Dispatch #48
Read about how housing costs are pushing Prague’s key workers to the edge, marijuana in Paraguay and the radical past of children’s writing in Yugoslavia.
Hello and welcome to Translator’s weekly Dispatch, where we bring you summaries of compelling stories written beyond the Anglosphere.
This week, from the Czech Republic, we look at how Prague’s housing crisis is hollowing out the city from within. As rents soar beyond reach, teachers, nurses, and other essential workers are being pushed to the margins.
From Latin America, we summarise a Paraguayan piece looking at how marijuana – despite being formally illegal – has become a staple crop for farmers, a medicinal cure associated with indigenous culture, and a symbol of the contradictions at the heart of society.
And from the former Yugoslavia, we turn to children’s literature as a battleground of ideology. Tracing the erasure of a socialist tradition that treated children as politically aware subjects, this essay asks what was lost with the rise of “innocent childhood” and why the figure of the “knowing child” still matters today.
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.
Here’s what we’re looking for and how to let us know.
Prague without teachers or nurses
How soaring rents are quietly pushing the city’s essential workers to the margins
Anna Absolonová’s reporting traces Prague’s housing crisis through the lives of those who keep the city running and reveals how unaffordable rents are reshaping who can afford to live in the Czech capital at all.
At the centre of the piece is a simple but unsettling question: what happens to a city when the people it depends on can no longer live there? Using data analysis produced with the Urban Journalism Network, Absolonová shows that Prague’s housing market is increasingly incompatible with the incomes of “key workers”, namely nurses, carers, teachers, firefighters, police officers, cleaners, whose labour underpins everyday urban life.
She opens with the story of Josefína Linka, a thirty-year-old social worker who helps homeless people secure housing while struggling to afford her own. Despite working full-time, Josefína can only rent a single room in a shared flat, paying around a third of her income for housing. Her situation, the article makes clear, is no longer exceptional. It is becoming the norm.
According to the analysis, market rents in Prague exceed affordability thresholds for most key professions. A commonly cited benchmark is that housing should cost no more than 30 percent of income. Yet nurses, teachers, firefighters, and carers would all exceed this limit renting a modest 50-square-metre apartment. Public space cleaners are hit hardest, often spending closer to half their income on rent. Only doctors and paramedics consistently fall below the affordability line.
Municipal housing, once a partial buffer against market pressures, has shrunk dramatically. Prague had around 100,000 municipal apartments two decades ago; today there are fewer than 30,000. Of these, only about 3,500 are allocated to key workers. While city officials speak of plans to build more rental housing, new construction has lagged demand, and rents in municipal apartments have risen sharply, in some cases doubling since 2021.
The consequences are spatial as well as social, the article reports. Many key workers can only afford very small apartments if they want to keep rent within a third of their income. Larger flats become financially untenable, especially for single parents or those caring for family members.
Absolonová illustrates this through the case of Kristýna Šrajerová, a paramedic whose night shifts made life in a one-room apartment unworkable. She and her husband eventually moved into hospital-provided housing, one of a handful of employer-backed schemes offering more affordable rents to healthcare workers. While these initiatives provide relief for some, they remain limited, and unevenly distributed.
The article also exposes how affordability gaps intersect with gender. Women dominate many key professions, particularly in care, education, and social services, and on average must work more hours than men to cover the same rent. The disparity grows with seniority: female doctors and paramedics face larger pay gaps than their male counterparts, compounding housing stress even at higher salary levels.
The long-term implications are troubling. As Prague’s population is projected to grow by hundreds of thousands by 2050, demand for healthcare, education, and social services will increase. Urban planners warn that without intervention, Prague may face shortages in precisely the professions it needs most.
Prague remains liveable for tourists, investors, and high earners but increasingly hostile to those whose work sustains its social fabric. The question the article leaves hanging is not whether Prague can afford housing for key workers, but whether it can afford a future without them.
The original source article ‘Praha bez učitelů nebo zdravotníků? Kvůli cenám bydlení možná budoucí realita’ by Anna Absolonová was published in Czech in Deník Referendum, on October 28, 2025.
It is available here.
Deník Referendum is a Czech independent online news outlet known for data-driven reporting, investigative journalism, and in-depth analysis on social, political, and economic issues without a paywall and supported by reader donations.
