“Every stone, every door, every window in this house has been paid with money from abroad,” says Gheorghe Sarivan. He looks around the house and is quiet. “And still it is not comparable with houses in Europe. We don’t even have a bathroom inside.”

Sarivan lives in Siscani a small village towards the border with Romania. The roads are in terrible condition. Some parts are so bad, people rather drive through the grass. Not that many people have a car. People walk, ride a bike or use their horse and cart.

Moldova is the poorest country in Europe, with an average income of about 100 euro a month. This is the main reason why a quarter of the Moldovan workforce is working abroad. For Siscani this is not different. In the village almost every family has at least one relative outside the country who sends back money to repair the house and pay for the kids school or university.

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In the past years Moldova has become too dependent on the money people from abroad send to the country, experts say. “It’s like living on drugs and it’s called remittances,” says economist Ionita Veaceslav, who works for a social economic think thank IDIS Viitorul in Chisinau. He expects Moldova to be in troubled water within a few months.

Estimates maintain at least a quarter of the work force is not inside the country’s borders. Many of them work in Russia and Western Europe, sending money to relatives back home. In 2007 remittances were good for a stunning 36 per cent of Moldova’s GDP. This makes the country together with Tajikistan the leader in the world when talking about dependency on money from people working abroad.

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