O scrisoare de o adolescenta

I want to share parts of an e-mail from Olga, a 16-year-old student at the prestigious (and Pan Romanian-leaning) Prometeu Lyceum in Chisinau. After we met at Moldova's Independence Day celebration, she read my blog and had some things to say (I have made some slight grammatical corrections to her writing for better readability):

Why should I be proud for some kind of decision made 15 years ago? I don't feel free after this decision, as the only place where I am not afraid to say what I feel and think is my school, which fights hard for our independence and still teaches us Romanian (the correct form of the language, not "Moldavian," a word that I can hardly pronounce).

I saw you talked about Limba Noastra too, and the problem we are confronting with the Russian speakers. If you were in Chisinau on the 31st of August you would have been very disappointed just as all of us were. President Voronin came from his journey from Greece specially for the 27th important holiday, but he decided to visit the Czech Republic on the 31st, a holiday with no sense for him but much more important for me and many others. In the center of the city there were no concerts. Nothing. Just some awful folk music with no sense at the lakeside amphitheater.

I am tired of leaving the shops just for the reason that the shop assistant can't give me the thing I need because she says she does not understand Romanian and I say I don't understand Russian (though I know it perfectly). My grandmother is told to speak like a human being (as if Romanian is not a good language) if she asks something in Romanian.

We all still bear the consequences of the USSR system. I give myself as an example. All the 2005-2006 year of study I was fighting and getting good marks because my parents promised to send me to France for the wedding of my aunt.

That was the dream of my life, everything I ever wanted. I got great marks at my exams; I studied extra French and got the greatest marks from my group. When I got tickets and went for my passport all I saw was "visa refused". Why? You can't ask. But from their short sentences I understood: you are from an ex-sovietic country and we risk the fact that you may like the civilization from there so as to never come back here. So everything was ruined, all my dreams, all my hopes.

And when you wrote about the fireworks and the sentence with all the budget money that they are spending for 20 minutes of pleasure, I spread it. All of my friends laughed, but I was talking seriously because they could spend the money on something more useful like to give a better salary to my parents, both very good doctors that save lives, work hard and some persons don't even say thank you after a hard operation.

It's hard, really and if somehow I will escape from here I will just come back to see my relatives and that’s all. Nothing more attracts me here.

Once again, bravo for your reports. I liked them a lot.

I don't agree with everything she has written, but Olga is not the only Moldovan teenager who feels this way about her country. I fear that Moldova is losing an entire generation of some of its best and brightest young minds, who see the opportunities of the outside world and conclude that their home country has nothing to offer them.