World of War
Nadia attended a literacy class at a refugee camp with her infant always beside her. She had never gone to school and could not read words or numbers or understand money—skills she needed to survive. Without them, she said, she could not go safely to the market to buy food for her child. That is why she came to the class, day after day.
Nadia shared that when armed militants entered her village, she had hidden with her baby. Her husband and parents were killed while she hid. She kept silent, and she was one of only a handful of villagers who survived. After everything she had endured, an aid worker asked whether anything at the refugee camp had truly helped her. Nadia leaned forward, wrote her own name, and said quietly, “Now that I know how to write my name, I’m going to learn how to write my son’s name.”
Dr. Samantha Nutt, a physician and humanitarian who has spent decades working in war zones around the world, shared Nadia’s story during her talk at the Calvin University January Series on Tuesday, Jan. 27. Nutt described Nadia’s ordeal as a fundamental reason for why she, a Canadian physician, would dedicate her life to humanitarian aid. Nutt is the founder of War Child Canada and War Child USA, organizations focused on protecting and supporting children affected by armed conflict.
Nutt began by naming the reality of the moment we are living in. More people are displaced today than at any other time since World War II. Across the world, one in five children now lives in a conflict zone. Sudan is currently facing the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, with millions of children at risk of severe malnutrition. At the same time, many conflicts go largely undocumented, receiving little sustained international attention.
Nutt painted a stark picture of what conflict means for children and families: fields contaminated by weapons, food systems destroyed, and communities trapped with nowhere safe to go.
“Imagine being alone, surrounded by violence, and starving,” she said. “That is the reality for millions of families right now.”
But at the same time, while military spending has reached its highest level in history, rising more than 40 percent over the past decade, humanitarian-aid budgets are being cut.
“We are spending many times more on fighting and killing one another than we are on keeping children alive and in school with food and clean water,” she said. “That imbalance makes the world more unstable, not safer.”
Nutt also drew attention to a troubling global trend: just as humanitarian needs are rising, many of the world’s wealthiest nations are cutting foreign-aid budgets. In the United States, major reductions to U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) programs have left significant gaps in emergency relief, health care, and nutrition services.
Similar cuts have been announced in the United Kingdom and Canada, where governments have reduced long-term commitments to international aid in favor of domestic and military spending.
“We are spending far more on fighting wars than on keeping children alive in conflict zones,” Nutt said, warning that this imbalance fuels instability rather than preventing it. Aid spending, she emphasized, represents a miniscule portion of national budgets but plays an outsized role in protecting children, sustaining communities, and reducing the very conditions that lead to violence.
While humanitarian assistance is not about having all the answers, she added, it can help in resisting despair. “The work is not about fixing everything,” she said. “It’s about sustaining life, dignity, and hope when people have lost almost everything.”
Education, in particular, plays a critical role, she said. Nutt shared how War Child programs often begin with children but quickly expand to support women and families as well. “When women can read, write, and understand basic numeracy,” she said, “they can move through the world with more safety and agency.”
Throughout her talk, Nutt returned to the unifying power of compassion. “We don’t have to agree on the causes or narratives of war,” she said. “Here’s what I know above all else: compassion is never divisive. Compassion always unites.”
In a world marked by political and ideological conflict, Nutt urged, we need to hold more than one concern at a time. “We can care deeply about what’s happening in our own communities,” she said, “and still refuse to look away from suffering beyond our borders.”
Compassion, Nutt reminded listeners, is not weakness. “Tyranny is relentless,” she said, “but compassionate, reasonable people working together to help one another can stop it.”
The story of Nadia, said Nutt, offers a glimpse of what compassion can make possible. Learning to write her name did not undo Nadia’s trauma or restore what she had lost. But it allowed her to imagine a future for her son. And sometimes, Nutt suggested, that small act of hope is where healing begins.