Summary by ZN.
Marijuana in Paraguay
How an illegal plant has acquired meaning as medicine, income, and a symbol of civil disobedience in a country where the law lags behind lived reality
In this well reported investigation, journalists Guillermo Garat and Romina Cáceres trace how cannabis has moved from the shadows of illegality into the centre of everyday survival in Paraguay. What emerges is not a story about drugs as vice, but about marijuana incorporated into the tradition of Pohã Ñana (denoting medicinal herbs in Guaraní), and as an economic lifeline in a country where poverty and repression leave few alternatives.
The article opens with an interesting scene inside Paraguay’s Congress: lawmakers, police officers, and staff openly pocketing cannabis flowers, oils, and creams handed out by activist growers during a public hearing. No one asks about legal limits. Instead, they ask how to apply it, where it eases pain best, and whether they can take more. The moment is emblematic of an essential contradiction in Paraguay: cannabis cultivation and distribution remain criminalised under a 1988 law, yet its medicinal use is broadly tolerated, informally shared, and socially understood as necessary.
At the centre of this uneasy truce is Nicolás Bernié, a “solidarity grower” who has spent nearly a decade producing and distributing cannabis oil for free. Bernié and others like him notify prosecutors and police before holding cannabis fairs, register users through the state’s medicinal cannabis programme and even share harvests with authorities. They have never been arrested. Garat and Cáceres show that the law is less absent, than selectively ignored.
Nowhere is this contradiction sharper than in San Pedro, one of Paraguay’s poorest and most heavily policed rural departments. Here, cannabis has become the only reliable crop for thousands of small farmers after cotton, sesame, and other traditional livelihoods collapsed. Soy monoculture dominates the land but creates little employment. Cannabis, by contrast, pays school fees, medical bills, roofs, and groceries. As one agronomist puts it bluntly, no trucks come to pick up the produce of small-scale, family-run gardens unless it is for cannabis.
The article follows Eulalio López, a peasant leader who once fiercely opposed marijuana cultivation, fearing it would breed violence, corruption, and social breakdown. Over time, however, he watched neighbouring settlements prosper while his own stagnated. Eventually, he changed course. Today, he oversees a meticulously managed medicinal cannabis plantation, run collectively and openly, framed not as criminal enterprise but as successful agronomy. For López, legalisation is no longer a moral debate but a practical one. Without it, farmers remain trapped between poverty and extortion by public officials.
That extortion is systemic. Growers describe routine bribery by police, intelligence agents, and anti-drug authorities, who charge per plant for “peace.” Those who cannot pay are forced out or pushed deeper into debt. Meanwhile, large landowners cultivate cannabis at scale with impunity. The authors underline a bitter irony: that small farmers are criminalised for survival while the state quietly tolerates an industry it refuses to regulate. Garat and Cáceres also trace the rise of a parallel, semi-legal movement pushing cannabis into public view. Groups like Granja Madre and Mamá Cultiva organise open planting events, street markets, and public notifications to authorities. Mothers testify about children whose epileptic seizures have been eased through cannabis oil that the state is legally obliged to provide – but fails to. Activists frame their work as civil disobedience born of care, not defiance.
Throughout, the reporting resists romanticising cannabis. Violence, secrecy, and exploitation persist, particularly in smuggling routes to Brazil, where farmers often go unpaid. Yet the authors insist on what is most striking is the obvious reality that cannabis has already been socially legalised. What remains unfinished is the acknowledgement of that fact in the law itself.
By weaving together congressional farce, rural economics, maternal care, and activist persistence, Garat and Cáceres reveal cannabis as a mirror of Paraguayan society itself, a plant that exposes institutional hypocrisy, class inequality, and the distance between law and life. In a country where seven out of ten people lack health insurance, marijuana is not an ideological cause but a practical answer.
This original source article ‘Marihuana en Paraguay: por el imperio de la necesidad’ by Guillermo Garat and Romina Cáceres, was published in Spanish in El Surti on 11 March, 2025.
It available here.
El Surti is an independent Paraguayan news outlet producing investigative, cultural, and socially engaged journalism.
