War & Peace Quote by Ben Linder

There is no romance in this kind of compassion; it lands like a logistical problem with a human face. Ben Linder, an engineer who went to Nicaragua in the 1980s to work on infrastructure, frames his response to children not as charity but as emergency evacuation: "taking them all away" to someplace where bullets and empty stomachs can’t reach. The sentence stacks crises without commas of comfort - war, hunger, a fragile local institution ("El Cua") - so the reader feels what he’s feeling: an overload where the only imaginable solution is removal.

The intent is protective, almost parental, but the subtext is thornier. Wanting to "hide" kids until history calms down carries the quiet admission that outsiders can’t end the war on demand; they can only improvise shelters around it. It also reveals an ethical tension typical of aid work: the urge to extract individuals from danger versus the slower, messier project of making a place livable. Linder checks that impulse by naming a condition for leaving: he wants El Cua "strong enough" to care for them. That’s a deliberate pivot away from savior fantasy and toward capacity, durability, local ownership.

Context sharpens the line into something like an indictment. In the U.S.-shadowed violence of the Contra war, "until the war stops" reads less like hope than like impatience with political machinery that treats civilian suffering as background noise. An engineer’s voice makes it sting: he’s describing the social system the way he might describe a failed bridge - not abstractly, but in terms of who falls through.