What We Carry Back from the Field
Sarah Kurdi is an Infant and Young Child Feeding in Emergencies (IYCF-E) specialist with Action Against Hunger in Lebanon. In southern Lebanon, supporting displaced families means confronting the fragile line between professional duty and personal fear.
Every morning, before leaving for work, I hug my children.
It is an ordinary gesture. Parents do it without thinking. But in Lebanon today, ordinary gestures can carry an extraordinary weight.
I leave home to work in southern Lebanon, where I visit displaced families, support mothers and caregivers, assess infant and young child feeding needs, and refer children and families requiring specialized assistance.
A life rebuilt in a classroom
Tents appear wherever there is space. Families gather in collective shelters. Cars become temporary places to sleep. Damaged buildings stand alongside functioning neighbourhoods, making destruction part of the landscape.
Then sometimes there is an image that seems almost impossible in such surroundings: a mother breastfeeding her baby.
There is nothing dramatic about the act itself. That is precisely what makes it powerful. She is feeding her child, maintaining a routine and creating a moment of care in a place where almost everything familiar has disappeared.
A classroom becomes a family living space. Cardboard boxes become cupboards. Blankets are spread across floors so children can play. Clothes are washed in bathroom sinks. Mothers improvise storage, sleeping arrangements and meals with whatever is available.
These are not simply coping mechanisms. They are attempts to preserve dignity.
The cost of feeding a child
Infant and young child feeding is never only about food.
For a displaced mother, feeding a baby may mean finding a safe place to breastfeed, maintaining a routine in a crowded environment, accessing reliable information, or finding the means to meet a child's nutritional needs when household income has disappeared.
I remember one mother caring alone for five children: triplets with disabilities and twins under two years old. During displacement, she broke her leg. She was living in a collective shelter with little financial or emotional support. Her needs were immediate: diapers, infant feeding support, and assistance caring for her children.
Displacement does not create vulnerability from nothing. It magnifies what was already fragile.
In humanitarian work, food is often discussed through quantities, distributions and nutritional indicators. In a shelter, its meaning is much more immediate. For some families, a meal being served may be their only reliable food that day. For a child, repeated inadequate meals are not an inconvenience. They can become a nutritional risk. For a mother, not knowing whether she can provide enough food can become another source of anxiety in an environment already defined by uncertainty.
We can identify a need, provide counselling, advocate, refer and coordinate with other services. But no individual intervention can resolve every problem when families are living without stable income, secure housing or reliable access to essential needs.
The sound of uncertainty
The field is also places of sound.
Aircraft and drones pass overhead. An explosion can interrupt a conversation. For a few seconds, there may be no way of knowing exactly what has happened. Then ambulance sirens begin moving towards an affected area.
Inside, another soundtrack takes over: babies crying, adults talking, children calling to one another, people negotiating the practical difficulties of living in close quarters.
Families have little privacy, and the pressure of displacement can turn small problems into serious ones. Exhaustion shortens tempers. Financial pressure adds to frustration. The absence of a clear future makes every difficulty harder to absorb.
The sentence that returns
Despite the complexity of their circumstances, the concerns families express are remarkably consistent.
Food. Healthcare. Money. Their children's future. Their homes. And then comes the sentence I hear repeatedly: “I just want to go home.”
Going home is not only about returning to a physical building. It means recovering privacy, stability, income, routine and the feeling that one's life belongs to oneself again.
Some people follow the sentence with another: “We used to live with dignity. We don't deserve this.”
Children understand more than we think
Children respond differently.
When humanitarian teams arrive, they often approach first. They want to play, show us what they have found, and talk about their homes, friends and what they remember from before displacement.
Their ability to play can be mistaken for evidence that they are unaffected.
It is not.
Play is one of the ways children continue to be children when everything around them has changed. A child can laugh and still be frightened, run across a schoolyard and still miss home, or become absorbed in a game while adults discuss whether they will have to move again.
Watching them play is both reassuring and unsettling. It is a reminder of resilience, but also of how much children are being asked to carry.
The limits of helping
An elderly person asking for medication. A mother explaining what her child needs when you already know that the available services cannot cover everything.
The hardest professional skill is sometimes accepting that you cannot solve the problem in front of you.
But you can return the next day.
That gap between what a family needs and what can immediately be provided is one of the most painful realities of humanitarian work.
And yet, the field is not defined only by what is missing.
Families share food with others. People look after neighbours they barely knew before displacement. Mothers help one another with their children. New babies arrive into shelters. Children find reasons to laugh.
Even under extraordinary pressure, people continue to create relationships, routines and meaning.
After the ceasefire
A ceasefire does not instantly reverse the consequences of conflict.
For families who have been displaced, the announcement does not necessarily mean a return home. Some homes are damaged or no longer safe. Some families have lost their livelihoods. Others remain uncertain about whether the security situation will hold.
The bags remain packed.
The uncertainty remains.
What comes home with you
At the end of a field visit, I return to my own life.
There is a house waiting for me. There is food. There is a bed. There are my children.
And that return can be difficult.
Not because I do not want to come home, but because home makes the contrast impossible to ignore.
The families I meet are not fundamentally different from mine. They worry about their children. They want to protect them. They want enough food. They want to sleep safely. They want to return to the lives they recognize.
The difference is that many of them no longer know when—or whether—they will be able to do so.
This is what I carry back from the field.
Before I leave each morning, I hug my children.
Sometimes I wonder whether it could be the last time I see them.
I do not say this to dramatize what we live through. I say it because this is what conflict does. It reaches beyond the people directly caught in violence. It changes how parents think, how children grow up, how communities function, and how ordinary moments are understood.
For the families I meet, the wish is not complicated.
They want their children to be safe.
They want to feed them.
They want to live with dignity.
They want to go home.
And, after another day in the field, I find myself wanting the same thing—not only for them, but for all of us.
A life in which leaving home for work does not begin with the question of whether you will make it back.
