Moldoveni Peste Hotare

My 19-day vacation was in its final days. I had roller-bladed through London. I had watched soccer matches in pubs. I had walked through Covent Garden laughing to myself, remembering how great I had thought it was when I had been 15. In my mind, I kept returning to Moldova.

I missed Moldova. I was downloading Zdob si Zdub videos online. I was having mental meltdowns over the price of a pizza in London. I was even thinking of starting my own hostel in Chisinau when I completed my Peace Corps service. I missed the place that I now described as home.

I needed a taste of Moldova, and I got it in the form of me, three high school friends and nine Moldovans drinking beer and vodka, eating barbecue and salad and shooting fire extinguishers off the top of a seven-story construction site.

When I told my host brother, Sergiu, in May that I was going to London, he told me that I had to meet one of his best friends, Dumitru. Dumitru's family lives two doors down from my host family's house, and Sergiu and Dumitru were always at each others' houses through childhood. Dumitru, 26, began working in London a year ago as a security guard at a construction site. He, like the other foreigners working at the construction site and the vast majority of Moldovans abroad, is working as an illegal immigrant. Dumitru and I exchanged a hand-full of e-mails and agreed to meet during my stay in London.

At least 600,000 Moldovans work abroad, according to official statistics, and possibly double that number are actually working peste hotare, according to Aliona Avetisean of Winrock International. That means that nearly a quarter of Moldova's 4.4 million citizens work outside the country at any given time. Nearly every Moldovan has either worked abroad or has a family member who has worked abroad. Therefore, an essential part of my Moldovan Peace Corps experience was to see Moldovans working in another country.

I called Dumitru on Sunday, and he told us to come over right away so that he could properly host us. We arrived in an East London neighborhood in the early afternoon and were greeted by Dumitru.

"Which one of you is Peter?" he asked as he approached us outside the Underground stop. He was about 5'7" and broad-shouldered. His brown hair was just barely long enough to part, and although his hair was trimmed nicely, he sported a day's worth of unshaven beard. After I introduced myself and my friends Mike and Kyle, Dumitru announced his first priority; buying some beers at the local store. We gladly came along and carried the beers; Dumitru couldn't, since he had recently had a hernia operation.

"Don't tell anyone at home that I had surgery," he said. "Just tell them that I'm healthy and everything's fine."

We left the store and walked a couple blocks to the construction site. The neighborhood was not the most sparkling, and it is not in the scope of the average tourist's Kensington-Piccadilly-Notting Hill perception of London. On our way, we ran into one of Dumitru's Moldovan coworkers on the road. This surprised me, since I had assumed Dumitru would be the only Moldovan working at this job. We continued on to the work site, and I discovered how wrong my assumption had been.

After bumping our heads multiple times walking into the atrium center of the seven-story construction site, we were greeted by eight men and one young woman, all Romanian-speaking. Dumitru was definitely not alone. I introduced myself and my friends in Romanian. Then came the obvious question, from a man in his early twenties named Igor:

"Esti American sau Moldovan?"

I clarified that I was American, as were all of my friends, but that I knew Romanian because I'd been living in Dumitru's village for nearly a year. After the obligatory "Wow, you even have a good Moldovan accent" comments, we settled down to partying.

We sat and stood around the table, enjoying the usual Moldovan picnic foods of barbecued pork, salad, tomatoes and onions. There was no wine at the table, but there was plenty of beer and vodka. When we wanted to drink Strongbow cider, the Moldovan men wanted to make sure that it had high enough of an alcoholic content to suffice. 5.3 percent passed the test.

The men that we met were part of a 200-man work crew at the construction site. There are Moldovans, Romanians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Albanians and Brazilians working, just to name a few. No one works legally. While some younger men are like Dumitru and speak English well, the vast majority learn only the most basic English vocabulary. Everyone can parse the language well enough to know a hammer from a drill at work and a loaf of bread from a jug of milk at the store.

Dumitru and Igor's English was good enough to converse with my American friends, so I turned my attention to one of the men who didn't speak English, Sandu.

Sandu is 38 and was the only Romanian who was at the site that day. He is from Iasi, which is a beautiful city just across the Romanian-Moldovan border. Although a measuring tape would say he is only six feet tall, his presence is enhanced by a gut that poked out of his unzipped blue jacket throughout our entire visit; he leaves the impression that he towers over men just a couple inches shorter.

