Dispatch #19
Read about female motorcycle drivers in Indonesia, gastro-nationalism in Greece, thirty years of countercultural raves in Taiwan, and at-home laser treatment in Iraq.
Welcome to Translator’s weekly Dispatch, where we bring you summaries of four compelling stories written beyond the Anglosphere.
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Back to this week’s Dispatch #19…
A Turkish-born, Greece-based anthropologist delves into the politics of baklava, and we hear about thirty years of countercultural raves in Taiwan. In Iraq, the convenience and privacy of at-home laser treatment lures many women into unlicensed beauty salons. In Indonesia, female motorcycle drivers shoulder the burdens of unpaid labour, long working hours and digital exploitation with little protection.
We hope you enjoy the read.
P.S.: In the meantime, tell us what you like and dislike, themes you’d like to see explored from the perspective of different linguistic media landscapes. And, as ever, feel free to recommend specific pieces we should summarise for our Dispatches, or translate in full for the magazine.
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The true price of affordable beauty care
An Iraqi perspective on the newest fad in laser hair removal
The beauty industry is enormous and incredibly popular in the Middle East. When I lived in Beirut – writes our Contributing Editor, Sophia Smith Galer, in her summary of an article from Raseef22 by Benin Elias – I’ll never forget seeing my first plastic surgery loan, proudly advertised by a bank on the side of the road. But what happens when cheap at-home providers bend the rules?
Raseef22 is a marvellous independent media network based in Beirut. (Its editor is part of Translator’s advisory group). This investigation is from their wider project Mish ‘Al-Hamish (“Not on the margin”), a popular, educative column that sheds light on sexual and reproductive rights in Lebanon, Iraq and Palestine.
The piece begins with the story of a 32-year-old woman from Najaf in central Iraq, who saw an advertisement on Facebook for a women’s group that offered laser hair removal at home. This was compelling for Reem (a pseudonym), who could find it challenging going to beauty salons to get the same procedure; she told Raseef22 that her husband and family usually prevented her from going to these salons because of fears that staff would place cameras in the salon and film naked women and girls.
It’s not clear from the piece whether this was the fee for total hair removal, or per session, but Reem said it was 15,000 Iraqi Dinars, which is about $10, to remove the hair from “sensitive areas” (presumably her bikini line). Either way, this is extremely cheap, and four months after going through the sessions, she had intense itching, redness, and what she described as warts. A gynaecologist later told her she would need several months of treatment to remove them, including yet another kind of laser removal on the skin.
Raseef22 reports that hundreds of unlicensed beauty salons like this appear to be spreading in Iraq without official oversight. Since 2023, a committee formed by the Iraqi Council of Ministers has been investigating unlicensed health and beauty centers; after their first year, the Ministry of Health published a list of 72 centers which had been reported for violations which they requested to be shut down. But this is unlikely to be a significant portion of the number of actual centers that are operating without a licence.
In July 2024, Majid Shankali, who is the head of the Parliamentary Committee for the Environment and Health, said that between 900 and 1000 centers compared to about 100 licensed beauty centers.
Another Najaf resident, Najla, had to postpone her wedding over laser hair removal gone wrong. Her skin was left peeling and disfigured, and she told Raseef22 that some cream the salon owner gave her afterwards to try and treat it ended up burning her. She has been housebound for a month; “I don’t leave my room. I can’t stop holding my thighs apart all the time.”
Iraq’s healthcare system is beginning to feel the weight of these salons’ misdemeanours. Dr Nour Ali, a gynecologist, said that she is receiving visits at the hospital and her private clinic for cases in which women appear to have skin deformities, burns and infections following unlicensed hair removal procedures. Her advice? “Anyone who wishes to undergo a laser session must consult a doctor before proceeding to determine their skin type and the number of sessions required. They must also have experience and knowledge of how to use the laser device and sterilisation.”
Haya Taleb, a laser specialist who works for a licensed center with doctors’ supervision, added that it wasn’t just physical trauma women might suffer, but psychological too - I can believe that from Najla’s testimony. Women from poorer areas are far more likely to go to unlicensed centers too, exacerbating the problem because they may not be able to access quick medical support when they need to.
The amount of sterilisation and good practice that is involved in laser hair removal means that the experience should feel slightly medical; here in London, I remember being asked to fill in a ridiculously long medical questionnaire, and the presence of a lot of wipes, sunglasses to shield my eyes from the laser, and hygienic garments to put on. In this piece, Taleb added that different hair - thick, fine, white - each merits different approaches. Laser hair removal is an art and a science - which is exactly why licensed beauty centers normally charge a lot for it.
