So the executive decision was made for me to not go to Transnistria today. I would have been going with Winrock’s Chief of Party and she was worried about the inevitable showdown we would have with the border guards as a result of a foreigner being in the car and this would cause a great deal of stress and make us late for the round table. Better to go when there isn’t a time constraint. Our driver said that he went with a German guy a little while ago and while there was no problem entering Transnistria, the guards wouldn’t let them cross the border on the way out so they had to hassle with them for a long time and eventually pay a significant bribe. My understanding is basically that you never know what’s going to happen at the border. It could largely depend on which town you are trying to go through or whether or not the guard you have to talk to ran out of cigarettes or had too much vodka the night before and is feeling agitated. That’s how I imagine the situation anyway.
At any rate, I was able to attend the monthly OSCE Anti-Trafficking Coordination Meeting with my boss and I had been looking forward to going to one of these sessions since I got here so I was fine with that. I would say there were about 25 representatives there from various NGOs and government offices, and I also saw a Peace Corps volunteer that I met this weekend and a Political Officer from the US Embassy that I’ve talked to a few times. The meeting was partly in English and mostly in Romanian but everyone got a pretty sweet headset for immediate translation. It wasn’t as cool as the ones we got at the big meetings in Brussels that you can use to listen to speeches in all the different languages of the EU, but it was something.
As for the content of the meeting, my boss gave a presentation on the Transnistrian Women’s Support Project and the rest of the discussion focused more on children’s issues that have recently become the subject of much attention. It seems like a bunch of organizations are going to start doing research on the issue of the exploitation of children through the internet and are creating awareness projects to address this problem through prevention. Many children in Moldova are left without parents because they need to go abroad to make money, and they use the internet to keep in touch. As a result, they have constant access to a computer and the internet and have no one around to advise them about how to use the internet safely. As we all know, the internet can be a pretty scary place. In the same way that some sexual predator/pedophile might try to communicate with a girl in rural Maine through Myspace, you might have a trafficker in Egypt contacting Moldovan youth through Odnaklassniki or Facebook. Just the other day at work my co-worker got a Facebook message from a guy in Egypt she doesn’t know and she said that happens pretty often that men from the Middle East are contacting Moldovan women and trying to meet them and usually it’s a fairly creepy situation. Apparently the same kind of thing is happening with sketchy people offering kids money or presents or even threatening to hurt their parents as a way of trying to manipulate them psychologically through online communication. The director of La Strada, an NGO in Moldova, talked about a new hotline they have opened for children regarding this issue and they can also contact one of La Strada’s consultants through a Skype account.
I found the meeting very useful for my research overall, especially since it is nearly impossible to find information easily online or even in print through brochures or reports published by organizations in Moldova. Much more information is presented at the meetings than can be surmised through the official notes that you can get from the OSCE. I would definitely like to attend every month if I can. It’s a good way to see what various organizations and actors are doing to address the issue and what kind of new projects or problems are popping up.
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