When life in a war zone tests US families

Even under the best of circumstances, holding a family together involves challenges. Imagine how much harder it is for families stationed overseas when civil and international strife breaks out, as has happened in the Middle East.

Surely the job of comforting and dealing with children means that family discussions take on complicated new dimensions.

To better understand what American aid workers and US diplomats have been through during recent evacuations from Pakistan, the Monitor talked with three families who once found themselves in similar situations to find out how they dealt with living in war-torn foreign countries.

Even with guard dogs, a high-walled compound, and a watchman (unarmed), Marge Tsitouris had a hard time sleeping at night while stationed in Somalia in the late 1980s.

Brutal heat, chaotic streets, and lack of electricity made it particularly trying for the country director of CARE, the humanitarian organization.

But when a family in a nearby house had armed intruders break in, that really rattled Mrs. Tsitouris.

"Of course I've been shot at, but somehow that wasn't as disturbing as the house just down the street [being broken into]."

Mogadishu was relatively safe when she, her husband, Doug, and son, Madan, arrived in 1986.

Before the war started, they went to the beach every weekend and her son played with local Somali kids. His American school was a gathering spot for the community.

The fragile peace gave way to war in the late 1980s. Chaos reigned during the early 1990s, when warlords vied for control of the city.

"It's kind of like: Who's got more guns and who can take over?" she says.

Family life - and how to approach parenting in such a tense situation - meant balancing CARE's mission (feeding Ethiopian refugees who had flooded into the country) and the desire to keep her family safe.

She remembers one time when her first-grader was playing in the dirt lane in front of their house. Nearby was another boy, about 10 years old, who was also playing - with a Kalishnakov assault rifle.

As the capital became more unstable, Tsitouris and fellow workers practiced how to respond during an emergency. One of the scenarios was what to do if rebels came into the compound, put a gun to the guard's head, and said "Let us in, or we'll shoot the guard." What are you going to do? The answer? Under no circumstance, she says, were they supposed to open the door.

As tensions grew, she and her husband talked about sending their son back to the US to live with her brother or mother. But her husband was determined not to break up the family.

Once, when they were returning to Somalia via Kenya, they saw passengers who had just arrived from Mogadishu, "who were scared, who were ashen faced, who were in fear of what they had lived through, because Mogadishu had been attacked," she says.

A few months later, as the situation grew worse, they had a family discussion, including Madan, about whether her husband and son should relocate.

"He wouldn't leave me," she says of her husband. "He said, 'We're in this together, I'm not going to break the family up.' "

The Tsitourises could have returned to the US, but they felt that their work in Sudan was too important for them to leave.

"If there was no CARE, if we weren't doing our job, then a lot of people ... would definitely have been affected, if not by famine, than by serious malnutrition," she says. "I had so many friends in government and the international aid community, I could make things happen. And the Somalis really trusted me." But while she always felt secure, she couldn't guarantee safety for her son.

The war Madan lived through doesn't seemed to have profoundly affected him. Even today, as a teenager, when asked what his favorite country is, he still says Somalia.

"Going through those major decisions together and realizing all the things that are important to you, that brought us a whole lot closer [as a family]."

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