Recipe for a Moldovan rock concert

Imagine you’re at the Warped Tour, rocking out to various incarnations of punk/ska/metal/rock in a sea of punky teens and other random concertgoers. (Sidenote 1: Warped Tour is a great concert festival that travels around the US every summer. I haven’t been since 2001, so this post assumes it hasn’t changed too much since then.) Now make the following amendments to the scene and you’ll know just what it’s like to attend the annual “Rock Festival Stary Melnik” in Chisinau, Moldova:

• Put away your wallet. Entry for the 10am-11pm concert is only 20 lei (~$1.50)

• 
• Replace the sponsor. Instead of Vans (American skate shoe company), Stary Melnik (Russian beer company) is the headline sponsor. Keep in mind that this means there are people everywhere with tall half-liter cans of beer. Including, in some cases, small children. No, these are not early-years DJ and Steffi Tanner – they’re 8-12 year-olds drinking beer. With their mother.

• Remove all souvenir stands and side stages. Which is fine because two main stages rock hard enough to carry the whole show.

• Remove all garbage cans. The ground works fine.

• Choose a venue with twice as much square footage per concertgoer. With plenty of space to get our groove on, my new Russian teacher Katya and her friends and I had a great time.

• Forget English. All singing is in Russian or Romanian. Which isn’t always all that noticeable in these genres.

• Add a fair number of punky Euro-mullets. They’re actually pretty cool. (I’m not kidding.)

• When Moldovan superstars Zdob si Zdub come on, stop moshing and start dancing the hora! While you may only be familiar with the Israeli/Jewish version you’ve busted out to Hava Nagila at Bar Mitzvahs and weddings, there’s also an awesome Romanian/Moldovan version. And what better soundtrack for this than Zdob si Zdub, the Moldovan punk/folk entry to (and 6^th place winner of!) the 2005 Eurovision Song Contest. (Sidenote 2: This televised contest pitting European nations’ singers and songs against each other has been running for over 50 years and draws hundreds of millions (!) of viewers each year. Placing was a proud moment for Moldova in its first year of participation.)

FUN, right?

Anyone need a wife? (No, not me.)

I get about 30 hits every weekday now, less than half of which are from returning visitors, and have been stumbled upon by several people here in Chisinau – some whom I knew beforehand, some whom have contacted me since. While I definitely have mixed feelings about this – it’s cool yet a little creepy to have strangers reading all about you – my new favorite hobby is finding out how people end up at my blog. Check out these recent Google searches that have brought people to me:

• Location: Spooner, Wisconsin
  ISP: New York Public Library (?)
  Search: pizza cheese market in Moldova
  

• Location: Ireland
  Search: a taste of my life
  

• Location: Bratislava, Slovakia
  Search: say hello in moldovan
  

• Location: Macedonia
  Search: sheep sector in Moldova
  

• Location: Caracas, Venezuela
  Google Blog Search: Pridnestrovie OR "Igor Smirnov" OR Transnistria OR Transdniester OR Tran

• Location: Littleton, Colorado
  Search: peace corps moldova address
  

• Location: Douglasville, Georgia
  Search: tips for young ladies

• Location: Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam
  Search: “caro” “fashion”

• Location: Moscow, Russia
  Search: (hidden) – sketchy!

• Location: Amsterdam, Netherlands
  Search: lover in chisinau

• Location: Istanbul, Turkey
  Search: moldovya love
  

• Location: New York, New York
  Search: moldovan women

As these last few imply, many searches about Moldova also seem to be about meeting eligible bachelorettes. Which may or may not be related to this story: When I was in the US Embassy’s “Consular Services” waiting room today, waiting for extra pages to be added to my passport, the only other person there was a man who acted sorta jumpy and clueless and sounded like he was straight from the American South. He was very concerned that his new wife wouldn’t be able to get into the U.S. when she flew over a few weeks after he did. Wonder how they met....

The warm breeze of Communism....

Q: What’s up with these bad Moldovan ads?

