I'm wakened before dawn again. There's been another strike. A neighbour's house was completely demolished. Thankfully no one was hurt. We'll all be spending the day - and tomorrow and the day after that - clearing away the rubble and trying to rescue anything of value we can.
I want to move. I keep telling my parents we must move. But nobody wants to move. And all day long I find myself looking up to the skies, wondering when the next bird will appear.
Somewhere far away there are people sitting at computer screens. I'm told that many of them are children like myself, not much older than I am. They can't be hurt by what they do or what others do in an attempt to stop them. They fly the birds. Over my village.
I've never met these people and they've never met me. But they're trying to kill me.
We live under a constant threat. A threat that colours our lives completely. We know little of who these people are or why all this is happening. We live in constant and total fright.
We bury our dead. The birds strike when we do. We're never safe.
Life simply doesn't make any sense.
Cousins of ours got some pirated Hollywood movies from Bangkok. I can now see what life is like in that country known as the United States where the birds come from. Cars and drive-ins and laughing happy people, so rich, so privileged. What did we do to them?
Sometimes they come in the day. I'll be out playing and suddenly we all look up. We search the sky. The very sound strikes terror into our hearts.
The buzz from the bird becomes deafening. And the louder it becomes, the more we tremble. The louder it becomes, the closer we are to yet more destruction, suffering, pain, and death.
We have nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Where would we go? How would we know in which direction to flee? All we can do is stand there, sit there, eat our meals, take care of our hygiene, try to sleep, try to love one another, try to care for and protect and rescue one another, beneath that awful ghastly buzz.
Why were we even born? Why are those people doing this to us?
Someday I'll be married. Somehow I will fall in love. Someday I will make love to my spouse. And as we lie there making love, the buzz will come. As we are caring for our newborn children, the bird will come.
Through nine months of every pregnancy, the buzz will come. When our children are sick, the buzz will come. As we try to live our own lives, the bird will come.
And more of my family and friends will die. And I will never understand why.
'25,000 feet in the air. Silently lurking in the clouds. Aloft 24 hours without rest. A half-tonne predator hunts.' - Predator drone demo from 2006