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Everything’s shutting down around me and we’re all suffering from depression and anxiety,” Mawla says. In a crisis that has touched every corner of people’s lives, Mawla and her colleagues wonder how long they can continue. The collapse has also fuelled a black market for electricity, petrol, and medicine. People can no longer access basic services while items such as staple foods have become unaffordable. Lebanon today faces one of the world’s worst economic crises in 150 years, which has pushed millions into poverty. With a breakdown of the financial and banking systems since 2019, decades of rampant corruption, and the coronavirus pandemic – the health sector is just one of many that has collapsed. In today’s Lebanon, hospitals tell patients to bring their own drugs and turn others away due to lack of supplies, equipment, and even staff. Until a few years ago, Lebanon was a leading provider of medical care in the Arab world with people coming to Beirut for plastic surgery in particular. “We have to ration drugs and spend our time looking for painkillers and aspirin.” “Things like syringes and tissues run out,” says Salem al-Akoum, a clinical nursing supervisor at RHUH. Patients wait on benches in a hallway of the Rafik Hariri University Hospital in the Lebanese capital, Beirut He passed away,” says Mawla, her voice shaking. “A 23-year-old came into the COVID ward the other day with an infection. She regularly finds herself unable to provide simple treatment for patients due to medicine and equipment shortages.
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Like most of her colleagues, she sleeps at the hospital and only goes home every two or three days.
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She looks tired as she flips through patient notes. With colleagues unable to get to work due to the fuel shortages, 10-15 percent of staff are absent from each shift, and Mawla finds herself caring for three times as many patients as she used to. Many hospitals across Lebanon have turned off lights and air conditioners in corridors and administrative areas to save on fuel for generators for operating rooms and patient wards. Lebanese wait in a queue outside a closed petrol station in Beirut’s Hamra district ‘Everything’s shutting down’īack at the hospital, the young medic walks down a dim, humid corridor towards the coronavirus ward where she cares for dozens of patients. “A trip to fill petrol is a gamble,” says Mawla, brushing thick black hair from her damp forehead. Many times, things get tense,” she says, referring to explosions, shootings and fights that break out frequently at stations across the country.
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“It takes eight to nine hours to get the job done. While one cares for patients on the ward, another fills their tank. With Lebanon facing worsening fuel shortages, the 27-year-old resident doctor takes turns with her hospital colleagues to refuel their cars. Lebanese army soldiers organise the lines but fail to keep people’s tempers from flaring. It is nearly midday, but she has been queueing since 4am to fill her tank before rushing back to work at Rafik Hariri University Hospital (RHUH) – the country’s largest public hospital and leading coronavirus treatment facility.ĭozens of cars are parked in front of Mawla, while behind her even more stretch for half a kilometre. Beirut, Lebanon – Zeinab Mawla wipes the sweat off her upper lip as she sits behind the wheel of her car in the blistering September heat, waiting for her turn at a petrol station in Jnah, a district in the south of Lebanon’s capital.