Lopatnic is a typical Moldovan village, situated in the North West of the country, half an hour drive from Edinet, the main city of the district. Roads are mostly not paved and the majority of people works in the fields. The Prut river and Romania are only half a kilometre away.
During the last decade, a large number of people from Lopatnic and the neighbouring villages decided to migrate to France in search of work and better-living conditions. The majority of people only returns very occasionally to visit relatives and friends.
Corjeuti, a nearby town, became somehow famous in Moldova for the thousands of migrants that settled in the Paris region. Many houses here are richly decorated with large and incongruous wrought iron gates, even though they rest uninhabited for most of the year. Many roads are paved, an exception in this rural area. Migrants who managed to be successful abroad like to build large mansions. The village’s appearance is strikingly different from the typical rural Moldovan landscape. Even a large restaurant, called La Paris, with abundant kitsch decorations, and a miniature of the Tour Eiffel sits here. Only a few roads away, the usual Soviet monument stands beside an artillery piece from the Great Patriotic War.
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- WWII memorial in Corjeuti.
“Now everybody walks down the road with a phone. In my childhood, you had to go to the fields with just a bottle of water and some bread. It is totally different now, I am happy for the younger generations.”
Ion Ciobanu gives us a warm welcome, offering homemade wine, sweets and bread. “I was born here in Lopatnic,” says, pointing at the parents’ house nearby. He is now in his sixties. He is keen to say that he built his house by himself, starting from 1971. Looking at the well, Ion says: “I cannot drink water from the tap. This is the real taste of water, not that one!” We all laugh. Right beside the house, in the garden, he grows large pumpkins. “I do not even eat them. I give them all to the pigs”.
We sit down when his wife Valentina joins us and soon Ion starts narrating how migration has affected the lives of all of his family members. During the Soviet times, when he was young, he went to Kurgan, in Siberia, to work as a craftsman. Life was harsh, but he spent seven years there. Even after meeting his wife and having two sons, he kept working in Kurgan to support the family, with a new dream: to be able to raise money for his own house. In the meantime, Valentina worked in the tobacco fields.
Ion worked for many different people, helping to dig wells and build houses. People around were poor, so he only asked for the money they were able to pay. He used to work a year at the time, then he travelled back to Moldova to spend the money on construction materials for the house, before leaving again.
After Kurgan, he went to Ukraine and worked there for eight years, earning money with the same purpose: to come back and have the possibility to build a house and to make a good life for his children. Everything was done for the sake of his children. He returned to live in the village in 1982 where he eventually succeeded in building the house. He likes to spend his spare time doing repairs.
In the 1990s, everything collapsed in Moldova. Buses in this region did not even go from town to town. Electricity was only provided for two or three hours a day in the village. Although Ion worked more than ever before, day and night, his salary never got better.
Along the years, the situation slowly improved. “I never thought about leaving this land again. I was born here, I have my house and fields here. Here are my relatives and my ancestors, I feel very close to this country, I don’t wanna leave any more”.
