Aside from asking your name, “what do you think of our country?” is perhaps the most common question a traveller faces.

My experience in Moldova has been no different. As I caught my breath, casting my eyes over the lake in Valea Morilor park, a shimmering golden disk in the wintery sun, I was inundated by this question by fellow finishers of the half marathon. Sipping black tea and huddling together against the chill, I pondered my answer. Did it lie up the slope where Embassy Row stretched out, full of grand houses? Or at the other end of the park, where grey Soviet-era housing blocks stood, apartments slotted together like a lego set? Or did the answer lie somewhere else entirely, beyond the park-flecked urbanscape which marked out the capital?

Moldova is frequently known as the poorest country in Europe – with a GDP per capita of $4,499 according to the World Bank, this measure places the Moldovans as marginally wealthier than the average citizen of Mongolia. Pass through villages and you will see teapot-shaped (but somewhat disappointingly spoutless) wells, often ribbed in blue and white, with an iron bucket poised to topple down and be retrieved by chain and pulley. The roads are occasionally smooth, though mostly the surface resembles a cheese grater – rough enough for a vibrating ride, but generally without gaping potholes. Though not evident as I rolled through, I was told many toilets lay in outhouses, lying behind squat and concrete houses, themselves behind steel gates.

Chisinau, Moldova’s capital, is a different story – fairy lights twinkle in central upmarket cafes where a fine flat white can be sipped – cheaply by UK standards, but three times the price of a petrol station Americano. Restaurants serve ribs, pizza and curry, though golubtsy (stuffed cabbage leaves) or placinta (crispy pastry swirls filled with cheese or cabbage) would be the traditional choice and just as tasty. Pints of Moldovan-brewed IPA, weissbier and bitter can be pulled. Here, between eight storey ageing apartment blocks and a surprisingly low-slung and unimposing centre the middle class babies of globalisation are present. As are the cars – they are as abundant as cycle lanes are sparse; it is clear German car dealers do brisk business and probably attractive credit lines.

However, to see Moldova through this prism is unlikely to take you much further than what you had already imagined – if indeed you had any preconceptions of Moldova. To move beyond banal generalities and to answer the deceptively simple original questions you must Luke elsewhere.

But where? Riscani, a village in the north. A small patio next to the shiny department store in Cahul. Through a metal door in a nondescript apartment block off Dacia Boulevard on the outskirts of Chisinau.

In fact, the places hold only passing importance; it was the people I met that helped me understand a little more about Moldova.

Victoria Dunford didn’t – and doesn’t – have a degree in International Development. Nor does she have an MBA. A PhD in chemistry is beside the point. As someone who was either under- or over-qualified, she ended up employed as a social care worker in an NHS hospital on the Isle of Wight. At one point, she was amazed to hear thirty old hospital beds were to be thrown away. She knew that her friends and family back in Moldova would be on a wooden bed if they went to hospital. They simply couldn’t be binned. One hundred and fifty beds and seven hundred wheelchairs later, Victoria’s work had just begun. One legacy of the Soviet era, ruled – or ruined – by ideology, meant that physically and mentally disabled people were hidden from view in orphanages or state-run institutions. They essentially didn’t exist. I was told of a war veteran who lost both legs and could not draw on disability benefits… because, officially, there were no disabled people in the Soviet Union. Whilst many of the orphanages have been shut over the past twenty years thanks to organisations such as Copil Comunitate Familie and Keystone, this has not solved the problem. Victoria told me in a room filled with computers and a mug-printing machine that the disabled children stayed at home and were rarely taken out the house, poorly understood by parents and largely left alone. One boy, after been given a wheelchair, said “thank you for helping me see the trees”. Lying in bed, all day, each day, he could only see the sky.

Victoria was determined to change this. So she did what people had told her time and again was “impossible”. It is clear that Victoria uses a different dictionary from many of us because she did not abandon the task at hand. Her definition must have read something like “incredibly hard, but can be done with enough willpower and perseverance”. Her cheery, open face belies a core of titanium. Almost single-handedly she converted a decrepit kindergarten into the aptly named Phoenix Centre, opened in 2015, a place where children and young adults can thrive with a bit of support, training and love – and a 37 metre ramp at a gradient amenable to wheelchairs. Along the way, Victoria became versed and excelled in painting, business administration, electrics and fundraising – to name but a few. She taught herself or learnt the hard way, but never stopped working to make the Centre a reality. This was a place young people could learn to be independent, given time and the right environment. Things their parents assumed they were incapable of doing – dressing, washing, cooking – they learned, over time needing less support and in turn acquiring independence. And the mug-printing machine? Victoria told me that although the centre was meant for children, once they become adults they have nowhere to go and so she is developing job opportunities too. The swimming pool for therapeutic and community use, currently a concrete shell, will require receptionists and Victoria knows exactly where she’ll be hiring from.