Sandu came to London a year ago with a fake Lithuanian passport. He is sacrificing time with his wife and children so that he can finish the last two rooms of their house and buy furniture. He told me that he makes five pounds per hour, which is more money than I made in my first four months out of college. He shares a four-bedroom apartment with five other men, and pays 160 pounds rent per month. He is able to send home hundreds of pounds for his wife and kids each month, which is much more than the $200 average monthly salary in Romania.

The two of us went to the roof together to look down on the rest of the neighborhood. In the far distance was the London Egg, one of the most sleekly designed buildings constructed in the city. Closer to us was a mosque.

"See the mosque over there?" Sandu asked me. "I don't like the Muslims here. They're dirty. All the Pakistanis just make problems."

"Maybe these ones do," I said, "but the Pakistanis I know are all good people. You know, other people probably say bad things about Romanians; that they're dirty and only cause problems."

"Maybe. But I don't like the Muslims."

After taking a few pictures from the roof, we went back downstairs and joined the group. Dumitru took the liberty of showing me a pornographic video on his mobile phone. Thank God for technology.

My attention turned now to Radu, a 20-year-old man from Ialoveni, the county neighboring mine. He fondly remembered the Peace Corps volunteer who had been in Ialoveni when he was in high school, and I told him that there was a new one now. Radu left for London after two years of university. He said that when he returns, he plans to finish school and start his own business with the money he will have earned. He disagreed with Sandu's numbers, saying that they made 10 pounds per hour.

Radu's said his time in England has been a mixed bag so far. On the positive side, he said he liked being around other young Moldovans, going to clubs every once in a while and inviting girls back to the construction site at night to have parties in the unfinished apartments. The biggest problem he had with London was that with so much immigration, it didn't seem very English.

"When you come to London, you think that you're going to see all English people. Then you come here," he said with some disappointment, "and you see all these other people."

"But what are you?" I asked. "Aren't you an immigrant?"

We talked for a few more minutes, and then decided to all go back to the roof. Mike, who didn't have a year of training in the fast-paced Moldovan drinking methods, laid down on the roof and began to doze off. After a few more minutes of talking, we woke him up and headed back downstairs. On our way down, though, Dumitru pointed out two fire extinguishers. Radu grabbed one of them, pointed it into the building's center atrium, and shot it.

"This is what we do for fun," Dumitru said.

I took my turn, and they took my picture. I had never shot a fire extinguisher before, and I have to say that it's even more fun than I imagined. Next time I do it, though, I'll be sure not to spray into the wind; extinguisher powder tastes awful.

After four hours of partying, it was time for us to go home. I guided my American friends through the traditional Moldovan goodbye routine.

"We have to go now."

"No, have another few drinks. There's no rush."

"No, we have to go now. Only the best. Good luck."

"One more drink."

"No, we've already had more than enough. Gotta go."

"Alright." Our hosts then took us to the exit. "Okay, just one more beer for the road."

"Sure, no problem." You can never refuse the last drink as you leave. On this particular day, Mike ruined the proceedings by vomiting. Ryan, Kyle and I, however, each drank a final beer with our hosts. Then we went on our way, all of my friends agreeing that Moldovans are "really cool".

This was just one construction site with a handful of Moldovans in a country where they are not in large numbers. According to Aliona Avetisean, the Winrock representative, Moldovans work mostly in Russia, followed in popularity by Portugal, Italy, Spain and Israel.

"The most popular reasons for Moldovans to go abroad is to earn more money than they can here," Avetisean wrote in an e-mail. "The average salary here is $100-150 per month and it is not enough for living, especially if you have to raise children. But the paradox is that they spend earned money on remodelling and buying new furniture and maybe some equipment, sometimes cars, instead of investing it into their own business. When they run out of money, [which] happens very quickly, they leave the country again. "

It's a much bigger situation than just these men in this construction site, and it is doing Moldova both good and harm on a large scale. But looking at it on a small scale, I'm glad that my friends got to meet Moldovans, and I'm glad that I got a taste of Moldova to cure my homesickness. I was only away from Moldova for 19 days. Can you imagine the situation for these illegal workers, staying away from their friends, family and everything they feel comfortable with for two years or more?

In that sense, we volunteers aren't too different from the people we've come to help.