I was 24 and on my first professional journalistic assignment abroad: covering the 20th anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda. I say professional, but I probably did not appear so. Unlike experienced staff correspondents, who flew in for a few days and stayed in fancy hotels, I had emptied my sublet room in London, following the end of a three-month internship there, and arrived in Rwanda on a one-way ticket. In a bid to stretch funding received through a reporting grant, I rented a room in a hostel above a bowling alley, where I would live for a month.
I had little money or understanding of the concept of a professional fixer. A lot of the time, my reporting simply involved me setting off alone and seeing whom I could speak to. To move between interviews, I hopped on the back of a “moto” – clinging to the shoulders of the motorbike driver who wound up Kigali’s hills, along meticulously clean streets. Fortunately, I also made friends with a group of local film-makers and we would sometimes travel around together.
It was during one such effort that I met Zula Karuhimbi. She was an elderly Rwandan woman famous for having used “witchcraft” to save the lives of dozens of Tutsis she had hidden in her attic during the 1994 genocide, scaring away murderous militants by threatening them with spells and magic. She may have been considered an iconoclast, because of her willingness to stand against the murderous rampage many of her countryfolk set out on, and because of her embrace of herbal medicines and spells. Yet what I perceived, alongside her courage, was love towards humanity in action – the simple goodness of someone who cannot envisage another way to approach the world than to protect and be kind to other people.
Zula died four years after I met her, in the same small, dilapidated home I had visited her in, two decades after her heroic actions. Standing indoors, in a room dark from the lack of electricity, she held my hands in hers. I will always remember what she identified that day as a fundamental force in this world. “Love is the most important thing. Find someone to love and the future will always be bright,” she told me.
Twelve years have passed. By my count, I have now reported from almost 40 countries and interviewed individuals remotely in many more. I have witnessed violence, exploitation and unbearable cruelty in forms that are often overt, though can be equally punishing when they present through neglect, ignorance and abandonment. I have seen what we all know – that inequality is ever-growing, while the most privileged have the ability to shut themselves off from everyone else. Injustice and impunity reign. Even the idea of empathy is under attack.
Yet love has also been a recurring theme. By this, I mean love for family members and a wider community, as well as romantic love. It is present in every catastrophe I cover, even if that is not always evident in journalistic reports. I see it in the decisions people take amid crises, the sacrifices they make or the way they stay together. Love delivers comfort, deepens pain and widens joy. It is a motivator, a stabiliser, a hope to hold on to.
I have struggled a lot in this profession. In the beginning, I truly believed each report could make a difference, that journalists collect testimonies for an honourable cause, that we play a vital role in a quest for accountability. If only people far away understood what exactly was happening, they would take action and change would come, I thought. It did not take long for those beliefs to disappear. It is true that occasionally when I write an article, in this newspaper or elsewhere, someone steps forward to help. But it is usually on an individual level, while the greater suffering continues. I wonder if my role has only – in the end – exacerbated that suffering by forcing the traumatised to relive what they have gone through.
As journalists, we strip detail from our reports for a variety of reasons: word count limits; broadcast length requirements; a determination of what is fresh or newsworthy. My new book, This is Also a Love Story: Searching for Good in a Divided World, is an effort to recentre the presence of love in the broader understanding of crisis situations. It includes stories from nine countries across Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Africa – a spread of places, including Syria, Japan and Ukraine.
Not all of them are obviously love stories. In Lebanon, where a crippling economic crisis devastated the country long before the latest wars, I spent time with Bassam and his wife Maryam. In 2022, in his early 40s, Bassam reached the end of his tether when his father needed expensive medical treatment, prompting him to raid a Beirut bank wielding a gun and a gallon of petroleum. The savings of depositors – such as him – had effectively been seized, following what the World Bank called a giant Ponzi scheme. Bassam’s bank raid ended after hours of a standoff between him and police. In the days afterwards, he was hailed as a national hero, with his intervention raising questions about who the real thief was – many said the bankers and the state rather than him.
