SANAA, Sept. 7 (Xinhua) -- Mohammed Mohsen, a 13-year-old Yemeni boy, washes cars from early morning to the sunset in Yemen's capital Sanaa to earn a little money for food.
His two younger brothers help him clean the cars' windows with soap and polish with wet cloth, to earn a living and support their family.
The three brothers are primary school students, but turned to washing cars after their family plunged into heavy debts due to the ongoing civil war and economic blockade.
Their father Mohsen, like many other government employees, has been left unpaid since September 2016, when the Central Bank was shifted from Sanaa to the government-controlled southern port city of Aden, which caused the stop of salary payments to over one million public sector employees, and halting remittances and disrupting imports.
He turned to daily-wage work which was not enough to afford the house rent. The continuing economic hardship has deepened the suffering of the family and many other families in the northern cities.
The father borrowed more money to start a small car-wash business in May. He bought a small water pump, a small water tank and installed them on a street corner near their home.
His three young children work on the car-wash project, while he continues to work for a daily wage elsewhere.
The five-year-long civil war and the de facto blockade have caused the economy of the impoverished country to collapse, leaving many families with no much choice.
"We are not like other children who go to play and enjoy at the parks, we should work to buy food for our family," the middle brother Mukhtar, 10, told Xinhua.
Likewise, many other children turned into the cheap child labor after the country slid into civil war.
The war broke out in late 2014, when the Iran-backed Houthi group seized control of much of the country's north and forced the internationally recognized government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi out of the capital Sanaa. The Saudi-led military coalition intervened in the Yemen conflict in the following year to support Hadi's government.
The war has destroyed the country's infrastructure and targeted many vital industries, damaging businesses, causing the loss of thousands of jobs and leaving millions of families struggling to survive.
The economic blockade since 2015 has caused prices of food, medicine and fuel to skyrocket.
The World Food Program says over 20 million Yemenis become food insecure, warning that current level hunger in the war-torn Yemen has reached "unprecedented" level.
Many families in Yemen are no longer able to afford one meal a day, said the organization.
The conflict left nearly 80 percent of the country's malnourished population rely on foreign humanitarian aid, triggering what the UN describes as the biggest humanitarian crisis in the world.
Mohammed said that he helped his father buying food, water, medicine and other family's needs, adding that he would try to help pay the house rent this month.
"However, we are facing a problem," he said in a choking voice. "The people my father borrowed money from asked him to pay off the debt, or we would lose the project." Enditem