But with beauty standards and societal norms the way they are, it sounds like many in Iraq are being pressured into accepting low rates, and persuaded by the privacy an at-home setting seems to assure. However, just as the headline suggested, it ends up becoming a far higher price to pay.
Original article (“جلسات ليزر في المنزل… جلسات ليزر في المنزل… "التجميل" الرخيص مادياً والمكلف صحياً بلا رقيب في العراق,”/“Home laser hair removal without oversight in Iraq: cheap for your wallet, but expensive for your health”) by Benin Elias, first published in Arabic on 2 June 2025.
It’s available here.
Raseef22 is an independent media platform based in Beirut, Lebanon.
Summary by SSG
They Danced on the Ruins
Inside Taiwan’s underground rave scene, where music, mysticism, and fleeting trust pulse through the margins of the city
At a crumbling temple on a mountain slope in Taoyuan, music begins to hum. Smoke drifts between broken pillars, LED lights coil around shattered stone. It’s not a club, not a concert, not quite a ritual—but something that slips between all three. The dancers come with tents, speakers, talismans, cigarettes. Before the first beat, some bow to the spirits of the place.
This is Taiwan’s underground rave scene, now entering its third decade. In this piece from Initium Media’s ‘Reporter’s Notes’ column—a space for journalists to reflect on stories that moved them—reporter Chang Kai-hong steps into a world of pulsing music, improvised spaces, and temporary trust. He attends a rave at an abandoned family shrine-turned-party site, and what he finds is both stranger and warmer than expected.
Here, exchange isn’t about money. Chang trades peanut butter sandwiches for cigarettes, drinks, and conversation. Here, no one cares about job titles, degrees, or backgrounds. What connects people is rhythm—shared steps on the dance floor, and a mutual frequency in the music.
He meets a couple—one a young Taoist priest in flowing white robes—who light incense to greet the spirits of the ruin. The priest gives out talismans with hand-brushed script. The two met at a folk music festival in Miaoli, but techno brought them closer.
Across the scene, religion and rave are not in conflict—they’re curiously blended. A man named Ah Xuan recalls another party, this one behind a mountain temple, announced cryptically through Telegram: “The gods have spoken. Come dance in the hills.” Participants had to pass through a fire-walking ritual before joining. Entry wasn’t paid but gifted—each person brought something to contribute to the “resonance”: a drum, a joss stick, a mum-cooked rice ball. The DJ booth stood on a traditional banquet table, next to offerings and lotus lamps, under red temple lanterns modified to blink in sync with the beat.
One DJ, playing under the name Tāi-sîn-án (in Taiwanese:大神仔), mixed Taoist ritual sounds, Taiwanese dialect samples, and low-frequency techno. At 1am, the temple’s spirit medium arrived—not to shut things down, but to lead a trance-like dance ritual in the centre of the floor. Together, under techno rhythms, the crowd moved like a kind of electronic Pat-ka-chiòng (a traditional Taiwanese ritual performance troupe rooted in folk beliefs and myth).
A rave is a fleeting refuge for restless souls. Around the dance floor, someone reads tarot, someone else rolls lūn-piá (a form of spring rolls) by hand — It feels less like a party than a parallel-world marketplace, quietly blooming under the pulse of the music.
Yet this openness exists within boundaries. These are not public events. Most outdoor raves occupy spaces illegally—public land, private ruins—without permits, often with music that pushes the limits of legality, volume, or sobriety. As such, the scene runs on discretion and trust. Locations are shared via private messages or secret Telegram groups, often revealed only the night before. Sometimes, attendees must meet at a designated point and follow guides in.
This has created a kind of semi-secret membership structure—exclusive, but not commercial. You can’t buy your way in, but if you’ve danced together once, you might be recognised as one of their own. Over time, this forms an underground network, held together not by rules but shared memory and bodily resonance.
In this world, trust and unspoken consensus are more binding than regulation. No one bans photography, but most people simply don’t take photos. No one is forced to share, but most do. It’s governed by a quiet, mutual code of PLUR: Peace, Love, Unity, Respect.
At the centre of it all is the dance floor, a paradoxical space—tight, crowded, but strangely free. Bodies move in ecstatic synchrony without touching. “It’s like a shoal of fish,” Chang writes, “each moving to its own rhythm, but never straying from the current.”
For some, the freedom is transformative. Ah Zhe, a raver who once frequented nightclubs, says raves are different: “Nightclubs are about the chase, about sex and show. The music’s just wallpaper. A rave isn’t like that. Here, music is everything—and dancing is why we come.” What keeps him coming back isn’t the scene, but the spiritual release. “What really gets me hooked is the feeling of mental freedom when I dance.”