A: As my Moldovan friend explained, advertising is a new industry here – back when the people creating the ads were in school, nowhere taught even basic marketing classes. Just a few decades ago, Moldova was part of the USSR and there wasn’t much need for strategic marketing of any sort, particularly advertising. There was no point – nobody really had a choice of what to buy since everything was centrally planned, so there was no need to extol the virtues of your product. Interesting, right?

On a related note, the other day my Polish officemate was reminiscing about watching TV while growing up in Warsaw. Without fail, the weatherman always reported nasty cold fronts blowing in from the West and wonderful warm air coming over from Russia....

Weekend getaway

This weekend, my coworker Malgosia, her boyfriend, another friend, and I took a trip to the Purcari winery a few hours south of Chisinau. After a private tour, we had a nice little wine tasting with samples of eight of the winery’s finest (poured generously and refilled as desired), and finished the evening off with a delicious dinner washed down with more free-flowing wine. (See what I mean? – Moldovans take their drinking seriously.) Though I know approximately less than zero about wine, I somehow managed to love the two wines that are apparently typical American favorites: the Purcari Sauvignon Blanc and the “Rosu.” I was a huge fan of the fact that bottles could be purchased for approximately $5 each in the gift shop. I was not, however, a huge fan of the Cahor wine – a port-like sweeeeeet (like sugar, not like fabulous) concoction that’s purportedly a Moldovan specialty. I’m sure it’s great, but I just can’t roll with it personally.

We spent the night in Purcari’s hotel, a beautiful place on the beautiful winery grounds, and then drove down to the Ukrainian seaside the next day. In concept: great idea. In practice: sorta miserable.

(a) I haven’t yet mentioned that it’s been over a hundred degrees here every day for the past few weeks. While this sounds like great weather for going to the beach, it’s not. It’s just too hot.

(b) The water was full of weird fuzzy seaweed and hundreds of little jellyfish. I’ve never been squeamish about sea creatures, but splashing around without waves and with abundant unappealing aquatic flora and fauna didn’t make for a great time in the water. And without going in the water, you basically melt. (See (a).)

(c) The beach was full of (sometimes large) people in (frequently small/tight/creative) swimwear. Especially the men. I’m all for comfort, but boys, promise me that when you’re 70 you won’t wear baggy gray briefs in the sea!

One of mys weekend highlights was sharing some important American culture with my Polish friends: when we stopped by the side of the road for some watermelon, I started a seed-spitting contest. While the crowd started out quite skeptical, Malgosia really got into it. And who says Americans don’t have culture?

Scenes from the wine tour, and a 6-Speedo shot from the beach. Ah, Europe....

“Alcohol may be man's worst enemy, but the bible says love your enemy.”

Moldova sure seems agree with Frank Sinatra on this one....

Beer
Advertised on giant billboards downtown and available for purchase all over the place, beer is sort of like water here. But sometimes cheaper. You can buy it at stands in the park. It’s on tap at McDonald’s. I’ve generally been talked out of ordering it at bars and other alcohol-oriented situations – it’s mostly been something to drink with dinner (or in the van on road trips.)

Wine
As wine is one of Moldova’s largest industries, it’s a big deal here. People are very proud of Moldovan wine, and hopefully the industry will be able to recover from the hit it’s taken from Russia’s 2006 ban on Moldovan wine imports. (Wine exports to Russia made up 13% of Moldovan exports and 3% of its GDP, so this is not a minor problem. The country’s working on convincing Russia to lift the ban, and on finding alternate markets, but Moldovan wine’s sweetness apparently makes it hard to market most places. Also, many producers are hindered by inconsistent quality due to the fact they buy grapes in small quantities from various farmers rather than rigorously cultivating their own vineyards.) Though there is some excellent wine produced here, that doesn’t seem to be what people usually drink when just chilling at home with friends – then the wine of choice is homemade and poured out of reused soda/water bottles. I’m certainly no wine connoisseur, but I just can’t get into the stuff personally.

