Word: moldova
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When Tatiana, 23, a nurse from the former Soviet Republic of Moldova, began planning her vacation in Greece last year, she knew she had to be careful. Her country has plenty of scam artists, and she had heard worrying stories of counterfeit tickets being issued and passports stolen. So she took a recommendation from a childhood friend, who put her in touch with a travel agency that offered her seven days all inclusive in sunny Athens for $800. A few days later she was in the back of a hired car, bound she hoped for the Mediterranean and an early...
...unpleasant but ultimately intractable social ills. "Too often," notes Helga Konrad, coordinator of a task force on trafficking in human beings recently set up in Vienna, "victims are jailed as prostitutes and traffickers allowed to go free." Economic conditions in Eastern and Central Europe are chiefly to blame. In Moldova, for example, the economy has shrunk by almost 50% over the past decade; average monthly salary is around $30. Four households out of five are living below subsistence levels, and more than 90% of people are materially worse off than they were under communism. Unemployment is so bad, according...
...loosely organized, investigators say, sometimes operating under the aegis of larger criminal organizations and sometimes working alone. At the point of contact-where women are first approached with an offer to travel or work abroad-recruiters are often former trafficking victims or others adept at gaining girls' trust. In Moldova, known recruiters include the daughter of a village priest and the wife of a policeman. They also routinely use classified ads in newspapers or on the Internet. "Jobs for girls without complexes, $800 a week," read one published not long ago in Makler, the Chisinau newspaper. When a Moldovan reporter...
...victims who do manage to escape, such memories take a heavy toll. "My soul is stained," said 19-year-old Olga recently, picking at her food back home in Moldova. "I can't forgive myself for trusting people." Across town, Marina says she wakes up most nights in a cold sweat, pale and shaking. She gobbles tranquilizers and smokes three packs of cigarettes a day. "People look at me and think I am either a junkie or an alcoholic," she told a reporter, glancing repeatedly over her shoulder. "This is no life...
...only because Moscow lost most of its empire in the last decade. Add only the 17 medals snagged by tiny Belarus or the Ukraine's 23, and the ex-Reds were way out on top. To those add the smaller hauls by Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Azerbaijan, Moldova, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan, and the former Soviet Union took home a staggering 163 medals. But hey, they lost the Cold War, and that means we won the Olympics. Nyah nyah...