Sasha taps on the orange glow of an app and presses play. In the darkness of evening, chilly but not yet cold, thumping bass – overlaid with a dancing, scattered, synth tune –  fills the air. He then plays a pop-y number he produced in collaboration with a Canadian singer. “I can write this shit whilst on the toilet” he says in a quiet and assuredly dismissive way. We revert to the layered electronic ensemble. “I make this from nothing. It all comes from me but it’s so much harder”.

Sasha, trim and pony-tailed, is in an olive trenchcoat and delicately balancing a cigarette in his fingers. He cares deeply about music. So much in fact, that instead of emigrating, alongside 1.25 million other Moldovans (out of a population numbering 3.6 million), he decided to establish music festivals in Cahul, a town with a brightly lit centre but dark side streets. He shows me a video of last year’s edition. A throng of people frame the stage and his phone’s speakers struggle to do justice to what must have been a throbbing baseline. Along with other events across Europe, this year’s festival was cancelled. Sasha is confident about the future, though he admits funding is a constant struggle. In the meantime, in a corner of the kitchen next to pickling cabbages in vast jars, a 3D printer whirrs, which Sasha has programmed to fashion parts to build an even bigger printer. “Everything I have and want is here”, he says, “now I want other people to come here too”.

Once again, I was lost. Not that I didn’t know where I was – in front of me was apartment block six, the very place I needed to be. It was just that number six stretched for thirty metres in either direction and eight stories up. In one of these rooms, through one of the doors in front of me, was the Playback Theatre group.  I circumnavigated the apartment block once, twice, passing identical metal doors. As I rounded the end of the block one of these clone doors opened as my clockwise circling with the ticking tandem was an open-sesame (it wasn’t. Whatsapp would feature in a revised version of A Thousand and One Nights). Tamara bustingly ushered me in, and after threading the tandem through the door and yanking it round a sharp and narrow corner, with only a minimum of oil ending up on my jeans, I was inside.

Growing up, and particularly as a teenage boy, I had what I saw as a healthy suspicion of showing emotions, still less the benefit of deliberately displaying them in a room of people. Yet this is exactly what the Playback Theatre does. No amount of cajoling would have got sixteen year old Luke to attend, but what a difference ten years can make! After working in groups to enact various feelings, including vdokhnoveniye (“inspired”, if you’re wondering), the seasoned black-clad performers took the stage. I recounted an anecdote from that morning: my reluctance to plunge into the cold water of the Valea Morilor lake and then the excited and invigoration that followed. To my surprise, when the emotions were played out in front of me by the four actors, I felt that rush once again, yet so much more strongly. It resonated in a way I hadn’t expected, plucking chords inside me which largely lay untouched; I was surprisingly moved by the experience. One mother told the group of her son stuck in Transnistria – the unrecognised statelet in the east, officially part of Moldova but with its own Russia-backed government, a relic and caricature of the Soviet era – who she had not seen since Covid hit the scene and the borders closed. Each actor became a human radio mast, transmitting frustration, anger, longing and hope to each sitting in the room. I looked across at the mother. Tears slid down her cheek.

Playback is much more than theatre. As its motto attests “Acting, Healing, Uniting”, drama is only a small part of its purpose. I can only imagine the cathartic effect it has on those brave enough to recount their stories, but I can think of no environment safer or more supportive in which to do so.

These impressions flashed through my mind – Victoria’s smiling face; Sasha’s quiet intensity; Tamara’s warmth – as I bounced on my toes to keep warm in the crisp park air, thinking how best to answer this question so important to the runners surrounding me. What was my reply?

Yes Moldova has its problems. No, these are not small nor easily solvable. But I have met many, many beautiful people who care deeply about changing this country and its people and are putting their life’s work into achieving this. This is my take on Moldova: it could be an extraordinary country, but it already has extraordinary people.

Thank you.

Sergey. Serghei. Vasilii. Natalia. Victoria. Jazgul. Christina. Elena. Ana. Dave. Tamara. Sasha. Jane.