Vodka
This is what many of my Moldovan coworkers order at bars. People have been responsive to my idea to order orange juice to drink as a chaser, but they wouldn’t do it themselves – they seem to be more into straight vodka shots. And the tiny chain supermarket on my corner stocks dozens and dozens of different brands of vodka. (So many that I stopped counting because I felt weird intently scrutinizing the vodka section for so long.) I couldn’t find any good data on alcoholism in Moldova, but it’s often cited as a large (and growing) problem here. And last month, one of my American friends emailed me to say that he had read that Moldova has the third highest per capita consumption of pure alcohol in the world (after Luxembourg and Ireland) at 13 liters – and Oxford Journal on Alcohol places this figure at 25 liters per adult resident.

When it comes to drinking, Moldovans don’t mess around....

White in a sea of whiteness

I’ve never been in a developing country full of white people before.

This may seem like something that should have no relevance, but in a way, it does. Not because it makes the people on the street here any different than the people I saw on the street while living in Guatemala, for instance, or in China, but because it makes me different standing next to them. I don’t automatically stand out as being unusual. Sure, when it comes down to it, I’m sure I still stand out in a crowd as a foreigner to some degree – I probably dress a little funny and I certainly don’t speak like a local – but I’m not walking around with a scarlet F blazing from my forehead. My skin’s not a sign of wealth or privilege, because the poor and the underprivileged have the same skin I do.

It’s funny how this creates a new sort of equal footing. Now I’m not trying to imply that I’ve been on some other level than the people of other ethnic backgrounds I’ve met or worked with other places – that’s not it. It’s just that race isn’t really salient here – I’m not automatically the white girl, the gringa, the farang, etc. I’m just another person.

Even in the US, I’ve found that when I volunteer, I’m often serving people of color, a fact which has a certain weight to it. Not that there aren’t poor white people in the US – there certainly are – but I usually volunteer in urban settings, where the faces around me are generally non-white. And I sometimes fear that this can give a touch of an awkwardly patronizing quality to my efforts, especially when combined with a difference in socioeconomic status. Like when Melanie and I lead our class in the East Palo Alto Boys & Girls Club. We’re white and from a nice suburb. Our girls aren’t. Because of this, I sometimes fear our classes smack a bit of “oh, here come the rich white girls who know it all” – there’s no denying the class would be a different experience for the girls if Melanie and I were black, for instance. But we’re not, which brings differences, both bad and good. I definitely think it makes some of the girls feel like they can relate to us less. But it also brings a certain extra diversity to the class, which can be great – one of our girls literally wrote “white people are nicer than I thought” in her journal at the end of class one day. (Ah, I love kids.) :)

So anyway, I guess what I’m saying is race is always there, whether you think of it as important or not. And here everyone is white. Because of that, I don’t really blame people here for not knowing how to deal with race – I have to admit that when I saw an Asian girl in a restaurant the other day, my own first thought was “hmm, what’s her story?” – but I do try to educate people as much as I can. Not that I’m some great speaker of truth, but you gotta tell the world what you believe, right?

***************************************

Moldovan, during a lull in the conversation: So what about those black people?

Carolyn: What about them?

Moldovan: (Considers for a moment) Well, they’re lazy

Carolyn: Yeah, about as lazy as white people

Moldovan: That guy I told you about who always came to work late when I was in Chicago, he was black

Carolyn: Hmmm. Well, I know plenty of black people who aren’t lazy

Moldovan: Yeah, I guess. Once we were on this bus in Chicago and a black man asked us where we were from and we said “Russia” and he told us all this Russian history and we had no idea what he was talking about because even we don’t know that stuff. He was a professor. Maybe he wasn’t so lazy….

***************************************

I’m sure I make off-base generalizations about topics I don’t have much personal experience with, too, which is why I feel a sort of responsibility to try to educate others in the way I hope others will educate me.

