In 1915 Charlotte Brown, the principal of the Sidon Girls’ School, an American missionary school in Lebanon, described how the staff and students were living “dual lives” in “an isle of safety” in the midst of the “stress of great and terrible events” during the first year of World War I. Deliberately isolating the girls from the “suffering world outside,” the missionaries were initially thankful “that a few young lives were being spared the sorrow so pressing outside.” This was not to last, however. Within a year the protective shield the missionaries had erected around their charges was pierced. The wolves of starvation, disease, fuel shortages, locusts and increasing lawlessness were howling at the school’s door. On top of this, the uneasy neutrality of the American presence was shattered when the Ottoman government briefly closed down the mission schools in Sidon in 1916. By 1917, the school’s “connection with the needy became an intimate one,” and the school had been turned into a soup kitchen, refuge for the starving, and workshop to produce garments for the poor. In 1918, the school took in 165 orphans. Major sources for this paper are the detailed reports written by the missionaries who worked at the Sidon Girls School during the war years (quoted above). These reports provide rare, locally based primary accounts of daily life and suffering during the war in Sidon, and demonstrate how the missionaries living among the local community responded to its misery and tragedies with a great deal of empathy and ingenuity. Yet a certain remove that is discernable in the reports highlights how the Mission’s ambivalent position as a foreign institution affected its relief work. Despite its ostensibly non-political status and its assumed local “intimacy” with the community, the Mission’s ability to provide relief stemmed from the politics, power and privilege that derived from its foreign status. I argue that local experiences of war relief such as this complicate the larger, global history of humanitarian relief that tends to broadly situate it within the “civilizing mission” of colonialism, without examination of the confusion of categories on the ground. The story of Sidon Girls School demonstrates that who and what constituted local was often at the heart of the humanitarian response to World War I in the Middle East, and could determine who received aid, and thus survived.