I went to the former Yugoslavia a few times throughout the early 90's. Several years after the civil war I worked with a UN unit which traveled around Bosnia giving presentations to local civilians, especially schoolchildren, about the danger presented by the huge amounts of arms and ordinance littering the country. As a photographer, it was my task to produce imagery of anti-personnel mines, munitions etc. One day we were in a small village close to the Croatian border and I was smoking in the playground with the interpreter and schoolteacher of the class we had just presented to. Across the road was an elderly woman laboring in a field. Bent almost double, she was hacking weeds out of the ground with a hoe. It is an extremely common sight all over Bosnia. The schoolteacher saw me looking at the woman and she told me there was a sad story connected to her. Her only two sons had been killed early in the civil war and their bodies had been returned to her. She couldn't afford the funeral costs and had had to borrow the money from a local Serbian man, the loan secured on the few acres of land she owned. She knew she would never be able to repay the debt, as did the man who loaned her the money. She was now in a kind of medieval thrall to this man and basically worked the land to support her own, very meager needs and any surplus going directly to him. She owed him $60 US. I walked the 40 meters across the playground and set her free. I will never forget the way she looked at me.