As you see, two variants of answers are obvious leaders, and these are “mentality” and “corruption”.

If I address my personal experience, and namely the situations where I asked local people such questions as
“why are there so many unsolved issues”,
“why are the good concepts, which already function successfully in other countries, are not implemented here in the same way”

and so on, I mostly heard two answers:

a) that’s Moldova, that’s Moldovan mentality, you can’t do anything about it;
b) all our problems are because of corruption.

So, we see that this is the most common opinion in Moldova. Moreover, the presence of corruption is also proven by the Corruption Perceptions Index 2020 (https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2020/index/), where Moldova is not far before countries like Kenia and Mexico, being number 115 in the ranking.

Now, let’s dive deeper into the essence of these notions.
Mentality means the way people think. There are no doubts that our thoughts and beliefs define our behaviour, right? And what is corruption?
Usually under corruption people understand bribery, usage of personal connections in order to be out of competition and get a job, a fund or anything else and so on. All these are certain actions of people, their behaviour. If we check the definition of corruption provided by Cambridge online dictionary of English, corruption means “dishonest or illegal behaviour involving a person in a position of power, for example, accepting money for doing something illegal or immoral”.

So, the definition of corruption brings us back to behavior and, correspondingly, to mentality.

Well, it is easy to understand that if we don’t change our mindset, if we keep ignoring illegal and immoral behavior, and if those people don’t change their way of thinking and keep caring only about their pocket and profit at the moment,it doesn't get us any further.

As long as someone thinks about today, and not about tomorrow, and someone’s personal welfare outweighs the sense of responsibility to the future generations of Moldova, to our children, it doesn't get us anywhere.