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We were journeying on a tour bus with a guide through wide, unpopulated roads. “Here, listen to this story and picture it happening in the lands we are passing by,” commanded my sister, plugging her earphones into her phone and tossing it over to me to take what she had given me and do as she told. “Okay,” I replied, not knowing what it was she was going to play. “And perhaps I’ll listen to what you’ve got.” She turned her head swiftly towards me and gave me a quick, sharp jab with her eyes. ‘What was I to give her?’ I thought... What I had stored on my phone was my answer to certain curiosities that arose in my mind when I thought of what adulthood required of my version of me. I had realised that my pursuit of knowledge through casual reading had reduced to nothing in my ascent to adulthood. This had to change hence my now being subscribed to an audiobook app. I handed her my phone with an audiobook starting to play on managing finances. Here we began with her listening to my audiobook and me having commenced listening to the clip she recommended (although it was more of a command). The middle aged woman with a soft yet strong voice took me back in time. The land that I was now roaming was the same land the true story was set. The story began with a young woman who woke herself up and then her children, turning on the television to the announcement of a war in what was yesterday a land of peace and routine. School, breakfast, clothes on, drop-off, collect. That was the usual routine. Not anymore. Not for another four years. Not for the mother who I could picture in my mind, as we drove along the, what I could now imagine, troubled, beaten and heartbroken road. It was already a dusty track, but to imagine a mother scrambling to save her children, who unaware of what had just changed their destiny for the years ahead, looked up to listen carefully to their mother’s instructions, with mother desperate and convinced that God would spare her and her children and help them flee from the bloodshed planned in the years to come. The scramble to the check point, the successful verification of documents, and the luck of knowing one of the soldiers who was family friends. This being the reason mother had now passed the checkpoint and was successfully on her way to cross the border. She along with her children, escaped what could have been years of turmoil, bloodshed and perhaps sudden death-much like that of her neighbours, whose stories only surfaced much after the war had passed by. A war that forced hostage 100,000 lives. Hostage forever. My mind felt as though it was working twice as hard, firstly to figure out how this beautiful land could have qualified host to such an atrocity, and secondly to feel the anguish this mother had felt. The pain both physically and mentally. I was a traveller in these lands. Lands that had felt, heard, seen and smelt the manifestation of the horror known as war and what I could now see from the window of the bus-quiet, contemplative rocks and soil, home to a secret chapter wavering in the spirit of their past.