It has been two years now since Halwo escaped, her son already speaks the language, but their UNHCR resettlement process is moving nowhere.

“Every time there is a fighter jet flying over our head, my son runs away from the playground and hides in the flat.”

"Going out at night means you’re either a Talib or dead," he says. Zabihullah almost lost his life helping the West, the West helped little when Taliban came knocking.

Unconsciously, I fiddle with knobs on my camera, setting its sensitivity high. A dim world, into which I will cross momentarily, wouldn't reveal itself otherwise.

The date is 18th April 1992. A cowboy movie's playing on TV, we’re drinking tea, my mom and my grandma are sitting on the couch in their nightgowns. Suddenly, bright yellow lines appear behind the windows. I’m six and my first naïve thought is of New Year’s fireworks. I look towards my mom just as the realization of what’s going on dawns on her face. It’s bullets. What follows still remains a blur. An explosion of grenades, crawling under the table, a night on the cold windowless hall of my grandma’s flat.

Calmly winding southwards, Neretva is as mesmerizingly colorful as ever. Upon reaching Mostar, a witness to a bitter conflict almost two decades past, it pushes through a narrow, both geographical and historical, not yet healed and in its senselessness difficult to grasp. Tourists come for the disaster porn, Neretva minds little.