Sarivan lives in Siscani a small village towards the border with Romania. The roads are in terrible condition. Some parts are so bad, people rather drive through the grass. Not that many people have a car. People walk, ride a bike or use their horse and cart.

Moldova is the poorest country in Europe, with an average income of about 100 euro a month. This is the main reason why a quarter of the Moldovan workforce is working abroad. For Siscani this is not different. In the village almost every family has at least one relative outside the country who sends back money to repair the house and pay for the kids school or university.

Better conditions

“The decision for me to leave the country was simple,” says Petrea Sacacol. “My daughter got married and became pregnant, but there were no job opportunities for her here.” This was ten years ago. He left the village with a little knowledge of Greek, but no job offer in the country. “I ended up as a caretaker for a rich family. I was lucky I guess. My job was to water the plants, do maintenance. Stuff like that.” Later his wife joined him to work for the family. In total he spent five and half years abroad, making together with his wife about 940 Euros a month.

For Gheorghe Sarivan the money was also the reason to leave the country. “You can not live with two kids from a double salary.” Both Gheorghe and his wife Maria are teachers. “You can earn a maximum of 4000 Lei (270 euros) a month. My wife earns now only half of it. So what can you do with that?” The salary is just enough to pay the electricity and phone bills. For food the family is dependent on their own fields and animals.

To improve the living conditions for his family Sarivan left the country. First he worked legally for a few years in the Czech Republic. And from the summer in 2006 till summer of 2008 illegally in Italy. There he didn’t make much money. “I could send maybe 40 euros a month, the rest I earned went to the people I took a loan from. It cost me 4500 euro to be smuggled to Italy.”

Kids without parents

At the local school the consequences of the migration are becoming visible. “This kid has a parent in Italy, her father is in Russia, this one in Portugal,” says Becca Whiteley while pointing towards them. Whiteley is a US Peace Corps volunteer who’s been working within the community for almost two years. “It is not uncommon for kids to be separated from their parents for a long time.” These kids grow up with their grandparents, relatives, or on their own.

Svetlana Miheil hasn’t seen her mother for three years “One day she told me she would go for work abroad,” says the now fourteen year-old. “She didn’t know for how long. And last year, my dad also left for Italy.” For the time being Svetlana lives with her twenty year old brother and his wife.

Every day Svetlana calls her mother. “I miss her so much,” she tells with tears in her eyes. “I miss the love. The possibility to talk with her about girl’s things.” She keeps on telling her mother how much she misses her, but she can not come back because she’s illegally in Italy. “Mom keeps telling me that everything will be better soon, that I just have to wait.”

Parental tragedy

The social consequences of migration are enormous. “These families are thrown apart,” says Ghenadie Cretu of the International Organisation of Migration in Chisinau. “Psychologically this is very hard for them. The lack of parental care has long term negative consequences on education, but also on emotional stability.”

For Gheorghe Sarivan leaving his kids was the hardest thing he ever did. “It’s a tragedy not to see your kids grow up. You miss their first steps, the things they do at school.” But if he had to choose, he would do it again. “As parents you have the power to give your kids a better life, but for that we need to go abroad.”

But because Gheorghe was not at home, the kids had to help in the every day life of the countryside. “My son Costel learned to bring in the cows,” say Maria Sarivan. Before and after school he had to work the fields, take care of the animals and so on. “They grew up fast, working like adults.”

Estimates maintain at least a quarter of the work force is not inside the country’s borders. Many of them work in Russia and Western Europe, sending money to relatives back home. In 2007 remittances were good for a stunning 36 per cent of Moldova’s GDP. This makes the country together with Tajikistan the leader in the world when talking about dependency on money from people working abroad.

Remittances become bigger part of Moldovas GDP, see here the exact percentage per year.

But since the economic crisis the money flow has been drying up. In the last three months remittances decreased by 30 per cent, according to statistics of the International Organization of Migration.

Dependency on abroad

“The Moldovan economy developed a growth model based on consumption and imports,” say Ghenadie Cretu, economist at International Organization of Migration (IOM). The past years this model worked okay. Since 2001 the GDP has increased by at least 5 per cent a year.

But both Cretu and Veaceslav believe it is dangerous to let your economy grow using remittances. “In our language we have this saying which fits perfectly,” says Veaceslav. “Our economy is like ‘a rain puddle’. When there is rain, it’s there. But when it stops raining, the puddle dissapears. That’s our economy. If people stop sending money, there is no economy.”

One out of four households in Moldova is dependent on remittances send from abroad. Almost everybody knows at least a handful of people who are working abroad. Their importance is big. The remittances are mainly used for daily needs, like buying food and clothes, paying the rent and improving the house.

Consequences of the crisis

But with the remittances decreasing, expenditure is going down. For half of the households which are dependent on money from abroad, it makes up half of their budget. “And now people just stop spending,” Veaceslav says.

This has big consequences for the Moldovan state budget, which is sixty per cent dependent on taxation, in the form of VAT on consumptions and imports. Both are going down rapidly, as Moldovans were used to fund them by remittances. For the government this was a reason to request all the authorities to cut back the expenses by 20 per cent.

“This will mean that the government soon can not pay the salaries to public workers,” believes Cretu. “Probably people working as doctors and teachers won’t get their money within the coming weeks, and also pensions won’t be paid.”

Veaceslav also believes that this is only the beginning of the crisis in Moldova. “The big problems will start in September, when more people won’t receive their salary as the whole state will collapse because of the lack of incomes.”

Again a crisis

Big economic crises are not new for Moldova. After it’s independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 the economy went into free fall, making it the poorest country in Europe. The bottom was hit in 1998, when the country’s main export market failed during the Russian financial crisis.

But when working abroad was the solution to fight the crisis ten years ago, they are now causing troubles. “Many Moldovans are now returning home because they can’t find work,” says Cretu. At the same time he sees seasonal workers are not leaving for Russia, which they normally did.

” After 1998 the remittances were a capital infusion for the country,” says Veaceslav. But many of the countries where many Moldavians work – Russia, Italy, Spain and Portugal – have been hit severely by the crisis.

The only way out of this is with international financial help, thinks Veaceslav. “But I doubt if the EU and others are willing to lend us money. I don’t think anyone trusts this Communist government.”