Sally Hayden

Yeah, so I met Zainaboo, also maybe I'm mispronouncing her name, but I think it's Zainaboo, in a town called Gwoza in northeast Nigeria in 2017.

And so I don't know how much people know about the situation there, but Boko Haram, I'm sure they've heard of them from the Chibok kidnappings, which I think was 2014, right?

Yeah.

when more than nearly 300 girls were kidnapped from a school.

But actually, that's only a tiny, tiny, tiny tip of the iceberg.

There's been huge ongoing numbers of kidnappings.

millions of people displaced.

Like the full dachshund isn't even known because a lot of this area remains unsafe or inaccessible.

And so Boko Haram were kind of carrying out an insurgency and, you know, continue to, but it's kind of... But they target women and girls.

Well, also killing men.

So a lot of the time what they would do is, which is what happened with Zainaboo's case, that they'll take over the town, they'll just kill all the men.

And yeah, women and girls are liable to be forced into marriage or just, you know, different abuses.

And so...

In her case, actually, she was one of several women that I met who kind of basically went to huge lengths to protect their children.

And so what she told me was that, first of all, her oldest daughter, she basically hid her in kind of like a dugout.

She called it a ditch.

I understand it as like a dugout.

um and covered it over and basically just didn't want her to be forced into marriage and so the story she told me which was like backed up by the people in the displacement camp where i met her um was that she then basically pretended to be the way she described it was pretended to be mad and so she like

would kind of this disgusting, so hopefully I'm allowed to say it, like cover herself in feces and like, you know, keep her children close to her.

And she got her children also to tell people that she had been in a mental hospital before.