By January 2018 the mayor of Puhoi was fed up. His assistant kept turning up to work drunk. His colleague wasn’t the only one; sometimes it seemed to him as if everyone in this Moldovan village of 5,500 people had a drinking problem. So the mayor, Petru Frunze, decided to hold a competition. Any couple who could stay sober for six months would receive a cash prize of 1,000 leu ($240) and jobs. Twenty couples signed up, but only one succeeded. As promised, Frunze found them jobs as cleaners in the capital city of Chisinau, around 15 miles away. He even covered their travel costs. But within a few months, they had both relapsed and turned back to alcohol. “This life isn’t for us,” they told him. The competition never ran again. “If we had just one success story, it would have been worth it,” says Nina Iurcu, who succeeded Frunze as mayor in April 2019.
Time: How Moldova developed the world’s worst drinking problem
A photo taken on Oct. 29, 2016 shows a partial view of the Chisinau skyline.
