TGMS #022 Mothering in Moldova with Ludmila Ungureanu

Mothering changes us. For my friend, Ludmila, it has made her more empathetic to children, more open to relationships, and it has intensified just about everything. Ludmila is a friend from my graduate school days (as are many of my guests on this show). She and I shared an apartment with Katie Chandler (from TGMS #03), and the three of us spent many hours discussing international development and ways we could impact big things like poverty, literacy, and human rights. Today, the three of us are moms, and I think we’ve realized that as much as we can do on a big scale, what matters equally as much is what we do in our own homes. Raising kids who embrace others and seek to create positive change in the world is one of our deepest desires.

Ludmila and  I talk about her multicultural background, her studies in the US, and her work in Moldova as a lawyer and development worker. In the second half of the episode we talk more about how being a mother has changed her and what she hopes for her son, Bogdan. Why she and her husband decided to stay in Moldova when many have left the country. And we talk about why she chose to wait to travel with her son until he was three years old.

Ludmila’s Bio: Ludmila Ungureanu is a development professional from Moldova, a small country located in South Eastern Europe. Ludmila is the founder and CEO of the Center for Social Excellence from Moldova, a start up non-profit organization that will help vulnerable families, children, and youth break out of the cycle of poverty and build a sustainable future for themselves. Before founding the Center for Social Excellence, Ludmila worked with development organizations that focused on human rights, justice sector reform, and poverty reduction. These included United States Agency for International Development and the American Bar Association and their rule of law reform programs in Moldova, Catholic Relief Services and their poverty reduction programs, and the RADA Institute, a local organization that worked on building capacity of non-profit organizations. In the last 15 years, Ludmila worked in Moldova, Ukraine, Georgia, Kirgizstan, and Belarus. She speaks three languages, has a law degree from the State University of Moldova and has a MS in Management from the SIT Graduate Institute in the United States. Ludmila has a six-year old son – Bogdan and is married to Sergiu Talpa, an economist working in the private sector.

 Ludmila at an outdoor cafe.

Don’t forget to share your birth stories with us! Whether at home or abroad, birth stories connect us. We’d love to hear your story, and you can share it in two ways:

1. Head over to The Global Moms Network and post a picture or story of something that happened during your birth experience.
2. Call in and leave a voicemail with a birth story that might be featured on a special epsiode of The Global Mom Show. Call 657-GO-GLOBE (this is a US number).
3. If you have a story under 90 seconds long, you can leave it as a voicemail on this page. Just click the “Send Voicemail” button on the right side of your screen and record!

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