Look up our World Race “route” and you’ll see that the tenth month on the list is labeled “Moldova”. This is accurate – but it's not quite the whole story.
Where my team and I are actually serving this month is in a little country called Transnistria, which is located inside of the country of Moldova.
While in reality, Transnistria is nothing more than a territory of Russia inside of Moldova, to it’s inhabitants it is very much it’s own country – regardless of what the rest of the world has to say about it.
When the small territory decided to succeed from Moldova in 1990, it sparked a civil war.
The locals have many versions of who started what and who was to blame for the hostilities, but in the end, the war reached a ceasefire in 1992 with Moldova allowing Transnistria to function as it’s own entity – separate government, laws and currency. More than anything this agreement was to appease the people of Transnistria, and to this day they are unrecognized by any other country outside of Moldova.
Had no idea a place like this existed? Neither did we.
Nevertheless, it’s in this unique little non-country that we are spending the month, living on a construction site, doing hard core manual labor for five hours each day then teaching English for five hours each night.
The work is taxing and it’s definitely not how I expected to spend the tenth month of this journey, but if the World Race has taught me anything, it’s to throw my expectations out the window and wave goodbye to them with a smile.
So we’re diving in.
Getting dirty, developing new calluses, building relationships and sleeping on the floor of a cinder block building – in a country that doesn’t exist.