So to sum things up: being the “same” as everyone here, at least on this one dimension, is pretty interesting. It definitely makes me get stared at (and hit on) less on the streets. :)

Corporate Social Responsibility around the world

The conference I attended last week was all about the media’s role in Corporate Social Responsibility. It raised some interesting questions (“How should/can the media cover CSR?” “How can media corporations engage in CSR themselves?”) and created a nice dialogue on the subject, but I felt that all in all, it left me without too many answers. Though to the conference’s credit, this probably isn’t its fault – this is clearly a tricky and emerging area, and it’s often unclear what kind of moral obligations are at play here.

Ethical responsibilities aside, companies across the world are creatively finding ways to have positive social impacts that also increase their bottom lines by doing things such as

• Reducing costs (and negative environmental impact) through recycling efforts and increased efficiency of resource use
• Creating higher-quality and more consistent input/labor supplies by investing in their supply chains (e.g. Starbucks’ work with coffee farmers) and education in local communities
• Marketing their “socially responsible” actions to consumers who care, giving them an edge over competition

Check out these fascinating reports on the benefits of CSR – they’re by Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, and the UN, and are quite good reads.

This is something that is just starting to register on the developed world’s radar screens, and is often considered even less in the developing world. However, there can be special benefits to undertaking such initiatives here; for instance, showing off corporate responsibility can help overcome foreign skepticism for companies located in post-communist countries, attracting foreign investment and enabling lower financing costs and risk premiums. An important first step to realizing these benefits is recognizing that they exist, so media really does have the potential to help push CSR forward by raising awareness.

Learn more about CSR in the region in the most recent issue of the UNDP and LSE’s joint publication “Development & Transition.” While you’re there, check out two even more interesting articles: one questioning the good microfinance is really doing in Southeast Europe, and the other debating the merits and limitations of introducing “countercyclical financial instruments” in transition economies – for instance, linking returns on government bonds to GDP in order to share risk with investors, keep debt/GDP ratios relatively stable, and reduce likelihood of debt and currency crises. Interesting idea, right?

Last thought on the CSR tip. I just finished reading Don DeLillo’s Underworld and the first paragraph of the epilogue struck me:

“Capital burns off the nuance in a culture. Foreign investment, global markets, corporate acquisitions, the flow of information through transnational media, the attenuating influence of money that’s electronic and sex that’s cyberspaced, untouched money and computer-safe sex, the convergence of consumer desire – not that people want the same things, necessarily, but that they want the same range of choices.”

Now I’m obviously not of the anti-globalization camp, and I certainly wouldn’t want to limit people’s choices just to force them to “keep their culture” – but I am saddened by the thought of diminishing our world’s amazing cultural diversity. This raises the question of whose responsibility it is to protect tradition midst the increasing flows of capital eroding “cultural nuance” in our ever-globalizing world. Do the companies bringing the capital have some sort of obligation here? Or should governments intervene in some way? One could definitely argue that in a free market, culture will remain intact to the extent that people value it so we shouldn’t worry – but I fear this is a somewhat short-sighted view. People’s choices may optimize their own utility but not that of future generations, for instance. In this case, what responsibility do companies/governments/citizens have in protecting cultures without blocking personal freedoms? I have to think about this one….

Fun in Kiev

I got to tag along with the UNDP Moldova delegation to the UN’s “Corporate Social Responsibility and the Media” conference held in Kiev, Ukraine, last week, and was lucky to have enough free time there to get a taste of the city. I’ll summarize my personal highlights of the past few days in this post, and tell you all more about the actual content of the conference later this week. First things first. :)

Transdniestria
They say they’re an independent country. The rest of the world (Moldova included), says they’re just a region of Moldova. This causes a number of major complications for both nations/regions, and a few interesting situations for travelers. For instance: when you pass from the rest of Moldova to Transdniestria, Moldova won’t concede you’re leaving the country…but when you pass from Trasnsdniestria to Ukraine, the Transdniestrian border patrol won’t concede you’re even in Moldova…so driving from Moldova to Ukraine and back, you never officially leave or re-enter Moldova. (Interesting for tourists, potentially lucrative for arms traders and other shady characters….) I didn’t pass through any Transdniestrian cities, so the only noticeable differences between the half-hour drive across the region and the rest of my journey were thirty minutes of slightly bumpier roads and significantly ickier bathrooms alongside. I wanted to snap some pix at the border but was told by my vanmates that being seen doing so could have very negative repercussions for me. To get a flavor of the experience, just imagine having your passport checked by a stern Angelina Jolie lookalike in camo fatigues and a beret in the middle of expansive sunflower fields.

