'Last summer, I received my first payment from an American magazine for documenting what we were going through. It was $150, though after transfer fees were deducted I got $135. It was near the end of the month, and my father, who is employed by the Palestinian Authority, only gets paid every fifty days. I went to a cash broker to convert the digital currency into money that I could spend. The commission was nearly 40 per cent. I came away with less than $84 in cash. We were living through the hardest days of war and famine, down to our last bag of flour and some lentil soup. The air in our small tent felt heavy, as if hunger were sitting with us. Converting my $150 payment into ready money had already reduced it nearly by half, but on my way to the market I imagined all the food I could buy for my family with the $84 I had in my pocket. When I got there, the market was almost empty. The cheapest flour I could find was $55 per kilo. I couldn’t refuse. My family was starving. I had to buy whatever I could.'
‘Last summer, I received my first payment from an American magazine for documenting what we were going through. It was $150.’
Hassan Ayman Herzallah:
www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ap...
