Why Romania has failed its cultural workers, a disease epidemic in Nepal and Kyrgyzstan’s women trolleybus drivers
DISPATCH №65
Hello and welcome. Each week, Translator’s Dispatch brings you summaries of three compelling articles from media beyond the Anglosphere. It’s our way of helping us all read the world a little differently.
We begin in Romania where a new law to support independent cultural workers is falling short of its stated intentions. And in Nepal, medical experts are warning of a worrying rise in non-communicable diseases. Finally, a journalist in Kyrgyzstan explores the gendered legacy of the Soviet Union’s urban transport system.
But first …
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A victory on paper and nothing more
Why Romania’s efforts to legally recognize freelance cultural workers were doomed to fail
In April 2023, Romania launched a landmark programme: the Professional Cultural Worker Law.
This promised to be a lifeline for the country’s 100,000 independent cultural workers – artists, curators, managers, dancers, writers, freelancers – all of whom operate without social protection, stable contracts or specific legal recognition of their status.
Beyond creating a new type of employment contract for cultural workers, with certain tax advantages, the law was meant to offer such workers access to social insurance, unemployment benefits, seniority accumulation and collective representation rights. (In order to qualify as a cultural worker under the scheme you have to get at least half your income from cultural work – not including royalties from copyright – and not currently be working with a permanent employment contract).
The law was also, its architects hoped, an act of validation: a mark of recognition from the state that culture is not a hobby, and that those who sustain it deserve to be seen.
But a recent investigation by Scena9 reveals a damning statistic: nearly three years on from the law’s introduction, only 11 people are legally recognized as professional cultural workers in Romania. Reporters Daria Radu, Șerban Barbu and Maria Angele investigate why a new framework so useful in theory is, currently, a failure.
“We’ve been stamping our feet for so long about having no status, no protection,” bewails Mihai Ivașcu, a writer. “And yet when this opportunity is offered – which may not be perfect, but it is at least improvable – just six of us show up, when in fact we are thousands, or more.”
Ivașcu was the second person to register, after coming across the law entirely by chance. Believing it was the solution he’d been dreaming of, he registered with enthusiasm. Why didn’t more people do the same?
For the first two years, signing up to the register was only possible in person or by post, and this was itself a deterrent to many. But even after the process became digitised, it remained deeply bureaucratic. Scena9 journalists tried it out and ended up spending four hours and 19 minutes completing their own application, with two friends drafted in to help. Iulia Popovici, a critic, researcher, and policy expert who worked with the Ministry of Culture on the law’s adoption, puts the absurdity plainly: “The stated intention of the law is to cut through the bureaucracy. But now we have both the law – and the bureaucracy.” She refers to the tendency of the Romanian state to protect itself through ramparts of ever-multiplying paperwork.
Another significant oversight has been the lack of information extended both to those who might benefit from the law, and those who might be called upon to implement it. No one seems to know much: not cultural workers not accountants, not even staff at ANAF, the national tax authority. The Ministry invested almost nothing into outreach and promotion.
“The fact that there has been no promotion of the law, that there are no information meetings, that no registration assistance is offered,” Popovici notes, “suggests that the Romanian state has no great enthusiasm for the law.”
Rather than acknowledging the failure, the Ministry declared the results “exceeded expectations” – on the basis that the original funding for the programme only required that the law exist on paper, rather than it actually work in practice.
All of this sits within a broader picture: Romanian culture receives just 0.07 per cent of GDP in government funding, and the Minister of Culture’s response to the sector’s precarity has been to urge artists to think more “entrepreneurially”.
As the article points out, governments in other countries have shown what genuine commitment to cultural work looks like. In Ireland, a pilot programme gave 2,000 cultural workers €325 a week to pursue their practice. After finding that every euro invested in culture returned €1.39 to society, the pilot programme was made permanent. Germany and Austria have long-established social insurance systems specifically for independent artists. Romania could learn from these examples.
For those who did register, the law has delivered one tangible benefit: the ability to issue invoices legally under a new type of contract. But the sense of community and broader recognition the law might have provided have not materialised. Sara Pongrac, a 25-year-old theatre graduate and artist, speaks of the false hope: “I thought it could be like a kind of community.”
It remains, for now, a promise unmet.
The original article ‘Cum a eșuat Statutul lucrătorului cultural: 11 înscrieri la 100.000 de profesioniști’ (’How the Cultural Worker Statute Failed: 11 Registrations for 100,000 Professionals’) by Daria Radu, Șerban Barbu, and Maria Angele was first published in Romanian by Scena9 on 26 March 2026.
