With a quiet and gentle voice, Muqim tells his story of living through the civil war in Tajikistan. As he speaks, his eyes reflect a history of hardship and survival mixed with an unexpected grace. His story begins in southern Tajikistan, in a village to which the Soviets had forcibly relocated a variety of different ethnic groups. Years later, after the country declared independence, political and ethnic tensions erupted into a violent civil war. Because the village was so very diverse, the mixture of people in his hometown was viewed as a dangerous threat. "I had been traveling for a few days and on my return, I saw my neighbors and friends fleeing the village. Our homes had been torched and were burning to the ground. People perished in the fires, especially the elderly who were unable to escape. Our entire community was destroyed." Amid the chaos and carnage, Mukim was able to find his father and other family members. They were all safe, but his family had lost everything in the deadly blaze.

The civil war in Tajikistan raged from 1991 to 1998, resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands, the displacement of 600,000 people, and the destruction of 25,000 homes. During the violence, many Tajik citizens fled to neighboring countries; however, the specter of hunger, disease, and recurring conflict threatened and tormented those who remained. The war also exacerbated underlying tensions among ethnic groups which are still evident today in feelings, attitudes, and prejudices. One of the poorest and least developed countries in the world, today Tajikistan faces a state of economic collapse and large-scale unemployment. Behind a nice façade, it is a country with a decaying interior made up of a people economically depressed and struggling to live day-to-day.