'Yes' came after serious thought (06/21/06)

I said yes.

The call came Friday afternoon, when I was focused on the weekend’s class reunion. With a party Friday night, the banquet Saturday, the post-banquet party later Saturday night, and a brunch on Sunday morning, work wasn’t a particularly high priority.

And Moldova was the last thing on my mind.

“There’s a call for you on line one,” I was told. “It’s the State Department.”

That got my attention.

Would I, the woman from the State Department wanted to know, be willing to return to Moldova in September for two weeks? The plan would be for me to run a seminar on newspaper management for a week for members of the Independent Press Association, then do follow-up consulting with seminar participants the second week.

In many ways, it was familiar territory, much like the work that has turned into an accidental second career since 1998. And because it was just for two weeks, it could be worked into the calendar pretty easily.

Yet I hesitated for two reasons.

The first was that this would involve payment directly from the State Department. These gigs don’t pay much, but they do pay something. Ordinarily, I’ve been a contract worker for a non-governmental organization which is working under a grant from the U.S. government.

That intermediary organization has allowed me to maintain an arm’s length relationship with Uncle Sam, which is important since one of the things I’m trying to teach is press independence from government. This project will be structured differently, so I hesitated.

The other reason to hesitate was Moldova itself.

We fell in love with the country and all its challenges when we were there as a family in 1998 for nearly six months. But it’s an incredibly poor nation, and it hasn’t made much progress in terms of reform or development since we left.

Corruption is still a huge problem. Newspapers are still struggling, and for many their “independence” is illusory.

I found myself wondering, after I told the lady from the State Department that I’d think about it, whether I was prepared for what I was likely to find. Wouldn’t it be too depressing to see folks still mired in the same problems, still struggling to shake off the Soviet mindset? What if things are worse than we left them?

It’s nice to think that past work in the country made a difference, but was I ready for the possibility that it hadn’t mattered at all?

The reunion pushed those thoughts out of my head for most of the weekend. By Sunday night, I was finally able to focus on the details that had been e-mailed.

As I did, I found myself imagining the seminar participants. Tudor would be there, of course. And Gheorge and Ion and, perhaps, Vasile and Vlad. Maybe Serghei.

Within a few minutes, I’d put faces on roughly two-thirds of the proposed seminar participants. These were my guys. These were the people whose newspapers I’d visited in backwater towns like Criuleni and Rezina and Cimislia.

Would the seminar matter? I wasn’t sure. Did the earlier work matter? The jury’s still out.

But, in the end, I wasn’t willing to put the project in anyone else’s hands. The Independent Press Association had asked the embassy to send me back.

I figure I owed it to them to say yes.[[In-content Ad]]