It is available here.
Scena9 is a Romanian digital culture and society magazine covering arts, ideas, and everyday life, with a strong focus on independent journalism and social issues. It is supported by BRD Groupe Société Générale.
Summary by TMH
Nepal’s silent epidemic
The devastating human and financial toll of surging non-communicable diseases
Writing for Nepal’s leading digital news portal, Online Khabar, Pushparaj Chaulagain warns us of an epidemic: the sharp rise in non-communicable diseases (NCDs). These are non-transmissible health conditions like diabetes, heart attacks, strokes, and kidney disease caused by air pollution, excessive alcohol and smoking, unhealthy diets, and a sedentary lifestyle. In low- to middle-income countries, the report says NCDs are now the leading cause of death.
Nearly 200,000 people die annually in Nepal as a result of NCDs, and eight out of the top 10 causes of death in the country fall into this category. The government has introduced a multi-sectoral action plan to address this, yet critics argue it leans heavily towards treatment rather than prevention. Health economist Ghanashyam Gautam puts it plainly: investing in prevention would be beneficial for both health and the economy. The root causes – shifting lifestyles, poor diet, physical inactivity – remain largely unaddressed.
Chaulagain illustrates the human cost through individual stories. The first is that of Hastimaya Limbu, a 55-year-old woman from Jhapa. After her husband disappeared, she was left solely responsible for her daughters and travelled to Oman for employment as a domestic worker. The conditions were gruelling; working from dawn until midnight, cooking, cleaning, and doing laundry, barely pausing even for water or bathroom breaks in the extreme heat. The relentless pace gradually wore her down – persistent back pain, vomiting, and loss of appetite followed. After collapsing, she was rushed to hospital, where she was told that both kidneys had failed entirely. She eventually underwent a successful transplant, but total treatment expenses reached 6 million NPR (£29,000 / $39,000), and she continues to spend 15,000 NPR (£70 / $100) on medication every month. “Now I have to depend on others just to survive,” she says.
Limbu’s story is far from unique. Rambahadu Tamang, a 52-year-old porter living alone in Kathmandu, supported his family on daily wages. With little time or inclination to cook, he relied on cheap market food – fried snacks, momos, chowmein, and samosas. “It was those habits that destroyed my kidneys,” he reflects. Years of fatigue and kidney swelling eventually culminated in organ failure. His son donated a kidney and the transplant operation was a medical success – but the financial toll was devastating. Although the government contributed 500,000 NPR (£2,400 / $3,200) towards costs, it fell well short of what was needed. “We had to sell our land and property to pay for treatment,” he told Online Khabar.
These are not isolated cases. Government data reveals the true scale of the problem: under the Deprived Citizens Medicine Treatment Programme, patient numbers and costs have both more than doubled over five years. For ordinary Nepalis forced into out-of-pocket expenditure, the burden is crushing. Over 500,000 citizens are pushed below the poverty line each year due to healthcare costs alone.
Experts are clear that around 80 per cent of NCD risk factors lie outside the health sector and are rooted in environmental pollution, pesticide use, and the food industry. Meaningful progress requires coordinated action across government, not just health services. Above all, prevention must begin early. Specialists agree that education about smoking, alcohol, and diet needs to start at school level, before harmful habits take hold. Without a decisive shift from disease treatment to prevention the epidemic looks set to deepen.
The original article ‘नसर्ने रोगको महामारी : उपचार खर्चले सडकमै पुग्छन् नागरिक’ by Pushparaj Chaulagain was first published in Nepali by Online Khabar on 31 March 2026.
It is available here.
Online Khabar is Nepal’s leading digital news portal, covering politics, health, business, and society. Its tagline is “No. 1 News Portal from Nepal”.
Summary by TMH
End of the line for Kyrgyzstan’s women drivers
A journalist set out to profile the women trolleybus drivers of Bishkek. What she found was a means of transport – and way of life – on the brink of collapse
A report in the Polish magazine Pismo begins as a portrait of a single female trolleybus driver in Kyrgyzstan and becomes something much bigger. This is a story about not only the dismantling of an urban transport system but also the continued aftershocks of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Journalist Emilia Sułek follows Guljan Kurbanova, a 48-year-old in Bishkek, who is easy to spot in her high-visibility vest as she drives her trolley through the streets of the Central Asian capital. Like many Kyrgyz citizens, Kurbanova spent years working abroad – in her case in Moscow – before returning home, where she retrained as a transport worker. Driving had long been her ambition, despite resistance from male relatives. Eventually she enrolled in a Bishkek technical school, joining a profession in which women are in fact unusually well represented.
