Moldovan Identity

Last night I met a couple of ladies who work for the Soros Foundation-Moldova at Pani Pit, which has a really nice atmosphere and plays jazz music. From what I gathered, the Soros office in Chisinau primarily works to promote democratiziation and good governance and in that capacity they do a lot with monitoring and training NGOs. They ladies I met with are also very interested in the work that is being done to empower women in Moldova, which in turn helps decrease the risk of human trafficking and helps in the fight against domestic violence. Women all around Moldova are provided with trainings about how to start their own businesses, mobilize a community to address different issues, and gain self-esteem among many other things. Winrock is just one of many NGOs that give trainings and seminars with those goals.

We had an interesting conversation about Moldova's place stuck between the EU and Russia and how challenging it is to find a real sense of Moldovan identity. We talked about the benefits of Moldova working towards EU membership just in that it provides a stimulus for reform since all countries are expected to reach certain standards in all areas including economics, political stability, human rights, and so on before joining. However, it is also important for Moldova to maintain strong ties to Russia because you can't just forget that it was a part of the Soviet Union not that long ago, and that Russia controls its gas and has strong influence in the breakaway region of Transnistria.

They also enlightened me a little more about Moldovan sensitivity to language issues and ethnic minorities. Apparently although most Moldovans, especially in Chisinau, speak Romanian and Russian fluently, they make a lot of mistakes in both languages. I'm starting to understand a little bit more about how language is studied and used here. My boss at work said that although pretty much everyone speaks both languages now, that might not be the case in 10 years. Most people are educated in Romanian but study Russian as a second language in school, but actually it seems the majority of Moldovans are now studying French and English instead of Russian. In southern cities like Comrat everyone speaks Russian and that will probably be true for many years to come, but in other parts of the country it seems like you're going to start hearing Russian less and less. One of the women I was with said that it doesn't even make sense historically for Moldova to be its own country, and that it would make more sense if it had been absorbed by Romania again after the fall of the Soviet Union. But then there's the issue of Transnistria and all the ethnic minorities in the country. If everyone was suddenly a Romanian but felt no connection to that culture and didn't speak the language, that would be a very uncomfortable spot to be in. Overall, the national, cultural, and linguistic aspects of Moldovan identity create a very complex subject of study and I'm looking forward to exploring that more during my time here.

We also got back to the topic of my research, and both women shared stories with me about women they have met who have been trafficked. These stories and case studies really provide the best view into the issue of human trafficking in Moldova, so I was very interested to hear what they had to say. One of the women lived with a girl when she was at university who ended up being trafficked. She saw her when she came back to Moldova after a couple of years and she had lost tons of weight and clearly had experience trauma and was struggling with psychological issues. She's abroad again now but supposedly in a better situation. I won't get into many details on my blog with case studies I encounter because I feel like it's very sensitive material, but when you see that you have a small degree of separation between yourself and someone who was trafficked the problem seems that much more real. In Moldova, it really seems like it can happen to anyone, and how the whole process unfolds and what happens in the aftermath varies drastically from case to case.