The entire floor glitters with shattered pottery – thousands of glazed shards and fragments are scattered across the tiny home among the overturned tables and broken chair legs.
The ringing silence in here contrasts starkly with the brutal upheaval that let chaos and violence into the home not long ago – an upheaval that hits the whole part of the country every time foreign soldiers sweep though it ravaging and raping as they go and leaving devastation and death in their wake.
The country is at war, and everyone here lives in constant fear. Fear of the next time their door will get kicked in. Fear of the occupiers who are plundering people’s barns and larders and collecting ever higher taxes that everyone has a hard time paying.
And the fear never slackens its grip, even when the country isn’t occupied. Because people’s sons are sent to the battlefields where merciless cannon fire shakes the continent and tears apart bodies and families alike.
Why is this happening? Is it God’s punishment or the work of the Devil? Will this nightmare never end?