At daybreak, several passing trucks stopped outside the new gathering point to recruit workers.
Unloading flour, carrying medicine crates, clearing collapsed houses.
The pay was low, and sometimes meals were not even included, but the men here still crowded over.
Having work was better than having none.
A wounded man on crutches also tried to climb aboard, but the driver glanced at his leg and waved him off.
He stood behind the truck in its dust for a long while, then finally tucked his crutches under his arms and went to the shoe repair stall at the street corner. If he could not carry things, he could watch someone's stall.
Several women left their children with Lylla.
Some went to wash pots at the flatbread shop, while others sorted water-damaged medicine boxes for the pharmacy. Another woman waited outside the tailor's until noon before finally getting a dress that needed its seams unpicked and resewn.
Now that the roads were passable, there was a little more work.
As for just how much, that depended on how many trucks passed that day, whether the bosses were willing to pay, and when the shells came down.
There was a war here. A bad economy was inevitable.
But people still had to live. Three vegetable dishes and two meat dishes made a meal, and so did a flatbread.
Survive first.
By afternoon, those left at the school were mostly the elderly, children, the sick, and people too badly wounded to leave their beds.
Hamid sat outside a classroom changing dressings. Lylla put the few payments they had received at noon into the tin box, counted them, then counted them again.
Medicine.
Flour.
Diesel.
They needed all three.
Whichever one they spent the money on, the other two would have to stay on credit.