32278, Bob Chuck Schuknecht was a caseworker at the penitentiary when he decided to search for the meaning of life in the Peace Corps. Yep, it still exists. Bob wound up in Moldova, one of those former Soviet Republics tucked away between Romania, Ukraine and Turkey.
Hemmingsen: Moldova, Where?
“Why the hell don’t you get out of Iraq?” There’s a question we hear more often than we used to.
“How can I get to America?” That’s a question we don’t hear much on our prairie island. But they’re questions that Sioux Falls native Bob Schuknecht hears everyday.
Bob went to school with my daughter, but I’ve only known him since what I call “My Skelly’s Period” several years ago.
Bob, the son of long time Sioux Empire Fair and State Fair Manager Chuck Schuknecht was a caseworker at the penitentiary when he decided to search for the meaning of life in the Peace Corps. Yep, it still exists. Bob wound up in Moldova, one of those former Soviet Republics tucked away between Romania, Ukraine and Turkey. The first time I heard of it was in Hanoi, Vietnam, in 1988 where we ran into an entertainment troupe from Moldova. At the time, brandy was the leading export and we passed around plenty of it, a real icebreaker in a strange land where none of us spoke the other’s language and there wasn’t an aspirin to be had.
But what about Bob? He came back from the Peace Corps, nestled into the Washington bureaucracy for a while and then hooked up with a government contractor back in Moldova. His job is to help the new, non-communist governments sort themselves out.
Bob Schuknecht in Moldova
What is it like? Bob says his apartment reminds him of the cinder block apartment blocks in the movie Gorky Park, set in Moscow. He doesn’t use the elevator. There’s a reliability issue. But the place does have ATM machines that let him access his Sioux Falls bank account even though the average Moldovan makes about 30 dollars a month.
Moldova has a thriving black market, including trafficking in women on the Internet. They’re lured to a better life in other countries, stripped of their travel documents and, well, you can guess the rest.
Bob tells me women are carrying the load in the post-Soviet economy. When you have a baby, you bring your own bedding and food to the hospital. How did our HMOs miss that one?
Another hot market is people selling their organs, quite often to rich people working through Turkey. American movies dubbed into Romanian are hot. How do you say, “Go ahead, make my day” in Romanian?
Bob has seen a lot of changes since his Peace Corps days. Moldovans have tons of cell phones but not the etiquette to go with them. They ring all over, all the time. There are lots of Internet cafes in the big cities. The city he lives in is 750 thousand people. Moldova has 5 million people jammed into a country that is one-third the size of South Dakota.
Outside the cities it’s all agriculture, but there’s still a lot of 19th century manual labor involved since when the old communal farms were broken up they were gerrymandered with each farmer having several detached small plots. There’s a lot of grapes, a lot of wine, a lot of brandy and a lot of vodka.
The Orthodox Church is thriving again. One Catholic church that was a gym under Soviet rule is a church again. Bob has 7 churches in his neighborhood. The family is intact, with as many as 4 generations living under one roof.
But change is tough. Bob tells me older Moldovans want the communists back; young Moldovans just want to get out…to America, an America they don’t understand but one on which they’re willing to bet the farm.
Steve Hemmingsen
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