On September 24th the 3rd Mediterranean Music Therapy Meeting took place in Padua, a conference organized by the “Giovanni Ferrari” music therapy school of Padua, in which music therapy professionals from the Mediterranean area met to discuss the topic “musical spaces in music therapy, between the analog and digital world“.

Alberto Balducci of Music & Resilience was invited to speak at the conference, where he presented a speech entitled “Did COVID matter for Palestinian refugees in Lebanon?“. In his speech, Alberto introduced the Music & Resilience project and summarized the history of the Palestinian refugee community in Lebanon, describing its current situation and the activities carried out by M&R in 2021-2022, highlighting the use of the internet as a tool to maintain and strengthen human and musical bonds when it was not possible to travel due to the pandemic.

Alberto also invited the audience to reflect on the meaning of isolation, lack of resources, confinement in small spaces, situations of high toxic stress, etc. that shaped our lives during the lockdown due to the COVID-19 epidemic and how they can in fact be compared, to some extent, to the daily living conditions in the Palestinian refugee community (with the notable difference that the current situation in the camps has been going on for 74 years). From a personal point of view, for Alberto the experiences lived over the years with his Palestinian friends in the M&R project were fundamental to fully understand (and therefore also to face) the situation of the 2020 and 2021 lockdowns: the Palestinian community in Lebanon has been a great teacher of resilience for all of us.