Most Syrians spend their days getting fuel to cook and heat their homes, and to stand in long lines for rationed pita. The shortage of power is constant, and some areas only get a few hours of electricity a day, barely enough for people to charge their cell phones.
Desperate women decided to sell their hair to feed their families.
“I had to sell my hair or my body,” a mother of three recently said in a hair salon near Damascus, speaking of anonymity, like others interviewed in this article, for fear of arrest.
Her husband, a carpenter, was ill and employed only sporadically, and she needed heating oil for the house and winter coats for her children.
With the $ 55 she got for her hair, which will be used to make wigs, she bought two liters of fuel oil, clothes for her children and a fried chicken, the first that her family tasted in three months.
She then cried for two days in shame.
The declining currency means doctors are now earning less than $ 50 a month. The head of the doctors’ syndicate recently said that many jobs go to Sudan and Somalia, among the rare countries that the Syrians easily allow, but none of them have a strong economy. Other professionals earn much less.
“People’s concern is more than anything else food and fuel,” said a Damascus musician. “Everything is extremely expensive and people are afraid to open their mouths.”
The causes are multiple and overlapping: widespread damage and displacement due to the war; Western sanctions against the government and associates of Mr. Al-Assad vee; a bank collapse in neighboring Lebanon, where rich Syrians keep their money; and lock up to fight the coronavirus.