You should see the hot new place where some Eritrean newlyweds are spending their honeymoon these days.
Their warm and fuzzy little bungalow is a steel-shipping container, complete with 100-degree heat, rotting air and little water. As for privacy, forget it. It's packed with other Christians who are paying the price for their faith.
Welcome to Eritrea, a small African country on the Red Sea, where saying, "I do" can land a couple behind bars or, worse, inside a sweltering metal box.
"It blows your mind. There is no sanitation. The conditions are appalling, yet these people want nothing other than to worship God," said Dr. Carl Moeller, president of Open Doors USA, an outreach ministry that is working to help end the persecution of Eritrea evangelical and Pentecostal Christians.
Sometimes it takes a shocking story to get the real story out. Such is the case in Eritrea, a fairly new nation in northeastern Africa, and a country of which most Americans have no clue.
Where is it? What is it? Who are they? These are the questions that Moeller and others like him, including Voice of the Martyrs news service director Todd Nettleton, hear most often.
But of more immediate concern is answering the question of how to stop the Eritrea government from harassing and imprisoning Christians - sometimes by crashing weddings to remove anyone professing Christ as Savior.
"At this point, they're not executing people, but people are in the prison system who haven't been heard from. It's not clear if they're still alive," said Nettleton, who visited Eritrea a year and a half ago. "In the last two years, they've just starting arresting people."
Not just any people, but evangelicals and Pentecostals, who the authorities consider to be a threat to the state. Thus, everything from church cell groups to wedding ceremonies are cause for government concern - and discipline.
"The churches see an opportunity to get together, but it's a wedding, not a worship service," Nettleton said.
Eritrea's political history includes a complicated mix of rebel resistance, communist influence and mistrust of religion in general, evangelical Christianity in particular.
The country of 4.4 million people was part of Ethiopia until 1991, when rebels won independence for their new nation. Until 2002, there was, for the most part, religious freedom.
