Working in and on a conflict-ridden environment requires a special mindset. Apart from taking extra care to decrease any negative impact on the dynamics of the conflict („do no harm“), one thing becomes important to the practitioner: self-care.
One of our interviewees, Assaf, explained to us how his choice of work place was influenced by the on-going conflict. Now living in a small community of researchers in the middle of the Negev desert, he is able to forget about the situation in his daily life, working side-by-side with people from different sides of the conflict. The conflict does not disappear completely, but his surroundings shield him from having to think about it constantly. He can thus choose how much he deals with it.
When I came to the region, it was not my first time, but it was the first time that I focussed almost entirely on the conflict. For any traveller in the region, the conflict is always visible, so I had assumed that I’d know what to expect. But it turned out that I was wrong and that I had underestimated how much an impact interviews can have on the interviewer.
With often multiple interviews per day and most of the conversations revolving around the situation, the conflict was omnipresent. Even more, every person we spoke to shared his or her story and views, some just wanting to be listened to, some trying to convince us. Hearing differing, often opposing views and very personal stories took its toll on us. When interviews were finished, we did not simply go back to a normal routine, but the experiences stuck with us and kept mingling in our minds and conversations. I realized that when you’re working in a conflict, the conflict will walk home with you, because it is not restricted to your work, but its effects also extend into your private life.
After about one week of interviews, I felt my empathy dropping. While I could still conduct the interview, I did not feel the same connection with the person anymore. I simply couldn’t listen to their stories anymore. Since it is exactly this kind of a connection that we want to produce in our documentary, I realized that I had to intervene and gain back my empathy to produce the right atmosphere and environment during the interviews.
We thus postponed a scheduled interview to a later day and decided to take one day off and to relax at the Dead Sea. While even this choice has its relations to the conflict (the highway to the Dead Sea is built through occupied territory), I was able to take my mind of the brooding issues and regain my emotional strength for the following days. And just like I had hoped, I was able to connect to our next interview partners again.
I realized that, immoral as it first appeared to me, people working in conflict need their time out. In order to have a positive impact on a conflict, it is important to take your mind of it and ignore it from time to time, otherwise one runs the risk of emotionally burning out and becoming cynical. It is, of course, important to note that this is a luxury that people, who are stuck in the conflict, do not possess. For some of them, conflict is omnipresent and inescapable. While self-care and sometimes forgetting about the conflict is important to peace workers, one should be very mindful about the luxury that this means. But in order to work on conflict, it is sometimes necessary to not work on it.