Managing Public Health in a Fragile Consociation: Lebanon between Wars, Explosions and the Covid-19 Pandemic

ABSTRACT

Shortly after the 2006 Hezbollah-Israel war, I organized fundraisers at Kent University in the U.K. — then my employer — and in my hometown of Sicily. Back then, I enjoyed frequent exchanges with the people in a Christian enclave bordering Israel with whom I resided during that war (Mollica 2014a). I received a receipt and a letter of gratitude in acknowledgement of the money transfers that I had made to the municipality. The receipt detailed all the municipally-purchased medicines from a pharmacy of a nearby town. During the war, gathering medicines was a major problem. Indeed, one of the last photographs I took just before my evacuation was of the then deputy mayor, who was drafting a list of medicines that were needed in the village. He then organized a car trip to a nearby village where there was a pharmacy, of course having alerted Unifil (United Nations Interim Forces in Lebanon), the Idf (Israeli Defense Forces) and Hezbollah © 2022. Urbanities