In a workshop in Lebanon, Oum Omar remembers the not so distant time when his seamstresses made school uniforms and holiday clothes. Today, leaning over their machine, they make body bags for victims of the coronavirus.
Since the start of the pandemic, the small country of six million inhabitants has recorded more than 343,000 cases of Covid-19, including 4,092 deaths. Records were broken again at the start of the year, with daily deaths sometimes approaching a hundred.
“Before, we sewed festive clothes, outfits for pilgrims or school uniforms. We brought joy to the hearts”, regrets Oum Omar, 53 years old including 27 working in this sewing workshop in Saïda, city of South.
“Now we are forced to do this work,” says the one who supervises the workshop. “We have gone from joy to sadness”.
Around her, under the pale neon light, seamstresses with their faces protected by a sanitary mask are busy assembling black body bags under the needle of their sewing machines. They do about twenty a day.
Their finished product looks like protective clothing covers. But it is used to transport the bodies of people who have succumbed to the coronavirus.
– Market need –
With the jerky hum of sewing machines in the background, a young man uses a yellow wooden ruler to chalk out measurements on the rough black fabric spread out on a table.
On some unused machines, colored coils – blue, green, gray – are still in place.
“It costs us psychologically to do this work” but we must respond “to the current market need”, continues Oum Omar. The rise in “deaths has led to an increase in demand.”
The surge in coronavirus cases in January was largely due to the relaxation of restrictions during the holiday season but also to the spread of more contagious variants.
The arrival of the pandemic a year ago in Lebanon has turned the activity of several workshops upside down. Seamstresses have also started making uniforms for medical personnel or for hospital patients, as well as protective fabric masks.
After receiving its first doses of the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine, Lebanon began its vaccination campaign on Sunday with the goal of immunizing more than half of the population by the end of 2021.
Oum Omar hopes that this dark page will be turned quickly so that his seamstresses find their “usual job” and that people can “breathe a little”.
But, she warns, “they will have to be more careful, otherwise we will be forced to return to this kind of stitching.”
–