“The National Museum of the History of the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 Years”
Former Soviet States don’t talk about “WWII” – they instead call it the “Great Patriotic War” and focus only on the Axis-USSR portions. Kiev’s museum on the subject is probably the coolest museum I’ve ever visited…and I say this despite the fact that it was all in Russian so I only understood about 0.1% of the signage. History museums are getting so beautiful these days, and this one surpassed the also-really-cool Hong Kong History Museum on my list of personal faves because of its stunning presentation of WWII artifacts. Below see part of the photo tribute to fallen Ukrainian soldiers (honored as “Heroes of the Soviet Union”), and the entryway’s summary of the entire museum: a fallen, broken German eagle.

Kiev Statues
Kiev definitely doesn’t forget Soviet times, and the city’s statues don’t let you forget, either. The “Mother Motherland” statue overlooking the river in the middle of the city is very large, very silver, and very intense – holding a sword and a shield adorned with the coat of arms of the Soviet Union, she rises 100m over the city and is 1.5 times taller than the Statue of Liberty. Really, don’t mess with this chick. Also, the Lenin statue here is in the middle of the city, unlike the one hidden in the depths of a park in Chisinau, and brightly-painted tanks make an urban playground for small children.

Pechersk Lavra
One of Ukraine’s four UNESCO World Heritage Sites, this Orthodox Christian monastery includes churches, belltowers, and an amazing 1000-year-old system of narrow underground corridors and chapels. I roamed the tourist-accessible portion of these “caves” – but only after buying a (required) scarf to respectfully cover my hair and a small candle to light my way. All in all, I don’t know which creeped me out more: (a) the numerous glass boxes containing priests’ mummies wrapped in ornately-colored cloths, or (b) the fact I found the monks to be so young and good-looking. Chill, girl – they’re monks.

General Kiev culture
Though none of these are exactly newsworthy on their own, all the little things I did in Kiev really made me love the city. I walked through parks, admired the architecture, sipped tea in sidewalk cafes (where everyone else seemed to be on free wi-fi), went to a great little art gallery opening, shopped up a storm, took convenient public transportation (including visiting the “world’s deepest metro station” 102m underground), and enjoyed the sunny (though occasionally rainshowery) weather. Nice place!

I’ll leave you with a few closing pictures: general scenery, architecture, and me partaking in some Georgian wine (and hats) with a fellow conference attendee, a reporter for the Georgian (the country, not the state) publication Financial.

Oh, and I don't know why this last one cracked me up so much, but check out the sign for the Mexican restaurant where we ate one night: "Tequila House" written in Cyrillic. :)

Moldovan Fashion Tips for Young Ladies

Do:

• Wear it short
• Wear it tight
• Wear it low-cut
• Feel free to expose your midriff
• Accessorize! (Bonus points for designer labels)

Don’t:

• Worry about looking trashy – it’s not trashy when it’s a cultural norm!
• Fear less-than-perfectly-maintained sidewalks. I don’t know how you do it, but I guess when your 4-inch heels look that good, a few potholes won’t be able to bring you down
• Forget the colors, patterns, ruffles, shimmer, and sparkles! Go all out, girl.
  

