What Conflict Taught Me About Listening

Fatima Salman is an Infant and Young Child Feeding in Emergencies (IYCF-E) specialist at Action Against Hunger Lebanon mission.

The brief was straightforward: assess infant and young child feeding practices, provide nutrition counselling, identify risks, and connect families with the support they needed.
But humanitarian work in conflict rarely follows the questions you arrive with.
I remember returning to see Sarah a few weeks after we first met. Her husband was still alive when I first spoke with her, and I was happy to see her again. I expected to continue the conversation we had started.
Instead, she told me that her husband had been killed a week earlier.

I had gone to speak with her about infant feeding. Instead, she asked where she could find psychological support for her eldest son.
“He still cannot understand that his father is gone,” she told me. “He has stopped eating, and so have his siblings.”

Another mother described what life had become.
Before the conflict, she had been able to give her children the things she considered ordinary parts of childhood. Now, she gave them pieces of tape to play with because she could no longer afford toys or maintain the routines that had once structured their days.
“We eat one meal a day,” she said. “Breakfast is whatever we can find. We were never used to living like this.”
She had started allowing her children to spend more time on their phones than she wanted, simply because she was exhausted.
“I feel like I didn’t only lose my home,” she said. “I lost the strength I had to raise my children.”
I had arrived with questions about breastfeeding and nutrition. But that day, those were not the questions that mattered most.

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That conversation stayed with me because it made something clear: when people are living through conflict, a technical need rarely exists on its own.
A feeding problem can begin with displacement. A child may stop eating after losing someone they love. A mother may struggle to breastfeed because she has spent the night worrying about where her family will sleep, or because she has been moving from one place to another with no privacy, no stability, and no sense of what will happen next.
The question in front of you may be about food.
The story behind it may be about everything else.

When the Question Is Bigger Than the Intervention

I heard another story from a father who had returned to the place where his brother's family had been killed.
He had pulled his niece from beneath the rubble. She was so small that he could carry her in his arms. He found another child and placed them beside her before finding their mother.
“They were killed while I was trying to get them out,” he told me.
Then he paused.
“I am a grown man,” he said. “But in that moment, I needed someone to carry me.”
I did not know what to say.
There are no technical guidelines for that moment. No referral pathway that can undo what someone has seen. No carefully chosen sentence that can make the loss smaller.
Another mother told me she had rented a home in what she believed was a safer area, only to be forced to leave again. She moved from one place to another until she eventually stopped breastfeeding her daughter.
Before the conflict, she had exclusively breastfed her baby and had been receiving support from a lactation specialist in the south.
Then came the journey out.
Twenty-four hours on the road under bombardment.
At some point, her daughter stopped accepting the breast.
“She cried so much,” the mother told me. “The bottle became easier. But I don’t want that. I want her to breastfeed again. Can I?”
I knew how to answer the technical question. But first, I needed to understand what had happened to her.
There were other conversations I still remember.
I remember one mother I had met earlier during the conflict. Later, someone asked me, “Fatima, do you remember this mother?”
I did.
She, her child, and the family members who were with them had been killed.

A father of two children has just died in a road accident while searching for work. 
You see someone.
You listen to them.
You worry about their child.
You make a plan to see them again.
And then you learn that there will be no next visit.
Repeatedly, conversations that began with breastfeeding, nutrition, or infant care led somewhere else: to grief, displacement, fear, poverty, and the struggle to keep a family together.
At first, I was afraid of saying the wrong thing.
My previous work in pediatric intensive care had taught me that words offered with good intentions can sometimes cause more pain. A phrase intended to comfort can feel unbearable to someone who is still in the first days of grief.
But listening was not only something I had learned as a professional. I was also meeting these mothers as a mother myself. There were moments when my technical knowledge told me what support I could offer, but my own experience of motherhood changed how I wanted to approach the person in front of me. I could imagine what it meant to lose the ordinary things we often take for granted: preparing a child's food, trying to get them to eat, putting them to sleep, waking up and finding them beside you. I did not want to stand outside that reality as a specialist with an answer for everything. Sometimes, I simply wanted to meet one mother as another.
So I stopped looking for the right words.
I listened.
I listened more than I spoke. I asked questions and let people finish. I learned to sit with silence instead of immediately trying to fill it.
I began to understand that some of the people I met were not asking me to solve what had happened to them. In those moments, they seemed to need someone who could hear them without rushing them, correcting them, or trying to make their experience easier to bear.
If I had been in their place, perhaps that is what I would have needed too.

