SANA, Yemen — To blare the jingle that draws the children to his ice cream cart — in the midst of a war — Noah Taha has been forced to improvise.

There is rarely electricity here in Sana. Not for hospitals, not for homes, and not to charge Mr. Taha’s little blue MP3 player. To solve his problem, Mr. Taha put a solar panel on the front of his cart so he could play the jingle — a somewhat haunting tune he called the Na Na song, after an ice cream brand — as he peddled through the Yemeni capital.

It was clever, but Mr. Taha said he had seen better. “I saw solar used on an electric wheelchair,” he said. “That was the best idea.”

I met Mr. Taha on a street full of electrical shops during a recent visit to Yemen, my third since the signs of conflict began to emerge early in 2015. With each visit, people seem more put-upon: running lower on money, more desperate to find work, and struggling to find food, medical care or a safe place to live.

But Yemenis are also famously resilient, living in the poorest country in the region and saddled for decades with feckless leaders. To cope with the war, many have seamlessly adapted to new roles.

Pediatricians have doubled as trauma surgeons, businesspeople have transformed into aid workers, and proprietors of electrical supply shops have become experts on solar power.

“We didn’t know anything,” said Khairullah Ali al-Omeisy, 24, who owns an electrical supply shop but learned all he could about solar panels when the boom began several months ago. “We tried to know everything.”

After scouring the Internet, he can now tell customers about the difference between Chinese and Canadian solar panels or the life span of Vietnamese gel batteries.

Solar panels are all over Sana these days, even available on installment plans for those who cannot afford them outright.

“We made a huge profit,” Mr. Omeisy said. Every shop on Shaoob Street was getting in on the action — and even people without a traditional shop.

Mohammed al-Fendi, who until recently was a carpenter, now sells the solar kits out of an old minibus he converted into a store. “The market is wide open,” he said.

And he thinks it will stay that way for a while: Even if the war ended, he doubted the ability of any new government to restore power for more than three or four hours a day.

Life in a war zone

Closer to Yemen’s front lines, people have made more jarring transformations.

Ahmed Naji Abdu once worked as a driver at the Taj Sheba, one of Sana’s fanciest hotels. Now he works for the medical charity Doctors Without Borders as a driver in Taiz, a city torn apart by some of the fiercest fighting in Yemen’s civil war.

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Mr. Abdu’s work, for one of the few international organizations operating in the city, was harrowing enough. But his home was also in shooting distance of battles in Taiz, and his family was forced to abandon the upper floors of the house after errant bullets struck it. The clashes have become more frequent in his neighborhood. “At night, it doesn’t stop,” he said.

His colleague, Dr. Arwa Ahmed Saeed, was an obstetrician in Taiz when the war broke out. She worked for a time at hospitals in the crossfire, where the victims were “fighters, women and children,” she said.

One day, seven women in one family, ages 11 to 21, were killed when a rocket hit their home. On another occasion, one of the victims was a three-day-old infant, she said.

She spoke to me in a much quieter emergency room a few miles from the fighting, in a mother-and-child hospital run by Doctors Without Borders. The work seemed no less urgent as she shuttled around the ward, treating children with respiratory problems.

Yet she admitted that she sometimes longed to be back at one of the front-line emergency rooms, despite all the misery she had seen.

“I feel like I offered help,” she said.

Less than a mile from the hospital where Ms. Saeed now works, a trash-filled sand lot offered a reminder of the dangers medical workers have faced throughout the war.

An airstrike by the Saudi-led coalition in December landed in the lot near a tented mobile clinic set up by Doctors Without Borders to help displaced people. It killed an 18-year-old man, Yayha Mohamed Dahan, when a piece of shrapnel pierced his chest, his relatives said.

The lot was still full of tents, transformed into something resembling a neighborhood. As I visited, an ice cream vendor peddled by, playing the same haunting jingle.

An ailing child

On my flight out of Sana, I saw another doctor trying to deliver care in terrible conditions.

He was accompanying a mother, a father and their sick infant son, Muhammad, who was breathing with the aid of a manual ventilator. They had set up a makeshift intensive care unit in a row of seats across the aisle from me, on an aging Airbus operated by Yemenia that is one of the few links between the capital and the outside world.

One machine, the size of a briefcase, sat on the tray table in front of the boy’s mother, and another, a monitor of some kind with flashing red lights, sat in his bassinet, never leaving the doctor’s gaze. The doctor sat next to the father, and they took turns gently squeezing the airbag.

It was not clear what ailed the boy, and no one wanted to interrupt the doctor to ask. The father’s frantic calls to Jordan, the plane’s destination, requesting that an ambulance meet them on the tarmac, suggested the boy’s condition was grave. The journey, which once took a few hours, now takes six hours or more.

Planes to and from Sana now stop for a two-hour security check in Saudi Arabia. The inconvenience of the stopover has infuriated Yemeni travelers, who see the security measures as an unnecessary and almost colonial imposition by the Saudis.

As Muhammad fought for breath, the delay was potentially fatal. The doctor appealed to a Saudi security agent who was on the plane checking passports to hurry things along. “Brother, we are doing everything we can,” the agent replied. But the plane remained parked for an unbearable 45 minutes.

The mother moved her thumb and down her fingers, in a rhythm meant to simulate prayer beads. Passengers in nearby rows uttered their own prayers for the infant. The plane finally left Saudi Arabia, and the cabin lights were dimmed. Members of the airline staff gathered around the family, and the improvised infirmary, shining flashlights on the baby so the doctor could see.

The plane arrived in Jordan. The ambulance was waiting.