Ok, maybe it’s not quite as extreme as I make it sound – there are plenty of women on the street who could easily fit in on any US sidewalk – but check out these samples snapped downtown mid-afternoon:

Yes, those may have been among the more extreme outfits on the street, and yes, I’ve been known to hooch it up even more than that personally on a number of occasions. (Vegas FOAM, anyone?) It just seems scandalous to me here because women go all out in contexts I wouldn’t. Just like I’m sure that when women from some cultures come to the US, they’re shocked by our public exposure of things they’d only show in their own homes. But because this is my blog, my (completely arbitrary) standard of propriety is espoused. The same standard, incidentally, that stared – 50% scandalized by the outfits, 50% envious of the bodies – at women’s get-ups last time I was in South Beach. So it's not just here. But it's also not just me – even Moldovans make fun of the different sense of style....

Moldovan friend: Is that woman Moldovan?
Carolyn: No, she’s American.
(a few hours pass)
Carolyn: That woman sure dresses up, doesn’t she? She looks so fancy.
Friend: She looks like a hooker. (Pauses) That’s why I thought she was Moldovan.

I love being a tourist sometimes

I had one of those relaxing-yet-exhausting tourist weekends checking out Chisinau and some surrounding areas. Highlights included:

Exploring the somber 19^th-century cottage of exiled Russian poet Pushkin and then buying a hot bikini in the city’s central open-air market (no joke, though since this is a wholesome, family-friendly blog, I’m including a pic of some nutritious grains instead.)

Paying respects at the monument to Chisinau’s many Jewish “martyrs and victims,” inscribed in Romanian, Russian, and Hebrew – in 1913, 35% of Chisinau was Jewish; today only 3% is. Before WWII, there were over 70 synagogues in Chisinau, each serving a different trade. This one used to be for glassblowers – now it’s the only one left for everyone.

Pretending to command the troops in the midst of an incredible collection of Soviet tanks and fighter planes inherited by Moldova’s armed forces, now on display in a random little park:

Wandering through the city cemetery and its various monuments to fallen soldiers:

Watching spectacular fireworks set to some intense Wagner in honor of 07/07/07 (though I just pretended it was a belated 4^th of July celebration…) with my friends Igor and Adrian:

Touring the Cave Monastery with Cristina – carved into a cliff 40km north of Chisinau, these remote caves were dug in the 13^th century and inhabited by monks until the 18^th. Downside to living here: low ceilings so you don’t forget to bow your head to God. Upside: great views!

Checking out all the cool old religious stuff around the caves. And I unfortunately couldn’t snap a good shot during the tumultuous ride through it, but I swear the neighboring town is Borat’s. Seriously – if I didn’t know that movie was filmed in Romania, I would put money on it.

Returning to Chisinau to get acquainted with my pal Lenin and chill by the lake in one of the city’s many urban oases.

Also, lots of urban wandering, sidewalk-café sitting, and park-bench reading, of course. Now that’s a great weekend. :)

A taste of my life

Several of you have asked questions about the minutia of my everyday life in Moldova – which I like, because it gives me an excuse to ramble about the details of my current existence. :) I’ll answer with a few lists. I love making lists.

My fave Moldovan foods - yum!

• Mamaliga with brinza (Moldovan grits and cheese)
• Skewers of all varieties (Chicken and veggies, lavash stuffed with cheese, etc.)
• Fresh Moldovan produce (Amazing)
• Various broth-based soups
• “Pancakes” (Crepes stuffed with cheese, fruit, etc.)
• Brinzici (A candy-bar-ish thing made of a cream-cheese-like sheep cheese coated in chocolate and sometimes filled with jam or other fillings. See pic.)

My hobbies – fun times

• Self-studying Russian (using a language textbook I created with internet printouts…resourceful, right? Although I did have my first real Russian lesson today, which proved to be somewhat helpful in combating my atrocious pronunciation….)
• Blogging (Obviously.)
• Reading (See my reading list, below.)
• Jogging (With two beautiful parks right by my house, I have no excuse not to.)
• Exploring Chisinau (I love walking around new cities. And being shown around by new friends.)