Not all seek chemical highs. One participant, Xiao Shan, identifies as a “natural high raver.” For him, the deep bass and extended movement are enough. “I think about all the things I never deal with,” he says. “Not necessary life-changing epiphanies—just the things that are always there, just beneath the surface.” In the darkness, emotions and bodies are released. “Sometimes I feel like I disappear into it,” he says. “Like I’m no longer myself, just part of the black.”
These parties don’t end with a final track—they vanish. “Underground parties are like dreams,” Chang writes. “They begin already on their way to disappearing.” Tents, speakers, lights are all cleared by sunrise. Even footprints are covered over. The only thing left is what stays in your body: the after-buzz, the lingering hum.
Ah Zhe recalls a small forest rave in Europe—location only marked with a hand-drawn map and the message: “At sunset, listen for the first beat by the river.” At midnight, the DJ reversed the entire set. The music ran backwards. Lights pulsed in reverse. The night turned inside out.
As the fire died down at 3am, no one spoke. It was a silent farewell. Before leaving, someone handed Ah Zhe a wooden coin inscribed: “You were part of something that won’t be recorded—but you will remember.”
Back in Taiwan, he searched for the party online. Nothing. No photos, no trace. Just the coin, still on his desk.
They danced on the ruins—not to rebuild, not to rebel, but to remind themselves that the body can exist another way. As long as people keep dancing, those nights will never fully end.
Original article (“章凱閎, ‘他們在廢墟上跳舞：在Rave派對結束後，我體內的嗡嗡餘震” / “They Danced on the Ruins: The Lingering Hum in My Body After the Rave”), by Chang Kai-hong was first published in Chinese on Initium Media on 17 May 2025.
It’s available here.
Initium Media is a Chinese-language digital media outlet based in Singapore.
Summary by KLT
Who owns baklava?
Turkish-born anthropologist Ellie Romain Ors explores the implications of gastro-nationalism through the humble sweet pastry
In the rich folds of baklava - a dessert that is as intricate in construction as it is in historical implication, Ellie Romain Ors finds a metaphor for national identity; layered, fragile and relentlessly contested. Having made Athens her home, the Turkish-born anthropologist is a connoisseur of not just pastry but the cultural significance it carries. In this interview with the Greek newspaper Kathimerini, Ors shares her exploration of gastro-nationalism, the field where food becomes a battlefield, and walnuts and pistachios bear the flag of national pride.
Ors arrived in Athens in the late 1990s, a move that spurred her journey into charting the complex cartographies of everyday Mediterranean life. “You don’t look Turkish,” she was told, as if ethnicity was a spice too strong to misplace. She refused to accept this shallow framing, pushing back against the essentialism that so often simmers beneath polite conversation.
Shaped by long afternoons of Greek coffee and long-distance memories of Istanbul, her project is less about who has the right to claim patrimony over baklava, but rather why do we feel the urge to do so. She compares it to “supporting your national football team.” Ultimately: “your team will always be better than the opponent”. And yet in the historical “baklava wars” - where both Byzantium and the Ottoman court lay claim to the desert as a cultural heirloom - Ors finds not only division, but a map of shared longing.
These themes are drawn out in her ‘Muhabbet’ (‘coffeehouse conversations’) lecture series, hosted alongside historians Katerina Boura and Elias Kolovou. Over wine and salted nibbles, folks gather in Plaka to hear Ors draw connections between cuisines and community. Here, food is both an artifact and an offering. In one lecture, Ors showed a picture of a mosaic of baklavas shaped into the portrait of Mehmed II, a sugary act of soft power by the Turkish National Baklava Association. It was then she realised how important it was to have a safe and neutral space to digest nuanced understandings of nationalism, identity and cultural inheritance.
For Ors, the stories behind certain dishes like moussaka and mahlepi, dolma and muchaleb, offer more than nostalgia. She believes these recipes can offer a mode of reconciliation. Proposing an “Aegean vision” that honours the maritime mingling of cultures beyond borders, religions and rivalries. After all, she notes, food is often passed down more easily than language; forging its way across the gaps of untranslatable vocabulary of family, grandmothers, of smells wafting from kitchens where no flag is flown.
Perhaps that is why the question of who owns baklava – unanswerable in itself – is still asked. It speaks to a longing built on diaspora, memory, and the joys of eating something both familiar and foreign.
