VITA VISSUTA

The alerts don’t sound like in the movies.

They are flatter. Shorter. Noisy. Breaking in the night from your mobile.

In Abu Dhabi these days, the sky is still blue. The sea is still calm. The cafés still serve flat whites with perfect foam. And yet, every few hours, phones vibrate with alerts. Potential Missiles threats. Drones detected. “Seek immediate shelter.” Words that belong to another geography now live here.

And then there is the harder question.

How do you explain war to a child?

You start small.

You don’t begin with geopolitics, oil routes, alliances, deterrence theory. You don’t say Iran, America, proxies, escalation. You say something simpler: Some adults are fighting. And when adults fight, sometimes they make very bad decisions.

Children understand fights. They understand unfairness. They understand fear in a room before they understand history.

A child in Abu Dhabi sees flashes in the sky and hears adults speaking more quietly than usual. He notices that school has been suspended. That parents check their phones too often. He may not know what a drone is, but he knows when a grown-up is pretending not to worry.

So you explain war like this:

War is when countries disagree and instead of solving it by talking, they try to hurt each other. They use machines instead of fists. Big machines. Fast machines. And sometimes those machines break things that belong to ordinary people.

And then you add the part that matters most: Most people do not want war.

That is important. Because a child must not confuse the sky with the world. The sky can flash. The world is still mostly made of people who want dinner, cartoons, homework finished, lights off at a reasonable hour.

Living here, under occasional interception trails, you realize how abstract war usually is to us. It belongs to screens. To maps with arrows. To expert panels.

Until it doesn’t.

Until you are explaining why the airport is temporarily closed. Why there are so few persons around. Why your friend’s father, who works on a base, has to stay longer at work.

A child will ask the essential question:

Are we safe?

You answer honestly, but proportionally.

Yes. The city has protection. There are systems that stop most of the dangerous things before they reach us. Grown-ups are working to keep people safe. That is true. Air defenses here are not a rumor; they are visible streaks across the night.

Children don’t need the full architecture of missile defense. They need containment. Emotional containment.

You also explain something else, quietly: War is not a video game. When something explodes, it is not points. It is someone’s building. Someone’s job. Sometimes someone’s life.

But you don’t overload them. A child does not carry the weight of casualty statistics.

Instead, you point to what remains normal.

The supermarket is open. The pool is still open. The cat still demands food at the same corner. Routine is resistance.

Here in Abu Dhabi, under Iranian attack, daily life has not collapsed. It has tightened. Conversations are shorter. Hugs are longer.

And perhaps that is the final lesson you give a child: war is loud, but life is persistent.

The alert will stop. The sky will clear. The cranes will keep building. Planes will take off again. And most of the world, even now, is not made of missiles. It is made of people trying, imperfectly, to protect the small circles around them.

That is how you explain war to a child.

You don’t explain strategy.

You explain care.

“Mau, why is there a war here?” Bianca, the daughter of some good friends of mine, asked me a few days ago. Reported from Abu Dhabi, under a blue sky.