One of the benefits in the way that the World Race is orchestrated is that we are able to go alongside the established missions and develop relationships with the people to better understand the culture and history of the countries that we visit.
Talking to our translator in Moldova I learn what it is really like to be oppressed. The country of Moldova was under the rule of the Soviet Union until 1991. She is 30 and she has lived through both types of government. I only understood a very little bit of communism until now.
She explained about the hope for the “ideal society” and how the people were always working for a better future……unfortunately that future never came. She told us about censorship in EVERYTHING. This censorship even infiltrated itself in to the Russian Orthodox church. The government was dipping its hands in to every facet of people’s lives. The priests were even under the government rule. I can’t imagine the craziness. I suppose that is the worst part about being brainwashed. You have no knowledge of anything different so you buy into it thinking that it is the only true way to run a country.
The communist government is so much more complex than I had ever known. The people were brainwashed in to thinking if they worked hard they would be rewarded. They even worked on Saturdays for free.
One day everything is taken care of, the next you are out in the cold. People were expected to adjust and live a completely different way and figure the new life out. They turned to prostitution, stealing, and crime quickly rose in the midst of everyone losing their hope for the ideal society. Parents had been raising their children with this idea that they would have a future, but the future never came.
She told us that one day she went to go and buy bread and had to bring a whole sack full of money because of the inflation that happened, virtually overnight. She explained about the different levels of the system, almost like a caste system, that determines your rights and pay grade, no matter the profession. The possibility to move up in the system exists, depending on how long you have been working.
They have been run fully by a parliament for the past 2 years and they have been unable to elect a president. The older generations remember the hope and future that was promised through the communist rule. The younger generations see the freedom and change that is at hand. You can’t even imagine what trouble this stirs up in the capital city of Chisinau.
Moldova has a rough past by all accounts and has been a struggling country ever since the fall of the Soviet government.
My heart breaks for the youth of Moldova. What will happen to them with no stable government? What will come of a nation with lack of a vision for the future, with a skewed perception of Christ’s love because all they know is a government run church? Our team did quite a bit of evangelism in Moldova and the beautiful thing is that they are spiritually hungry. There is a void that they have been trying to fill and understand ever since they gained their independence and the government changed. There is just a lack of leadership, initiative, and resources. Moldova was truly a place that God used our team to bring hope to the hopeless.
