"Those who used to dance and sing now fire bombs"

Ali gets out of the car and looks around confused. A group of women walk up and lead her across the street. She sits on the curb and stares straight into the air.

In front of her are rows of suitcases. I ask if she knew where she was going. She shakes her head and says she thought she would go shopping.

For the past three years, she has worked as a maid for a Lebanese family. Cooked their food, cleaned their house and looked after their children. But now they have sent her here, to the Ethiopian embassy in Beirut. Or "dumped her like a garbage" as the Ethiopian women I meet here describe it.

They have all been abandoned by employers who can no longer pay their salaries. They are not welcome to the embassy itself. So they sleep outside hoping to get what they want most of all: help travel home.

"In Lebanon, there is nothing to stay for longer," says Taseh, who is lying on the ground trying to wipe flies off with a twig. Around the wrist, she has wrapped a ribbon in the colors of the Ethiopian flag.

Now and then a new pink suitcase rolls over the asphalt. Lebanon's guest workers are among those most severely affected by the economic crisis that, even before the corona pandemic, was worse than any Lebanese today.

In recent months, the pace of decay has increased. The streets are now bordered by empty shop windows and rebuilt shops. Every morning outside the bank offices, people queue up to try to save savings that will soon be worth nothing.

But the banks have imposed restrictions on how much of their own money they can withdraw. The state is bankrupt and wants to keep the smallest amount.

The prices in the grocery stores cause many customers to turn in the door and on social media there are those who have started trading barter. In Lebanon 2020, "can I exchange some glasses for a packet of sugar?" no strange question.

The crisis affects almost everyone. Those of my neighbors who used to be counted on the country's middle class now eat lentils and potatoes for dinner instead of meat and fish. Those who were already poor I see digging in the garbage. The electricity comes as often as the used extinguisher.

In the country's streets and trains, anger grows in line with desperation. The joy and hope of change that characterized the protests last fall has been transformed into resignation and frustration. Protesters who used to dance and sing songs about the country's corrupt political elite, I can now see fire bombs against armored banks.

The figures say something about why. In recent months, the currency has lost almost all of its value. The minimum wage in Lebanon is now worth the equivalent of SEK 700. Maids from Ethiopia, who had worked for slave wages before, receive a maximum of 300.

In Lebanon, the crisis is too much. So outside the Ethiopian Embassy, ​​the piles of suitcases continue to grow.