For the past two days, I have been suffering from a severe headache, sinus congestion, a fever that at times approaches forty degrees Celsius, and a dry cough. There is also a heavy ache in my limbs that prevents me from carrying out even the simplest tasks.

I am not alone in this condition. I was the last in my family to fall ill, after my wife and children.

Hardly anyone in the camp is free of these symptoms. Everyone is sneezing, everyone is coughing, and everyone is utterly exhausted.

You go to medical points and cannot find even a single paracetamol tablet to ease the severity of these symptoms. You go to private pharmacies, and they charge the price of an entire box—before the war—for just one pill.

The pharmacist swears that his profit from this medicine amounts to only a few coins, and I tend to believe him. The condition is widespread, the prices are insane, and the real thief of medicine seems to be a single person who has monopolized the market.

I read a statement by one doctor saying that there is a strange virus spreading aggressively among the population.

Meanwhile, the doors are wide open to all kinds of chocolate, sweets, and candies—of every type and color—things that do not suit the city’s very dark mood.

An equation that is hard to understand, yet it exists.
You are forced to deal with it as it is: if you want to ease the symptoms you are suffering from, you must pay a pile of money and not ask how, why, or where it goes.

We are not asking for luxury, nor for complex treatment. We are only asking for what is enough to lower a fever, calm a headache, and give the body a small chance to hold itself together in the face of this general exhaustion.

O God, grant healing to this city afflicted by the disease of war.