Sri Lanka crisis: Daily heartbreak of life in a country gone bankrupt

• As rupee’s value dropped, the cost of food, cooking gas, clothes, travel, and energy skyrocketed.
• Middle- and upper-class people donated lunch packets and soft drinks to those in line.
• Lower-middle and working-class Americans are hardest hit by the recession.

Before you wake up in Sri Lanka, you’re losing.

Power cuts late into the scorching nights steal hours of sleep as the fans stop; whole families wake up drained after months of continuous blackouts after the government went bankrupt and ran out of fuel.

Work days, errands, and everyday basics are twice as expensive as last month.

You’re more broken than last week after all this.

After having less or no breakfast, the battle to get transportation begins.

In cities, gasoline lines snake around suburbs like metal pythons, clogging highways and destroying livelihoods.

Tuk-tuk drivers with eight-litre tanks must line up for days before they can run hires again. They pack cushions, clothes, and water to help them through the hardship.

Middle- and upper-class people donated lunch packets and soft drinks to those in line.

As the rupee’s value dropped, the cost of food, cooking gas, clothes, travel, and even what the state allows for energy skyrocketed so egregiously that even largesse from the wealthy has been scarce.

Families in working-class neighbourhoods gather around wood fire stoves to cook rice and coconut sambol.

Even dhal, a South Asian staple, is a luxury. Meat? Price tripled? Nevermind.

Once, fresh fish was cheap. No diesel means boats can’t leave port. Those that can fish sell their catch to hotels and restaurants at inflated prices.

Also Read

As the economy crumbles, Sri Lankans resume using firewood for cooking

More than 1,000 kitchens exploded across Sri Lanka this year, killing at...

Most Sri Lankan youngsters eat almost no protein. This crisis is macroeconomic to molecular.

Brains, organs, muscles, and bones of children getting enough? Imported milk powder has been scarce for months.

The UN warns of famine and malnutrition. For many, the crisis has lasted months.

Those who can obtain transportation take overcrowded buses and trains.

Young men clutch on footboards as the crowd within struggles for oxygen.

Sri Lanka’s richer people have complained for decades about bus and trishaw drivers’ indiscipline.

Many believe that the political and financial elites’ hatred for common people has brought the country to its knees. Lower-middle and working-class Americans are hardest hit by the recession.

Private hospitals still operate, albeit less well. In North Central Anuradhapura, a 16-year-old snakebite victim died while his father searched for anti-venom at pharmacies.

Many lifesaving drugs are unaffordable. Jaundiced 2-day-old died in May because her parents couldn’t get a trishaw.

Economists say the substantial tax cuts of 2019 – advocated for and cheered on by corporate and professional groups – helped empty Sri Lanka’s coffers and bring the nation to the verge.

On the black market, fuel for private vehicles and home generators can be bought at inflated costs.

Lower-income folks can’t afford bicycles to get to work because of the exchange rate.

It was the worst power cut that sparked Colombo’s March demonstrations. In the hottest weeks of the year, 13-hour daily outages drained a nation.

Fatigue prompted considerable anger, and thousands converged on the president’s Colombo neighbourhood.

This was one of the year’s most intense protests. A man in a motorcycle helmet railed against the political powers, clergy, and media that gave the nation the most self-serving and ineffective government in history.

Later, police battered and arrested Sudara Nadeesh, along with dozens of others.

Sri Lanka has never had a president so connected to the military as former defence secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa.

The south has learned in recent months what northerners have known for decades: governmental brutality meets protest.

In recent months, live bullets and tear gas have been fired indiscriminately at primarily nonviolent demonstrators including children. Mild discontent in essentials lines has led to savage beatings.

As demonstrators have died or been hospitalised, the police response has been perceived as outrageously disproportionate.

Politicians display photographs of public hardship and plead for change on social media. This has increased indignation. Were politicians not responsible?

While widespread rallies have demanded for the president and his cohort’s dismissal, they stay obstinately in position, their disdain for the public’s will obvious in backroom dealings that many say poison the island’s politics.

The same officials accused of plunging Sri Lanka into this canyon say they can get it out, although their policies are criticised.

Sri Lankans are being encouraged to work as housemaids, drivers, and mechanics in the Middle East and send their profits home.

Many of Sri Lanka’s most vulnerable residents may be compelled to leave their families for countries with minimal protections and little agency. “The vampire state,” one online anthropologist called Sri Lanka.

By nighttime, you’re exhausted from Sri Lanka’s turmoil. The daily operation of a business has become a continual bombardment of crises, with supply chains breaking, customers refusing to spend on anything except essentials, and personnel not showing up.

Then late-night power cuts return, and you eat lighter evening meals each week, unable to buy enough food, unable to cook what you’ve bought, unable to give your parents their medication or your children an education.

Fuel shortages have closed schools. Third year online.

The government fails to give what it promises, relatives and neighbours seek for money you don’t have, the police and military crush what little hope exists, yet you’re still grateful since many have it worse.

A lady and her two kids jumped into a river last week.

Daily heartache.

Also Read

Sri Lanka president asks Russia’s Vladimir Putin for help to buy fuel

Sri Lanka is experiencing its greatest economic crisis in more than 70...