Summary by ZN
The “knowing child” against the cult of innocence
A meditation on how socialist Yugoslavia’s radical tradition of children’s literature was erased after 1990, and why reviving the figure of the “knowing child” matters urgently today.
Written by cultural theorist Lilijana Burcar, this essay traces the systematic erasure of Yugoslavia’s once vital tradition of socially engaged children’s literature. Burcar shows how, with the arrival of capitalism in the 1990s, a rich legacy of anti-fascist, anti-imperialist writing for young readers was pushed out of schools and libraries, replaced by a commercialised cult of “innocent childhood” that conceals class and political struggle.
For much of the twentieth century, socialist Yugoslavia cultivated a children’s literature that assumed something radical: that children were not innocent vessels to be protected from reality, but social beings being shaped by it. This literature spoke openly about inequality, exploitation, war, and solidarity, and it trusted young readers to understand the world they inhabited.
What replaced it was a flood of commercialised children’s books, largely imported from Western Europe, built around the romantic ideal of “innocent childhood.” Translations of global bestsellers and long canonised classics rapidly displaced domestic production. The result was not just a change in taste, but a transformation in ideology. Children’s literature was stripped of its social content and repackaged as escapism and moral neutrality. The child was no longer a subject embedded in history but a timeless, apolitical figure.
This cult of innocence has deep roots. The article suggests that its origins lie in English Romanticism, particularly in the work of William Wordsworth and his contemporaries, who imagined the child as pure, natural, and unmarked by experience. This was never an innocent idea. Romantic poets were often aligned with the rising bourgeoisie, and their vision of childhood conveniently erased the brutal realities of industrial capitalism, including child labour. Wordsworth himself opposed the education of working-class children, dismissing those shaped by social hardship as “unreal.” Innocence functioned as a political tool, masking class violence behind pastoral fantasy.
That same logic persists, the article argues, in much contemporary children’s literature. Western European classics, both old and new, often cloak conservative worldviews in fantasy. They reproduce patriarchal structures, racialised hierarchies, and imperial imaginaries, all while presenting themselves as harmless entertainment. Series like Harry Potter, which has dominated children’s literary socialisation in the region for decades, are emblematic, beneath their magic lies a rigid moral order that normalises hierarchy, exclusion, and inherited power.
Against this stands the Yugoslav tradition of socially critical children’s literature, that was moulded by Marxist thought and the lived experience of anti-fascist struggle. Its central figure was not the innocent child, but the “knowing child”, a protagonist who understands themselves as part of a social, political, and economic world. This literature did not protect children from reality. It offered them tools to read it.
Children’s magazines such as Zmaj played a crucial role. They published reportage on global liberation struggles, from Vietnam to Africa, alongside literature and history. Young readers were introduced to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of the Child, to debates about colonialism and imperial war, and to the idea that solidarity extended beyond national borders. Children were encouraged to see themselves as political subjects, capable of moral judgment and collective responsibility.
After 1990, this entire ecosystem collapsed. Publishing houses were privatised or shut down. Festivals like Kurirček, which had connected thousands of children across Yugoslavia through writing, art, and performance, were dismantled. Anti-fascist historical picture books disappeared from libraries. Today, in Slovenia, not a single public or school library holds key picture books depicting the National Liberation Struggle (the Yugoslav-era name given to the Communist-led resistance against Nazi occupation in the years 1941-1945). This absence is not neutral. It is the product of deliberate revisionism, the article suggests.
The consequences of this revisionism are cultural and political. Children are now raised on narratives that deny them a language for understanding systemic injustice. Poverty, war, and imperial violence are either sentimentalised or rendered invisible. The knowing child has been replaced by a child who is meant to feel, not think and to identify with heroes, not with collective struggle.
The article shows that reviving socially engaged children’s literature is not an exercise in nostalgia. It is a political necessity.
The original source article ‘Književnost od i za “znajuću” djecu’ by Lilijana Burcar was published in Croatian in Portal Novosti on 5 November, 2025.
It is available here.
Portal Novosti is the Zagreb-based digital platform of Novosti, published by Croatia’s Serb National Council since 1999 with a weekly print edition and an online portal covering news, cultural commentary, and critical analysis relevant to Croatian society and the wider region, often pertaining to Croatia’s Serbian minority.
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