Most Syrians now devote their days to finding fuel to cook and heat their homes and to standing in long lines for rationed Arab bread. Power shortages are constant, with some areas receiving only a few hours of electricity a day, just enough for people to keep their cell phones charged.
Desperate women started selling their hair to feed their families.
“I had to sell my hair or my body,” a mother of three recently said at a hairdresser near Damascus, speaking on condition of anonymity, like others interviewed for this article, for fear of arrest.
Her husband, a carpenter, was ill and only sporadically employed, she said, and she needed heating oil for the house and winter jackets for the children.
With the $ 55 she earned for her hair, which will be used to make wigs, she bought two gallons of heating oil, clothes for her children and a roast chicken, the first that her family tasted in three months.
She cried with shame for two days later.
The falling currency means that doctors now earn the equivalent of less than $ 50 a month. The head of the doctors’ union recently said that many are going to work abroad, Sudan and Somalia, among the rare countries that allow Syrians to enter easily but none of whom have a strong economy. Other professionals earn much less.
“People’s concern, more than anything else, is food and fuel,” said a musician from Damascus. “Everything is abnormally expensive and people are afraid to open their mouths.”
The causes are multiple and overlapping: widespread damage and displacement of war; covering Western sanctions against the government of al-Assad and his associates; a bank collapse in neighboring Lebanon, where wealthy Syrians kept their money; and blocks to fight the coronavirus.