Moldovan trauma

 My visit to Moldova has been brief, but what a wonderful visit it has been. From a few touristy wanderings, to church in an ex-KGB building, to delivering a workshop on secondary trauma, burnout and self-care to some incredible Christian women who are involved in ministries supporting abandoned children and single mothers. I have also had the privilege to chat with some women one-on-one about their reflections on trauma from a Moldavian context, and it is some of these insights that I share here.

The main headline is that all the references to trauma from a Moldova perspective can be traced back to their recent history related to the fall of the Soviet Union. This is not particularly surprising, considering how massive that was, but it was interesting to hear all the same, especially as some of the women I chatted with had not even been born when Moldova gained independence.

There is a very clear divide between the older pre-independence generation and the younger post-independence generation. The older generation remember how they were expected to be grateful for everything, even for just one type of ice-cream, and not wonder if there were any other options. An outworking of this nowadays is the tension between this accepting attitude of the older generation and that of the younger generation who are used to having so much more choice, and appear not to be grateful for the simple things. They also remember how they were instructed to question nothing, and grew up being instructed that Communism was the best and that everyone was rich and safe and provided for. The trauma of discovering that this was not the case when the Soviet fell, resulted in subsequent floundering and difficulty in trusting others as all of the building blocks on which their lives, ways of thinking, and views of the world had been created, crumbled before them. They grew up having to hide any troubles from the outside world, and as a result there is a lot of bottled up trauma in this generation that has never been worked out, or talked about. This shows up in a lot of alcoholism across the country (apparently Moldova has one of the highest rates for alcoholism per capita in the world).

According to the younger women that I chatted with, they recognise these struggles in their elders, and they try to be sympathetic to them, but clearly there are tensions at times. Several spoke about difficult times growing up as children, when their parents were more newly navigating life in a recently independent country that hadn’t really worked out its identity, and as a result there were several citings of the unresolved trauma of being raised by angry, unpredictable parents who didn’t know how to show love.

Please know that this was not the case for all, but they were recurring themes that I heard, both from personal testimony and from anecdotes that they shared of the experiences of others.

Following independence, financial hardship was significant, and many parents went overseas to try and find work in order to send money home. Apparently this was particularly so amongst women, whereby they went to Germany, Italy etc to seek work, and left the children at home with the father or wider family. Sadly there were many occasions when the father or wider family didn’t have the ability to care for the children, and as a result they were abandoned to orphanages as ‘social orphans’. So there are many young adults who grew up in institutional care and still bear the trauma of abandonment and neglect in their formative years.

Meanwhile, the men, who lost their jobs when the Soviet fell, struggled to find work due to few or no qualifications, and turned to drink, living off the money sent home by their wives. And the wives kept on working overseas, unaware of what was going on at home, and when eventually they did return home, it was not to the family situation that they had left, or expected to return to. So tough, so tough. Behind it all can be seen a desire to do the best for the family, and a demonstration of sacrificial love, but sadly it all turned out to be so different for so many. Yes, for some it worked out, but for the majority apparently it definitely didn’t.

A big cause of trauma in Moldova, especially for the children, is cited as being abandonment and neglect. These tie in with the many children who felt abandoned by their mothers when they went abroad to work, and then were often neglected by fathers who were struggling with their own issues as mentioned above, and by wider family who didn’t have the financial or emotional capacity to take in another child. So the child resorted to living on the streets, or got taken in by an orphanage as a ‘social orphan’ where various abuses and further neglect was rife. Many children born to single mothers living in the villages were also sent to orphanages, as the stigma against being a single mother was so strong that the girl was often abandoned by her family and had no means of providing for the child. As Moldova pursues membership of the EU, the number of orphanages has now fallen dramatically, and children are being fostered instead. But many children don’t have legal documents and so don’t officially exist - another form of trauma.

Alongside these traumas, the country still struggles with its identity - does it identify more with Romania or Russia in its allegiance? The national language is Romanian, but there are also many Russian speakers, and the attitude to the war in Ukraine is also divided. As a country that has had an identity of servitude to a superior empire or nation, it is still working out the reality of not having that identity anymore.

There is much more that I could share about trauma from a Moldovan woman’s perspective, but I will stop here. I hope that this gives you an insight into some of the issues that this beautiful country is wrestling with. They sound a lot, but there is hope – hope in their female president who is bringing about great change, and hope in the younger generation who want to pursue positive change within this country.