Sunshiny Marielle Lindstrom

Marielle Lindstrom is the wife of a diplomat: her husband represents the Swedish Embassy in Moldova. She is also a diplomat herself. She works as the head of the International Organization for Migration. But she is also a mother: with two cute children Erik and Christina. We had a chat over the lunch.

- Marielle, you have so many roles and you manage to do so many things. I just heard that you are organizing a playground for children in Cathedral Park in Chisinau?

- The idea came to me when I was looking for a place for my own children to play. Since there is nowhere for children to play in the centre of Chisinau I thought that instead of building something just for my own children to use, I should try to do something for all the children in the city centre.

I asked all the mothers and nannies that come to the park every day, and all of them without exception said that they would welcome a playground for the children. In fact many commented that it seems that children have been forgotten in this period of economic transition. Now that we have started to build the playground, I have had some people protesting that we are ruining the grass and another has said that the Cathedral will be disturbed by children laughing.

It will be a modest playground – it’s made out of wood in order to blend in with the park and the Cathedral, and there is nothing mechanical. Best of all it will be free! The official opening is scheduled for June 1st, International Children’s Day. I have to stress that this is a team effort and without Kristien Johnson, the architect of the playground, it would have been a lot more difficult. Kristien is a practicing architect in Belgium, and she has volunteered her services to help the children of this city. We also have a good collaboration with the Center for Child Abuse Prevention, the City of Chisinau and I am particularly grateful to the major donors of this project: The Swiss Development Cooperation Agency, UNICEF, the British Embassy, and International Women’s Club in Moldova.

- You will have a Notice Board to inform Moldovan mothers about their rights. Eee… what rights?

- Actually the information boards are for children about their rights.

- What kind of rights do the children have?

- Right to speak their opinion, right to receive medical assistance, right to be a child and not a little adult, right to be loved and cared about. There will be small nice pictures, which explain all those rights to children. The artist has drawn little characters like rabbits and foxes and other animals acting like human beings. They are really nice pictures. I hope it will draw children rights into our attention as well. Sometimes we forget that they are little and it is their right to play and act like children.

But there on the information board will be information about different activities for children in Chisinau – also for mothers, of course. Everything, which has some value for parents with little children.

- Now tell the readers of Iubire.md about your job. You work in the International Organization for Migration. One of the biggest issues your organization deals with is the matter of women being sold as sex slaves. The human trafficking matters.

- Oh, yes. This is very important topic to deal with and talk about. We mostly work in three main directions in our Counter-trafficking Project which is supported by the EU, together with other major donors like Sweden, the US government, Switzerland and Belgium. We try to prevent young Moldovan women from becoming victims of trafficking. For example, we organise advertisement campaigns – “You are not a product!” You have probably seen the posters here and there. And we have other awareness rising campaigns, which purpose is to encourage Moldovan women to be more confident about themselves as women. I think this is very important.

A second type of projects we have focuses on education of police officers, for example, customs and border units to stop trafficking in human beings. There’s even a special police unit set up to deal with counter-trafficking activities within the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Despite the hard work of the police, sadly, very few women actually testify against traffickers. There are not enough resources to protect them and the women are also afraid of social stigmatisation if their real fate becomes public knowledge.

A detail from a mosaiq bus stop found in Moldova

And thirdly, we have projects, which help those women to return into normal life after being saved from the slavery. This is also very important, because they need to learn how to survive in normal society once again. We help them to set up their lives. We have a place where they receive medical treatment, psychological counselling etc. We have people who help them to find jobs, have back their documents etc. Did you know that 70% of those women, who have been kept as sex slaves are mothers? They have small children!

- No!?

- Yes, they have small children, whom they need to feed! The majority of these women are not young fun loving girls who would like to have rich boyfriends and have expensive clothes and jewerly. There is nothing glamorous about being trafficked – for one, you don’t get to keep any of the money that the clients pay. Many victims are single mothers and it appears that in Moldova, the men feel no obligation to pay anything towards the children. These are mothers, who are forced to look for some solutions in order to feed their children. And unfortunately they have been misled by false job advertisements.

- We, Moldovans haven’t used to think of those women as victims. We think that they deserved it, that this is their fault.