My reading list – I came prepared

• Underworld, Don DeLillo (Halfway done so far. DeLillo’s great.)
• Lost Province: Adventures in a Moldovan Family, Stephen Henighan (Was not as interesting as it sounds. And a Moldovan friend seemed to find it sort of insulting/unrepresentative of Moldovan life.)
• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, JK Rowling (Great plane reading and an important refresher – must prep for the EXCITEMENT that is the final installment debuting in July!)
• American Pastoral, Philip Roth
• Beloved, Toni Morrison (If you’re sensing a theme, it’s because several of these are from the NY Times’ “Best American Novels of the Past 25 Years” list. I love modern American fiction.)
• Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami (One of my fave authors.)
• Seeing, Jose Saramago (A spontaneous Borders “3 for 2” find. Looks good though.)

Current jogging soundtrack

• Sweet Escape – Gwen Stefani
• When You were Young – Killers
• Fly Away – Tim McGraw
• Wonderful Day – O.A.R.
• Irreplaceable – Beyonce
  
• Rehab – Amy Winehouse
• Umbrella – Rihanna, ft. Jay-Z
• Banditos – Refreshments
• 19-2000 – Gorillaz
• Seven – Prince
• Girlfriend (Spanish) – Avril Lavigne
• The Chronicles of Life and Death – Good Charlotte
• La Vie Boheme – Rent Soundtrack
• My Town – Buck-O-Nine

And that’s my life. Tell me about yours.

What a rollercoaster....

Worst part of my day so far: After walking to a cafeteria for lunch and successfully ordering soup, chicken, bread, and tomatoes with sheep cheese – all in Russian, mind you – the cashier thought my 100 lei ($8) bill looked suspicious so I had to walk all the way back to work to get more cash. During which trip it started pouring outside. POURING.

Best part of my day so far: Returning to my office after lunch to discover the Simpsons avatar creator. Do it! And meet Carolyn, resident of Springfield:

Problems start small – but how do they stop?

How do you get rid of things like corruption and excessive bureaucracy at higher levels when they’re the norm for kids growing up?

Two stories from a local university:

(1) My friend was once handed an exam from a teacher with a price written on the cover – to get a passing grade, students could either give satisfactory answers to the questions or pay the teacher this price.

(2) At a friend’s graduation ceremony last week, she went up front to get her diploma and they wouldn’t give it to her because she hadn’t returned her university ID card. When she ran over to the main office to pay the 2.4 lei ($0.20 USD) it cost to rectify this, they told her it wasn’t the proper time of day to do such a transaction, so after four years of studies, she couldn’t get her diploma with her class.

Moldova’s one of the more corrupt countries in the world – the World Bank places it in the bottom 25% of nations for control of corruption. My Lonely Planet guidebook even recommended bringing US $5 bills to pay off police with when unreasonably harassed on the street for being foreign. That hasn’t happened to me yet, although one of my Peace Corps friends has suggested we avoid certain well-patrolled areas when we’ll be speaking English. He was once taken down to the police station for no real reason and held there for hours until some sort of official U.S. embassy representative could come to his rescue.

As much as people complain about the U.S. government and other institutions we’re subject to, we’re pretty lucky that these groups usually do seem to have our best interests at heart and do their best to carry out their jobs in a just, efficient manner. (Maybe I’m too much of an idealist – of course some groups are much better served than others in the U.S. – but I do believe we’re incredibly lucky to be where we are.) And when things work less-than-ideally, we have so many watchdog and activist organizations fighting to get our nation on track – in the past few years, my good friends have worked for groups fighting everything from housing injustices to defamation of the LGBT community.

Is this the most effective way to change culturally-ingrained problems – by 3^rd-party organizations going after the “bad things” in society? Should the international community increase its efforts to combat corruption in Moldova? Or perhaps, as one of my Stanford professors’s research has suggested, could corruption be combated by economic development? He argues that while corruption can be detrimental to development, the converse may be even truer: economic underdevelopment itself may actually be a major driving factor behind corruption. When there aren’t as many opportunities to prosper through legitimate channels, there’s more incentive to compromise morals and make money any way possible. If this is the case, maybe the best way to combat corruption is to grow the economy like the UNDP’s trying to do here.

