When touring the streets of Damascus, the pale faces and frail bodies of Syrians tell a tale of how a decade of civil war coupled with a strangling economic crisis left the Syrian capital lost and in dismay.
Shop owners, especially butchers, can be seen standing in agonized silence in front of their stores, evidently broken up about the country’s currency hitting record lows and ever diminishing the buying power of their customers.
With the crash of the local currency, prices at shops have been hiked almost every day.
Overnight, the price tag on a kilo of bananas jumped from 2,500 pounds to 3,500 pounds. According to UN estimates, every nine in ten Syrians now are living under the poverty line.
Reflecting devastation in a country that has gone down the tubes economically, a skinny frail woman standing near the historical Abbassiyyin Square in Damascus can be seen yelling “we want to eat” at the top of her lungs.
Not even children are being spared the turmoil. A young girl, aged no more than five, is spending her days roaming the streets alone near the capital’s St. Louis Hospital.
When asked about her parents, she simply replies with “I don’t have any.”
The scene of hordes of Syrians shouting for a spot on public buses also echoes the dire daily struggles of living in the war-torn country.
Faced with a currency that sheds more of its value by the day, shopkeepers in the capital are unable to decide on a price tag for basic commodities. Items like clothes, shoes, and house appliances have become too expensive to buy.
A couple visiting the market can be seen quarreling over one of them wanting to simply ask about the cost of a pair of shoes for their mother.
On a close-by sidewalk, a mother breaks a loaf of subsidized bread in half. As she hands one of the halves to her son, she sternly reminds him that it was his share for the day.
Reaching out for the portion, the starving child bites into the loaf and says “I know.”
Food insecurity, today, affects thousands of Syrian children.
Two elementary students in the playground can be overheard complaining to each other about how there is not enough food back home.
“We don’t have food at home,” one of the kids tells their friend, adding that their stomach is always half empty after finishing their daily meal.
