Sally Hayden

And they said, you know, one man told me, I think his story is in the book that he had basically joined because he needed money.

He wanted to feed his children.

So, I mean, there's some stories there that I felt people can kind of make up their mind themselves as to how they feel about this and what's their reaction.

But I thought that that was, I don't know.

Yeah.

Yeah, so she was a woman that I met in exactly 2014.

She was already quite old then.

Her exact age, I mean, she showed me her ID card, but I'm not totally certain if it was right, but she was definitely very elderly and she...

had this story which you know has been actually covered by quite a lot of people she's been received medals and all things like that so um she basically like she came from this family of kind of traditional healers and when the uh who's who's were you know

I'm sure people know about the genocide.

They kind of had militias that were going around just massacring people and she hid dozens of tutsis inside her house.

And she basically said, you know, I'm going to cast spells on you and...

threatened them just to you know I think she said she like shook kind of or hit pots and pans and things like that just to freak them out basically so that they went away and yeah she was just an extraordinary person to meet and she was this tiny woman like she was much smaller than me and I'm like five foot three or something and she like we were asking her just all sorts of different things like she even tried to give me some sort of like powder she was like this will remove all your freckles

then we were asking her all sorts of things and she basically was like I might get the exact quote wrong but like like love is the most important thing in the world like find someone to love and your life will always be bright and I've been thinking about that more when like you know you asked me like why did I set out to write this book maybe that was an influence that you know was kind of at the back of my head somewhere because that was really my first kind of proper professional trip and

as a journalist to cover something.

And I think meeting her, it was, so she actually died in 2018.

And I think that I'm so grateful that I did meet her.

Like what do you mean?

I do think that maybe people thought it was quite strange when I started telling them, like, this was what I was working on, but... Do you mind talking just a little bit about, in broad strokes, because I know you're into facts and all that sort of thing, but like...

I think that