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The Importance of Ordinary Things

Somewhere between conversations about breastfeeding, food, and sleep, I began to notice that parents were often talking about something else without naming it.
Routine.
The things we barely notice when life is stable: Waking up and finding your children beside you. Kissing them. Smelling their hair. Preparing breakfast. Getting frustrated because they refuse to eat. Arguing with them because they will not go to sleep.

These are ordinary parts of family life. In conflict, they can become things people mourn.
As a mother, I recognised these things differently. They were not abstract examples of routine or family wellbeing. They were the ordinary moments that make up my own life with my children. I could imagine how frightening it would be for those things to disappear. 
Parents would tell me about their children's favourite foods, how they used to encourage them to eat, the meals they prepared, and the way everyone used to sit together around the table. They were talking about food. But they were also remembering a life that had been interrupted.
I began to see that, for many families, maintaining something as simple as a feeding routine was also an attempt to hold on to a sense of normality.
That changed the way I approached my work.
Not because the technical side of my work was unimportant. It was essential.
But because the person in front of me was more than a nutrition assessment or a breastfeeding challenge.
She was a mother who had lost her husband.
He was a father who had pulled a child from the rubble.
They were parents trying to protect their children while their own lives had become unpredictable.
I could not bring back a husband, a child, or a home.
I could not stop the conflict.
But I could stay.
I could listen.
I could leave space for a tear.
I could say, “Keep going. I’m listening.”
Sometimes, listening was all I could offer in that moment. It did not replace the technical support, referrals, or care they needed. But it changed how I approached what came next.

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What This Changed About My Work

The experience changed how I understand humanitarian care.
Nutrition is not separate from the circumstances in which people live.
It is connected to safety, housing, income, displacement, grief, and mental health. It is connected to whether a mother has somewhere safe to sleep, whether she has enough food to eat, whether she can breastfeed in privacy, and whether she feels able to protect her children.
A child who stops eating may not simply have a feeding problem.
A mother who cannot maintain breastfeeding may not simply need another instruction about lactation.
Sometimes the first thing that needs attention is everything that has happened around them.
This does not make technical support less important. It makes it more important to understand the context in which that support is being provided.
I still provide breastfeeding counselling. I still assess nutrition risks. I still make referrals and follow protocols.
But I now understand that good care also requires knowing when to pause.
Sometimes the most professional thing we can do is listen to the story that has nothing to do with the question we came to ask.
Because that story may tell us what the person actually needs

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The Stories We Carry

I am grateful to the families who trusted me enough to share these parts of their lives.
But there is one part of this work I still do not know how to carry.
I have met mothers and babies in the field, supported them, spoken with them, and made plans for follow-up. Later, I have learned that they were killed.
You see someone.
You listen to them.
You worry about their child.
You make a plan to see them again.
And then you learn that there will be no next visit.
That is one of the hardest realities of humanitarian work.
The stories do not always stay in the field. They follow you home. 
Sometimes, I look at my own children afterwards and think about what I would hope for if our places were reversed. If I were sitting in front of someone during one of the worst moments of my life, I would hope that they would be kind. 
That thought has stayed with me.
I began this work knowing that my role was to help mothers and children survive and remain healthy in emergencies.
I still believe in that work.
But conflict has taught me that care sometimes begins before the intervention. It begins when someone is willing to sit beside a person in pain and listen without looking away.
Sometimes, listening is the first form of care.