I think that to combat problems this ingrained and persistent, a multi-pronged approach is necessary. Yes, overall economic development will help, but it may not be a panacea. In fact, the World Bank lists it as one of five elements of an effective anticorruption strategy:

1. Increasing Political Accountability

2. Strengthening Civil Society Participation

3. Creating a Competitive Private Sector

4. Institutional Restraints on Power

5. Improving Public Sector Management

It sure takes a lot of work to change the world, doesn’t it?

Moving on up (even with the man still keeping you down)

Yesterday my boss Malgosia, her USAID counterpart Maria, and I field-tripped it down to Comrat, a town two hours south of Chisinau. Both of Moldova’s major wool purchasers are based there, so we got to check in with both of them in one day. The Growing Sustainable Business Initiative (the UNDP program I’m working for) has been working closely with both men and their main customer, a local yarn/carpet producer, to build a local wool supply chain. (See my previous post for more info.)

The good news:

• The project’s efforts at educating farmer on producing good wool and educating purchasers at collecting good wool has created a significant increase in the quality of wool brought to the yarn producer – leading to increased purchase volumes, more local farmers (~4000) making an income from their wool (rather than just using it at home or disposing of it) and higher prices for both the purchasers and the farmers
• With the yarn producer guaranteeing to purchase a certain increased amount of wool, there’s a lot more transparency across the supply chain. This means the collectors have been able to hire more people to collect and sort wool, and provide these employees with guaranteed year-round work (between wool-related jobs and off-season nut-related jobs)
• The project’s work to secure working capital for farmers was a success, and both were able to take out loans with reasonable terms from a local bank. This is important because many farmers refuse to sell if they’re not paid on the spot – perhaps a lack of trust carried over from Soviet times?

The not-so-good news:

• Though the purchasers have held up their end of the deals they made with yarn producer, the company hasn’t completely fulfilled its promises to them. It hasn’t actually been buying the agreed-upon amount of much wool from the purchasers, and it’s pretty late in paying for what it has bought – even after promising to pay on delivery. This means the purchasers don’t have cash-on-hand to pay back their loans.
• We’ve heard that the yarn producer has been approaching some farmers itself, promising higher wool prices than the purchasers pay, and then never closing the deals. This has lead to farmers refusing to sell to the purchasers and then being left without customers – not good for anyone.
• There are no other good customers to sell the extra wool to, as it’s not washed yet and most local companies (and basically all foreign companies) will only buy washed wool

What we’re about to do about it:

• I’m going to work drafting new Memorandums of Understanding we can sign with all stakeholders to make sure everyone’s on the same page here. Additionally, I’ll help the purchasers draft new contracts to sign with the yarn producer – it wanted us to stay out of that process before, which led to the signing of a contract that didn’t sufficiently protect the purchasers and farmers. No more relying on verbal agreements for these things – let’s get a contract in place that protects all the involved parties here and really makes this supply chain work!
• Also: we’ll see if we can find a way for these purchasers to get some wool-washing equipment. This would provide them (and thus the whole local sheep-farming community) with a much expanded customer base and create the potential for a huge increase in the amount of local wool being sold – even abroad. Good stuff! :)

Here are some pix from the trip to Comrat (and to the "biggest village in Europe" that we visited right next to it. I couldn't really get anyone to explain what a village technically consists of, though, so not quite sure how well that claim will hold up under scrutiny....) Check me out in a wool sorting facility -- the contraption to my left packs the wool into big bales, and the skeptical-looking people behind me are the employees whose work I'm disrupting. The sweet house in the next photo is being built by one of the purchasers to serve as a family home and a workplace.






Here you can see some men filling up water bottles at some sort of special natural spring that just happens to be coming out of a metal pipe in a man-made wall under a bunch of religious imagry. I politely declined a drink, as I'm not sure whether my system's ready for water that special.


Below, you can see a typical view out the car window on the ride down – endless sunflower fields. I think you might have to be here to really appreciate how beautiful they are, though.