Money versus values

Be thankful for what you have;you'll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don't have, you'll never, ever have enough. Oprah Winfrey

There is a saying “I live at the edge of the village”, meaning, I don’t care what is happening there. Maybe some ten years ago it was a good strategy, which doesn’t work any more, as we define differently the notions of town/village versus community. The town X is the place we live in due to different circumstances, while the community is the place where we have common things with the people we meet, actions we do in order to make this geographic place more pleasant, cozy, and finally “homey”. Thus, you can’t be indifferent speaking of it, even if you spend in this town just some hours to sleep and rest, after a busy, fatiguing day outside it. Wonderful! You come here to sleep and rest! So, it means it is the best place for you, and you have to make it the best place.

From the perspective of facilities my community has a lot to do, and the first thing would be creating good sanitation conditions. I refer here to having running water in the houses, but mostly by having a system of recycling the used water from the houses. If you take a walk around the village I live in, you’ll come across wells, which are at a distance of about 200 meters from each other. Some people are still using them to take water and carry it to their houses by buckets of 10 liters each. I, myself, was doing the same thing till 6 years ago, when like other people managed to save the necessary amount of money to dig my own well in the yard and, by the help of the pump to have running water in the house. But this is half of work to be done. The major problem is to have the used water stocked and most of all recycled, because each householder has dug a hole in the yard where the used water, of course, is stocked, and then, a special car has to come and empty it. But, some of the water penetrates the soil and finally goes back into the same wells in the yard, and then, into our houses. At the moment, people don’t see this process as a danger to their health, but it really is, as, along the pesticides our water is full of, and even, some heavy metals, now the wells fill with the used water from our own kitchens and bathrooms.

We can solve this problem by applying to international grants which would give us the possibility to build a sanitation system in the whole village, because this kind of work requires a lot of money and people do not have it. We also, have to explain to people that we can do it only by having everyone involved in this work. And again I am sure the mothers are the very persons to see the danger coming and to convince everyone to contribute to resolving this problem.

Another problem for Moldova, like many ex-soviet republics, is the phenomenon of migration, and even traffic of people, including sexual and organ traffic. But I want to speak about the illegal migration when people, especially, women pay by 4000 Euros (the salary in the country being of 200 Euros per month) to go abroad as tourists and remain there to work. Nowadays, Moldova has in the country just 2.5 million people from its 4million, the majority of them being the old people and the children. I do not blame the women and men who went abroad in the search of a better life. Some of them have taken their children with them and have established there for ever. Others are sending regularly money home where their husbands or relatives are investing this money in building nice, huge houses and supplying their children with all the necessary things, except mother’s and father’s love and care which can not be replaced by any money.

As a result we have a strange situation, when investing mostly financially in the children; it is forgetting about the moral values, which, unfortunately, are being lost. It happens to have young people driving luxurious cars to school, but not making any effort to neither studying nor making the community a better place to live in. Thus, it is necessary to find a balance between the financial and the spiritual efforts made for improving our life. We can do this by trying to be involved in different international projects, have our people travel abroad within some seminars, meetings, conferences, which would allow them see new ways of doing the same things and new lifestyles. So, to make our life better we need to invest both in infrastructure and in education.