“I’m doing all types of jobs just to make ends meet,” says Giannina Fusco, a professor at the University of Carabobo, a public institution that serves tens of thousands of students mostly from central Venezuela. Teachers’ wages, the region’s lowest, have decreased by 95% since 1997 and few earn much more than $50 a month, far below a living wage.

Between January 9 and January 17 alone, teachers and professors led 400 protest marches across the country. It’s the latest in a long line of humiliations suffered by Venezuela’s educated, aspirational middle class and shows why so many millions are emigrating to pastures new.

Like many of her colleagues in Venezuela’s educated, professional middle class, Fusco has been driven to despair by low wages and terrible working conditions. She hasn’t bought clothes in two years and couldn’t pay for health insurance this year. “I’m having a hard time,” she told me. “I’m doing what I didn’t have to do when I started my career.” She describes a Venezuela in which some teachers wear shoes with holes in them, while others struggle to put nutritious, healthy food on the table. Some teachers, she told me, were moonlighting as security guards, others foraged for discarded fruits and vegetables at local street markets.

When an American NGO donated medicine to Fusco’s university, she says “around 70 professors asked for antidepressants.”