When Sułek visits the school, she is told in no uncertain terms that trolleybus driving is not thought of as “women’s work” because it is easy or automatic. One teacher explains: “Women in Kyrgyzstan are ambitious and have always wanted equal rights.” And in the USSR it was women who, in the teacher’s words, “colonised” trolleybuses.
The training itself is demanding. Students – often juggling jobs and family responsibilities – learn electrical engineering, safety procedures, and the mechanics of vehicles that must be controlled both on the road and via overhead power lines. Whatever the demands, though, this is stable employment in a country where jobs are scarce.
Or at least it was. By the time Sułek starts reporting, rumours are already circulating that the city is planning to dismantle the entire trolleybus network. Within weeks, those fears prove justified.
Bishkek’s authorities announce the gradual closure of all lines, arguing that trolleybuses are outdated and too expensive to maintain. Passenger numbers have declined, officials say, and the system covers only a small portion of the rapidly expanding city.
Behind these controversial arguments lies a broader transformation.
The practical maintenance of the trolleybus network relied on cooperation between former Soviet Republics, Sułek points out.
She writes: “Trolza, a Russian trolleybus manufacturer from Saratov [in southern Russia], declared bankruptcy in 2017 ... Electronics were once purchased in Kharkiv, Ukraine. An entire empire contributed to the success of the trolleybus. But that empire is gone; a full-scale war is raging in Ukraine, so Bishkek won’t buy anything from Kharkiv for now. And the rolling stock is aging.”
Elena Sadunova, one of the final students in the technical school, says that shift is not only practical.
“The USSR had engineers, technology, and money, but above all, a goal: to create transportation solutions that serve people,” she tells the reporter. “Today, the government doesn’t care about public transportation. Let everyone take their own children to school, commute to work. The car lobby is behind it. This is what capitalism looks like.”
City authorities present electric buses as the future. But critics are unconvinced. Activists argue that replacing trolleybuses rather than modernising them is short-sighted, especially in a city struggling with air pollution. They also question the transparency of the decision-making process.
“The situation is murky,” says one activist. “The city is taking out a loan from a Chinese bank to purchase buses manufactured in China. The bank is paying for the expert’s analysis of why the fleet replacement is necessary. This should alarm everyone. Such an analysis can’t be neutral, after all.”
Fear of dependence on China runs deep in Kyrgyzstan, according to the report. Their shared border stretches over a thousand kilometers, and Bishkek’s public debt to Beijing reached $4 billion at the beginning of 2024.
But protests against these electric buses from China are hampered by political repression at home. Even among transport workers, action is limited by fear of losing what are now precarious jobs.
Meanwhile, the dismantling proceeds – sometimes literally overnight, when crews cut cables. The longer the journalist stays in the city, the greater the sense of inevitability grows: even those who oppose the closures start to concede the system may be beyond saving.
Against this political backdrop, the article returns to the drivers themselves. Women like Irina, with three decades of experience, who cannot imagine another career; or Begimai, who takes pride in the discipline and independence the job offers. They describe trolleybus driving as skilled work requiring patience, composure, and responsibility for passengers’ safety.
By the end of the report, the transition is complete. Bishkek’s last trolleybus line is shut down. Workers disperse: some find new roles, others struggle. Teachers from the technical school relocate. A Soviet-era, female-dominated profession reaches the end of the line.
The original article ‘Trolejbus w Kirgistanie to kobieca sprawa’ by Emilia Sułek was first published in Polish on 3 December, 2025.
It is available here.
Pismo is a monthly magazine focused on long-form reporting that was first published in Poland in 2018.
Translator Issue #3 is available now!
Inside, you’ll find stories from across the world: a Korean middle school on the political frontline, the world of gaming in 1980s Hungary, the fragile ecology (and mystery) of eels in northern Italy, the culture of shamans on the border of China and Vietnam, a searing investigation into Romania’s aesthetic gynaecology industry and Translator’s original Street Talks give voice to hyperlocal stories from Tehran, Karachi, Kyoto, Gaza and Bangalore – all illustrated by artists from around the world.
Plus: Abdul Bacet’s photo essay on Babur’s Gardens in Kabul, an interview with Abeera Kamran and Zeerak Ahmed on digitising the Urdu script, a multilingual crossword, and reviews of Polly Barton’s debut novel and Alexander Voloshin’s migration memoir.
