By Katarina

When people heard I was going spend three months in Moldova, the immediate response was always one of the following: “Ahhhhh, you mean ____” (insert any other country/region that starts with an M–Maldives, Morocco, Moravia, etc.), “why Moldova?”, or a vacant stare of unrecognition. Moldovans were even more shocked than their international counterparts. “What are you doing here?!” with an undertone of hesitancy and suspicion, potentially a remnant of the general skepticism of westerners ingrained in some post-Soviet countries. While Moldova is not some backwards “tail of Europe ” as I’ve heard other Europeans call it, it is most definitely not a tourist destination for most young American girls, so I could understand the surprise.

Here’s a quick FAQ to preface my time in Moldova.

“What is Moldova?”

1. Moldova is a small country sandwiched between Ukraine and Romania with a population of around 2.5 million. 
2. It has the world’s largest underground wine cellar, Milestii Mici, which stretches for 250 km.
3. The population in Moldova speaks Moldovan, Romanian, and Russian languages. The news completely varies if you get it in Russian, Romanian, or English. 
4. When visiting Moldova, be prepared to eat a lot of soup. Especially borscht. Borscht borscht borscht.
5. Moldova is one of the poorest countries in Europe, along with Ukraine and Belarus. As of 2021, about a quarter of the population lived in poverty. 
6. The tiny country has not one, but two separatist regions. One is Transnistria, a pro-Russian breakaway region in the east, occupied by about 1,500 Russian troops. Transnistria held a congress during my time in Moldova and called for more Russian support against Moldova’s “economic blockade” of the region. The other is Gagauzia in the south, it is an autonomous territorial unit of the Gagauz people, a Turkic ethnic group speaking the Gagauz language. 
7. When I asked my coworker if they had ice cream trucks in Moldova, she said “no, but we do have potato trucks.”
8. Brinza is a traditional kind of cow milk product used in their cuisine, notably as a filling in the flaky pastry placinte. But don’t call it cheese, it is NOT cheese. Around Moldovans, you must call it brinza. 
9. After the Russia-Ukraine war erupted, there was a point where about 25% of their population was Ukrainian refugees.

Question 2: “Why are you here?!”:

To be honest, I ended up in Moldova by a series of serendipitous accidents. I always wanted to spend time working somewhere in Eastern/Central Europe, but I intended for that place to be Slovakia, where my mother grew up and emigrated from in 1991 after the fall of the iron curtain. However, after my original Slovak plan fell through, I expanded my search. I landed on Chișinău, the capital of the Republic of Moldova, as a place ripe with anthropological, linguistic, and political material for me to explore. We called a friend who spent a few years working in Moldova to make sure it was safe so close to the war in Ukraine. He confirmed it was and recommended that I apply for an internship at Moldova’s central bank, the National Bank of Moldova (NBM). The newly established FinTech Department was working on the launch of Moldova’s Instant Payment System, called MIA Instant Payments. For my American readers, think of it like Venmo, but instead of a private start-up/“closed garden system”, it’s an instant system for transferring digital funds facilitated by the central bank. For Europeans, your country probably has one of these already, as it’s now mandated by SEPA.

Put simply, an internship in FinTech at the central bank in Moldova was too cool of an opportunity to pass up. In my interview for the position I spoke to three team members, and quickly learned that that was the whole team, and that I would be one of the first two international interns ever at the NBM. After an application and interview, I got the internship in the FinTech department. Our friend connected me with a colleague of his, who is the IMF resident representative in Moldova and graciously let me stay with her for the duration of my internship. And so, my three months at the National Bank of Moldova commenced.