- No-one deserves to be a slave. It can never be right to be able to own another human being. Are those women guilty because they were desperate, because they wanted to change their situation? I think not. I wouldn’t speak so strongly if the women know what they were getting into, but according to our statistics 98% had no idea that repeated rape and beatings came with the job. If they had known that of course no-one would go.

Another reason why I speak in defence of the victims of trafficking – so many people leave Moldova those days that we should be welcoming them back! They have survived a horrible experience. I have seen that it can happen to anyone – a university student, a policeman’s wife, a hairdresser, a waitress etc.

As a westerner, it is difficult for me to understand such a lack of compassion and empathy for a fellow human being. If we reject a woman because she was a victim of a crime that she could not control, then I am afraid we are accepting that traffickers have to right to use and abuse people as they please. If we do not protest loudly, then we condone slavery in a modern age. I come from a country that has never accepted slavery, and this is one of the reasons that Sweden and all the other Scandinavian countries are so actively involved in counter-trafficking activities.

- What would you suggest to a young Moldovan rural woman who needs to feed her babies?

- I cannot give clear recipes. Everybody’s life is different. I think we have to learn how to value ourselves as mothers and as women. When times are tough, the only way to survive it is to work together – not against each other.

- Or for example, to a student in Chisinau who would like to have a summer job let’s say in a Greek restaurant as a waitress?

- My first question is, does she speak Greek? I would be very cautious about accepting any offers without checking first. I’d recommend that the student calls the new national FREE hotline number 0-800-777 77 and ask for information on how to verify the job offer. It could save her life. I would also suggest that she calls the State Migration Service to check whether the “job firm” is licensed or not.

- So, all this is about the poverty? If we only had more money – all our problems would be solved then? Or is there something we could change without money as well?

- Attitudes. Every single one of us can change attitudes: the ways we think and act. Just because we expect things to be one way, it does not mean that another way is wrong. It seems that here although people in general are very friendly, middle-management people in shops or other service industries are very quick to react negatively to anything outside their frame of reference.

- But tell us, you have another concern – children and minors in detention centers.

- Yes, I’m concerned about the fact that minors can stay more than two years in detention (in the actual prison together with hardened criminals) before their case is even tried! Can you imagine being caught for stealing a chicken at age 14, then spending the next few years wondering how long you would have to stay. There is no guarantee that the judge trying the case will take those first two years into consideration when handing down his sentence. Of course I am not condoning the crime, all I want to suggest is that they are still human beings. When I went to see them, they were so pale that their skin looked almost green. They almost see no daylight. I am not talking about food or diseases or female hygiene! We, who are out, just pretend they don’t exist. But they will come back one day. With completely ruined physical and mental health! We cannot even use them as a negative example “See, what happens if you don’t follow the law” – because we never imagine the conditions they live in. I am hoping that the prisons will receive more attention from the donor community. I did hear that one of the grants awarded by the international Women’s Club of Moldova will go towards a project teaching life skills to women who were about to be released. That is good news, but my concern remains for the forgotten children in detention centres.

- Hey-hey, make a serious look now. The readers of KP want to see who is the tough lady!

- Marielle, you have two last names? You are Sander-Lindstrom. Why? In Moldova, when a woman gets married she takes her husband’s name and that’s it.

- In Sweden this is normal to combine the maiden name with husband’s last name. Lots of women do this way. I personally did not give up my maiden name, because I had been wearing it for so long time and this was part of my identity. Getting married just added another value to me, not took something away from me.

- You have lived in different countries – you mentioned Saudi Arabia and Australia but together with your husband you have also worked in Kyrgyzstan. Where were your children born?

- We were living in Kyrgyzstan while I was expecting Erik, but I played it safe and went home to Sweden. Christina is also born in Sweden.

- How do they like in Moldova?

- Oh, they are fine. In the age of 2,5 and 4,5 they do not need much. The main thing again is to surround yourself with nice people. They are well looked after and Larissa is a fantastic nanny.

The questions were asked and the photos taken by Marje Aksli

The article was also published in the biggest daily Komsomolskaja Pravda
(in Russian language)