When the homes of two Sudanese families in Tiger Bay, north Belfast, were broken into by gangs of masked men earlier this week, the police took an hour to arrive.
A single mother and her two children hid as the downstairs of their home burned.
It seemed preferable to going out into the street. The gangs knew who they were. The gangs were targeting anyone who looked foreign.
In the other house, a father protecting his two children thought about how he was going to explain what had happened to his wife when she got home from a trip overseas.
Both of them are translators for the UK's National Health Service and both have cars for their work. Those cars, sitting on a street lined with loyalist murals, were burned.