The Day to Day

Writing about my time in Moldova is very strange for me—something about the simultaneous mundanity and extravagance of my everyday existence while in Chișinău makes putting the experience into words challenging. There are certain facts about my stay–what I did at work, where I went for coffee, the friends I met–that are easy. But larger than those components are the much more abstract attitudes I witnessed and adopted while there. There is an element of shadow and vacancy all over the country, ghosts seem to ooze out of the cracks, and tradition remains steadfast and central. The past grips tightly onto the country and its people as they desperately try to keep up with their western counterparts. It seemed to me that this pull, the pull between the past and the future, the East and the West, progress and tradition, was tearing the country apart. Yet, during such a momentous time in their politics and culture, day to day life remained very simple and consistent. Go to work, take care of the family, tend to a garden, et cetera. Witnessing this overarching monotony was wildly different from my previous 5 months of backpacking, and combined with the grayness of the city in winter, my days blurred. My time there felt like a blip, with no real tethers to my experiences before or afterwards. It lasted a lifetime–ironic, because a life in Chișinău was exactly what I had to build.

I had no program, family, or friends to rely on when I arrived. I was 7 hours ahead of home and far from everyone I knew, in a country where I didn’t speak the language, planning on doing a job where I was completely out of my depth. As I sat in the Vienna airport about to board my connecting flight to Chișinău, I remember looking around at the other passengers, none of whom seemed to be younger than 50, and all of whom seemed to smell like cigarettes (it turns out this was actually just because of the “smoking zone” box right next to our gate). I was googling photos of the NBM headquarters–a gray monstrosity of brutal Soviet architecture–and, to be honest, I panicked. What did I get myself into?

After a warm welcome by my new host and a smooth first day in the office, things started to settle in as reality. I quickly realized that I was not going to find anyone my age at work to befriend. So, that Thursday I began to volunteer at a community English club. Here I met local university students, one of which became a good friend and my Russian tutor. I showed up at random art galleries, explored book shops, joined a gym, and even attended a drag show—chatting my way into tea and placinte, having conversations about folk embroidery and rural life in Moldova, and somehow scoring an interview with Chișinău’s only drag group. I also began forcing myself to start conversations with killer lines like “I really like your outfit please tell me you speak English”. This worked well enough that by the end of my trip, I had two full days stuffed with goodbye meals, including 3 back to back dinners on my last day.

Being air dropped into people’s permanent lives is starkly different from the mutual openness of meeting fellow backpackers. While three months to me felt like forever to be in one place, for the people I was working with and befriending, I was a speck in their otherwise consistent lives. I had to work a lot harder to inject myself into social circles. Building my network, though incredibly challenging, was deeply rewarding. The FinTech group chat still sends me updates on the project and my Moldovan friends still check up on me. I grew a much greater appreciation of what it means to uproot and relocate, including grasping the gravity of my mother’s choice to study in the US at 18 knowing no one and nothing, with no facetime (chilling, right?) and no safety net.

The Work

At the start, my job consisted of me desperately just trying to understand: trying to understand what an Instant Payment System is, trying to understand the product development process, trying to understand what a central bank actually does, trying to understand the conventions of an office job in a public institution, and trying to uncover the peculiarities Moldova had to offer to my anthropological dig of the country. It’s cliche, but being a quick and eager learner was unquestionably more valuable than any one technical skill or single professional experience.

Broadly, my job was to provide a young, international perspective to the work FinTech was doing, helping them tailor content for my age group of “early adopters” and to the international community. I like to think, however, that what I really brought was what my boss described as “a breath of fresh air”, because while I didn’t have any technical knowledge or experience, I showed that the world saw Moldova, that there were young people who were interested in, cared about, and were impressed by the work they were doing. Over the course of my internship, I got to interview people from every facet of the Instant Payments project and wrote a 35 page report on how the NBM developed MIA Instant Payments.

To understand just why the MIA Instant Payments project was so important in Moldova, here’s a bit more context. MIA Instant Payments is a digital payments system allowing individuals and businesses to transfer funds in under 15 seconds. The  NBM integrated MIA with all of Moldova’s major banks and several non-banking payment service providers. It launched MIA in March 2024 with a comprehensive marketing and educational campaign. By providing a faster, cheaper, safer, and more accessible payment option for micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises, MIA aims to encourage a shift from cash to digital transactions in Moldova, which reduces the shadow economy and increases financial inclusion and formal economy. Being included in the formal economy gives people access to loans and insurance, legal protection, consumer rights, more job security and fair wages, and it means people are contributing more to taxes and Moldova’s economic stability and growth.

