My Time in Moldova

My CAR debacle brought me to Moldova, where I spent my first few days staying with a friend from home, Erin Hutchinson.  Erin knew several peace corps volunteers and US embassy employees who worked with NGOs and grant programs in Moldova.  I spent my first few days reaching her contacts and setting up meetings.  All this time I was in Erin’s small town of Comrat, where people actually speak a dialect of Turkish.  Once or twice I tried using my Turkish, but their accent was really difficult to understand.  It was more effective to just let Erin use her Russian.

After a few days I left Comrat for the capital, Chisinau.  Chisinau’s city center is much more developed and bourgeois than I expected.  Moldova’s official GDP per capita is about $2300.  That puts it just ahead of North Korea and just behind Sudan.  But the center of the Chisinau feels almost like Budapest.  There are cafes, nightclubs, a McDonalds, art galleries, and public parks.  There are Mercedes and BMW’s driving the well-paved streets. 

I truly can’t reconcile this.  I borrowed a Lonely Planet on Eastern Europe from someone at the hostel, and about Chisinau’s wealth it basically said we have no idea where all the money comes from and we’re not about to ask.  Based on reputation I would presume the money comes from mafia, sweatshop-owners, and human traffickers.

Because much of the cuisine here is priced for these high-end lowlifes, I’ve spent much of my time here in Chisinau being quite hungry.  The city certainly doesn’t enjoy Turkey’s abundance of delicious street food.  Yesterday Erin and her mom were passing through the city and they treated me to some great Uzbek cuisine.  But I greatly want to learn where the commoners go for cheap and tasty eats.

From the city center of people, government buildings, statues, and expensive restaurants, it’s about a ten minute walk to my hostel.  The hostel has one room with six beds, and for most nights my only roommate has been an Italian guy with a disturbing mission.  Apparently his Moldovan girlfriend left him so he has pursued her to Chisinau to convince her to take him back.  In the midst of long silences where I’ve been reading or transcribing interviews he’ll ask me out of the blue: What do you know about women?  Have you ever been in love?  I’m sure I have some greater ethical responsibility to deal with stalkers like this, but I just try to keep my words with him to a minimum.  He doesn’t seem dangerous, just weird.  That said, if either I or a young Moldovan girl just back from Italy disappear, someone please inform Interpol about a 5’5’’ Italian man in his 20’s who listens to Pink Floyd.

Assuming I survive, however, the next few days will mark the end of my fourth week (out of ten) in my circumnavigation.  After four weeks I have gotten good information in two countries, which was my goal.  My reading pace has slowed in Moldova, but I think that's because my current book, Ian McEwan's Solar, is not the most entertaining.  I plan to catch up while in transit to Georgia.  The last few days I've also increasingly missed home and my friends.  This is a little strange since in Moldova I've actually had a friend from home, but maybe this is just the effect of being now four weeks into traveling.  It's not really something I can dwell on, since I'm not even halfway.

Of course my primary activity here has been my research.  I’ve been talking with NGO administrators, peace corps volunteers, and US embassy officials all associated with the Democracy Commission Small Grants Program within the US embassy.  I’m trying to arrange two more interviews for today or tomorrow, and then I’ll be set for a train to Kiev, Ukraine, and a flight to Tbilisi, Georgia from there.  The unexpected detour to Moldova will leave my research a little unbalanced--three of my five countries are former Socialist republics all struggling to adjust to the Western model of development and civil society in similar ways.  But the research, which I’ll detail more about later, has been successful, and Eastern Europe has been good to me.