Original article (“Ιλάι Ρομαίν Ορς στην «Κ»: Ο μπακλαβάς ανήκει στα φιστίκια του”/ “Elie Romain Ors on "K": Baklava belongs to its pistachios”) by Maro Vasiliadou first appeared in Greek in Kathimerini on 2 June 2025.
It’s available here.
Kathimerini is a daily political and financial newspaper based in Athens, Greece.
Summary by TMH
Wheels of Inequality
Women motorcycle taxi drivers in Indonesia navigate exploitative digital platforms and structural gender bias
Last month, on International Labour Day, Konde.co released a groundbreaking research report on the precarious conditions of ojols, some 4 million motorcycle taxi drivers in Indonesia. Twenty percent of the drivers are women, who embody both a digital-age social revolution and the stark limitations of platform capitalism. Rather than representing true empowerment, the so-called “partnership” between female drivers and their companies masks exploitative working conditions. Konde’s research, based on interviews with 30 women across nine cities, reveals a multi-layered crisis marked by gender discrimination, informal labour, algorithmic control, and the absence of social protection.
Aged between 35-44, most women ojol drivers in the study are single mothers and are their family’s main breadwinners. A majority were educated to high school level or above yet driven into informal work due to layoffs or lack of job opportunities. Despite working over 9–12 hours daily – sometimes more – and rarely taking days off, more than 70% of respondents earned less than 100,000 rupiah (about £4.50) per day. None considered this income sufficient. At home, nearly all also carry out unpaid domestic labour such as childcare, eldercare, and housework. Many reported burnout from this “double burden.”
According to the article, gender-based violence and discrimination are rampant. Nearly 87% had experienced cancelled orders because of their gender, and 43% reported facing sexual harassment. Rejections from male passengers are frequent, reinforcing harmful gender norms that women don’t belong on the road. Many drivers do not report abuse for fear of retaliation or inaction from platform companies. When reports are made, nearly 70% of cases receive no resolution or lead to further victim-blaming.
Algorithmic management exacerbates precarity. Nearly two-thirds of women had experienced algorithmic penalties such as sudden suspensions, often without clear cause. These automated sanctions and the overall lack of transparency in performance ratings, incentives, or scheduling, leave drivers powerless, even as companies claim they offer “freedom” and flexibility. In practice, the platforms set the rules and shift all operational risks, such as fuel, maintenance, and illness, onto workers.
Tia, a single mother and one of the drivers interviewed, works from dawn to midnight to make ends meet. She juggles deliveries while battling fatigue, harassment, and algorithmic punishments. Her story is emblematic of a broader pattern: women turning to gig work after layoffs, attracted by promises of flexibility, but ultimately trapped in a cycle of debt, surveillance, and exploitation.
The research also exposes the failure of state regulation. Only a small fraction of drivers have any form of social protection. Despite performing essential work, women ojol drivers are excluded from labour rights such as maternity leave, sick pay, or job security. Most are categorised as ‘partners’ rather than employees, allowing companies to avoid legal obligations. This pseudo-partnership, Konde argues, is a convenient fiction used by platforms and government alike to shirk responsibility.
Organisations like the Serikat Demokrasi Pengemudi Indonesia (SDPI) and all-women collectives such as Gayatri have emerged in response to these injustices, building solidarity and demanding structural reform. Women drivers are calling for recognition as formal workers, transparent algorithms, fair compensation, safety mechanisms, and labour protections that account for their specific needs.
At its core, the report paints a vivid portrait of how the intersection of gender, class, and digital labour creates unique vulnerabilities. Far from being beneficiaries of the gig economy, women ojol drivers are among its most exploited participants. As Tia’s story makes clear, surviving as a woman in the gig economy is not just a matter of navigating traffic and weather, it’s about resisting erasure in a system that profits from their invisibility.
Original article (“Jalan Terjal Ojol Perempuan, Bertaruh Pada Panas Aspal dan Algoritma: Hasil Riset Konde.co (1)”/ “The Steep Road of Ojol Wanita, Betting on Asphalt Heat and Algorithm: Konde.co Research Results (1)”), by Luthfi Maulana Adhari was published in Indonesian on 30 April 2025.
It’s available here.
Konde.co is an Indonesian feminist media platform that focuses on gender justice, labour, and human rights. Through investigative reporting, research-based features, and grassroots storytelling, it centers the voices of women, marginalised groups, and workers often excluded from mainstream narratives.
Summary by ZN
That’s all for now – we hope you’ve enjoyed the read. Keep an eye out for our next Dispatch of summaries this time next week!
The Translator team