In 1999, my family moved to Mostar, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. I was just over two years old, and my sister was barely a year old. I remember little about my toddler years spent in Mostar, but the war wrecked city lingers in my mind still.
Mostar had known great struggle during the war and it still felt it even years afterwords. As a child, walking with my parents, I hardly noticed the bullet holes and crumbled walls. I became accustomed to seeing buildings completely abandoned. They stood alongside the road with trees and vines growing with their broken structure. As I moved through the years living in Bosnia, I learned the history behind the war. Though I had seen buildings and even my own church with bullet holes, I did not understand. Soon, I came to know why the Stari Most (Old Bridge) in Mostar was destroyed. The day I saw a recording of the Stari Most being destroyed was the day that Bosnia and Herzegovina stopped being just a surrounding I had become accustomed to.
My mother drilled it into our heads to never wander into an empty field. If no one stood on the ground, we were not to go walking onto the land. Millions of landmines filled Bosnia and Herzegovina after the war, and to this day there are still mines. As we drove to from city to city, we’d pass signs with skulls on them reading, “Pazi-Mine”. It translates to “Careful-Mines”. I had known people who had died and survived stepping onto mine fields. In third grade, perhaps it was fourth grade, we were taught what to do if we were ever to find ourselves with in a minefield. These were the type of things that I came to know, to fear and to recognize as my reality. I often asked my parents if they were taught these things in school in America, but I quickly recognized that my childhood reality hadn’t been theirs.
Bosnia and Herzegovina may have been dangerous in some little ways, but it was also extraordinarily beautiful! This small Balkan country became my entire life. I loved walking downtown on the cobblestone roads and passing the gelato stands. Bread was life. Bakeries could be found on nearly every street. I’d go with my mom or my nanny to get kifle, a salty bread, or krofne, a pastry that resembled a donut. Even now, I miss the street cats and dogs that moved about as if they owned them. Though I hated it then, I now miss Tuzla's grey filled winter sky from the coal burning chimneys. Its smell now comforts me, but, growing up, it often made my throat itch. There is beauty in every structure, every mountain and every river between Bosnia and Herzegovina’s borders.
I am an American, but I am also a Bosnian. I may not have any Balkan blood running through my veins, but that country has become a part me in so many ways. I stand on the border between worlds as most Third Culture Kids do. I am caught between them and my identity is muddled. Just as much as I am an American, I don’t feel American. Just as much I am not Bosnian, I feel Bosnian. I look at the world through different glasses, except it’s hard to remove them. I wasn’t revealed the world little by little as most were, instead I was brought into multiple cultures at young age of two. I used to want to take it all back. My years spent abroad caused pain, confusion and so much loss. I did not know my extended family until I was older. I lost friends continuously. Then again, I have known such wonders. I would not be who I am today if I had not moved to this small, marvelous country. I wouldn't trade who I've become for anything.