At work I got to be a part of the thousands of little tasks and decisions that culminate into big impacts. I learned how to make UX/UI wireframes in Figma, created content storyboards for collaboration with animators, wrote and edited content for the company’s website, social media, and events. Outside of work I got to see the adoption of the platform in real time as my Moldovan friends activated it in their banking apps, sending each other transfers to split a check at lunch or pay for a Taxi. The parallel universes of my 9-5 and personal life collided, showing me how even though my everyday work at the NBM often felt detached from the people it was meant to impact, all of it was real, and it was actively changing Moldova.

I was lucky to also explore the life of diplomats. I got to have coffee with representatives (including my host) from the IMF, EU, and USAID. I had the high level financial advisor for the NBM give me professional and personal advice and a one-on-one lecture on supervision and anti-money laundering. I got to network at a finance event for the first time (where there was a 25% chance that people were comfortable speaking English with me) while wearing the highly coveted MIA Instant Payments hoodie my FinTech colleagues got for me. I ate lunch with my coworkers at Soviet style canteens for $3, followed by overpriced but delicious $5 cappuccinos — a duality which shows the pull between the East and West in Moldova better than any artsy metaphor ever could.

Photos with my coworkers and my work building

The Rest

Outside of Chișinău, I visited monasteries and wineries in the countryside, and I used Moldova as a homebase to explore Istanbul and Venice and visit my grandparents in Slovakia.

Photos from visiting Orheiul Vechi Cave Monastery, Moldova

Photos from my trip to see my family in Slovakia

Photos from my trip to Venice

In Chișinău I tried Moldovan, Georgian and Bulgarian food for the first time and learned how to order tea in Russian. Seeing the implications of living under Russia’s looming shadow firsthand, I immersed myself in Eastern European politics and interviewed Moldovan drag queens and kings to learn about the strangled state of queer rights and activism. While being gay is not illegal, same-sex marriage is prohibited and the community stays mostly hidden due to threats of violence. The group told me about how Russian anti-gay propaganda was entirely influenced by how stable and popular the regime was at the moment. When things were good, people were allowed to love caricatures of gay people from afar. Gay pop stars or even a talk show hosted by a drag queen dressed as an old soviet woman could become popular. However, when things were bad and society needed a common enemy, anti-queer and anti-western propaganda (with their corrupt morals and delinquent youths) was the obvious answer and was subsequently churned out.

One particularly memorable day was my tour outside of Chișinău. We drove through the rural villages of Moldova, witnessing the reality of the country outside of the capital. Half of the buildings were abandoned and caving in on themselves. Most residents we saw were elderly, with the youth migrating out of the country and into the city where a more prosperous life was promised. Every single person gawked as we drove through the gravel or dirt roads of the villages. The hammer and sickle was embossed on a church, and a little boy saluted as we passed by. Everything seemed gray, with the occasional gate or church painted in chalky pinks or greens to bring the facade of life into the dying rural landscape. This phenomenon could even be found in Chișinău, in the random abandoned and collapsing buildings in the city center, or the corroding doors with the bright blue paint flaking away like bits of the sky falling. A gray hazy veil had fallen over places like these, the forgotten places, freezing them in time and making them invisible to the rest of the world. This is the battle of a country whose youth is fleeing, stuck in the throes of linguistic and political division between the East and the West, who has had corruption burrow and fester in its flesh, who has slipped into the peripheries.

However, while these places and these truths exist, they do not define Moldova, or its people. Moldova is a place full of cultural heritage and traditions, modern art galleries and quirky cafes. European Union flags fly next to Moldovan in Chișinău to emphasize its candidate status and direction of the current government. With resources, guidance, accountability, and attention, the country can help those on the outskirts flourish. Moldova is a place determined to progress, and I am deeply grateful that I was able to play a small role in building its future—it definitely inspired mine.