Sally Hayden

And she basically, there seemed to be a belief that if somebody had mental issues, that if you killed them, that could actually make you have like bad luck in battle.

Yeah, basically you'd be cursed.

So this is what she told me.

And she then, the strange thing was that I then met another woman.

So this, it's hard to explain, like, or it's hard to imagine probably for a lot of people.

But like when we went to Groza, we went in a helicopter with UNICEF.

It was like completely cut off from the internet.

completely cut off from phone access like you couldn't travel in this area around it was kind of called a garrison town protected by the Nigerian military you couldn't travel in the area around because you'd get kidnapped or killed and I met then like a long distance away another woman who actually had quite a similar story but what she said was that she had been kidnapped with her children I think she had four children and

And that she, again, had pretended to have mental issues and started pouring cooking oil on her head.

And she basically said anything she could find, she'd pour it on herself.

The Boko Haram militants were like, you know, this is just too much hassle to keep this woman, so we'll just let her go.

And she ended up walking with her children to safety, so...

It was really astounding, actually, that I met these two women.

They definitely had no communication.

There was no way to get between these two places.

And they both had this really just extraordinary story of suddenly coming up with a way to try and escape from this situation and to protect their children.

I think I counted 38.

But not for the book, just nine for the book.

Yeah, so I met Zainabou, also maybe I'm mispronouncing her name, but I think it's Zainabou, 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?