Sally Hayden in Syria in 2025. Photograph: Cosette Molijn 
A boy in Raqqa, northern Syria, around Valentine’s Day 2025. Photograph: Sally Hayden 
Bassam, who was widely praised after a bank raid in Beirut, with his wife Maryam in Lebanon in 2023. Photograph: Sally Hayden
His bank raid made headlines, but the motivation behind it was only mentioned farther down in reports. During our meetings, he scrolled through photos of his beloved father, who died in 2024. Bassam spoke of his father’s gentleness and the memories they made together in a southern village that is now inaccessible – part of the Israeli military’s “buffer zone”. He detailed the love that held the rest of his extended family together; the actions they were willing to take for each other.
Years earlier and about 3,500km away, in Uganda, I accompanied former child soldiers on an hours-long drive before they were reunited with their parents, more than a decade after being abducted. I watched as their relatives stepped shyly towards them, then began ululating, running forward to lift the men on to their shoulders; later formally shaking their hands. Their communities welcomed back these men, who had been kidnapped by the Lord’s Resistance Army as boys and forced to do unspeakable things. One – aged just nine when he was taken – was only recognised by his father because of a scar on his head from a childhood accident. “I was extremely, extremely happy yesterday when I saw my family members,” he told me the following day. In particular, he felt overwhelmed by the love his mother had shown him, at a time when he had worried about rejection instead. “When I came back yesterday, I saw her inviting me back.”
On the other side of the continent, in northeast Nigeria, I learned about the brave actions mothers had taken to protect their daughters from being married off to Boko Haram fighters. Millions were displaced as the insurgents expanded their control over this region, slaughtering anyone who stood in their way. Probably tens of thousands of women have been abducted or found themselves in areas under militant control. In two separate parts of the northeast – including areas without functional communication networks – I met women who responded with courageous action, in ways I did not expect. This included behaving erratically, even pouring cooking oil or other liquids on themselves, to give the impression they were mentally unstable. The result, they found, was that they were more likely to be left in peace; their children socially isolated – and thus spared – alongside them. When they finally escaped the group, the women faced another ordeal: trekking long journeys, protecting their children along the way.
Back on that first trip to Rwanda in 2014, during a sunny afternoon on a university campus, I met “artificial families” – groups of young people who lost family members in the 1994 genocide. They had appointed a “father” and “mother”, who held regular meetings with their “children”, making sure they were supported and cared for; asking if there was anything they needed; and encouraging them to study hard. Other artificial families like these, originally set up inside of schools and universities, were spread across much of the country.
More than a decade later, I wanted to track down the same people again, to see how their lives have been in the period since. The eldest artificial family members are now in their 40s. I discovered that many now have their own families – spouses and children – but their “artificial” parents and siblings are still in regular contact, often through WhatsApp groups. Significant numbers have moved abroad, but they continue to visit each other on important occasions, or to contribute money for presents when the situation calls for it. It made me reflect on what a family really is: if you are lucky, it is a kind of safety net, though that is far from a given. Yet there are alternatives to the types of families we traditionally recognise, and most of us have more space to choose our own family as we get older.
Sally Hayden in south Lebanon. Photograph: Simon Townsley 
Zula Karuhimbi, in Rwanda in 2014. Photograph: Sally Hayden piece 
An ‘artificial family’ praying together in Kigali, Rwanda, in 2014. Photograph: Sally Hayden
Another trip found me in Ghana, west Africa, where I attended a secret Pride event in a remote location. It was the first Pride month after a new, repressive anti-LGBTQI+ bill was approved by Ghana’s parliament. Attendees told me how they supported each other, even as they were increasingly forced to hide who they are to the outside world. At a time when committed romantic relationships could feel too high-pressure – both because being noticed spending excessive stints with one individual could raise suspicions and because no one wanted to take responsibility for anyone else – the “community” continued to feel like a welcoming place. “Platonic love and affection [is] something I’m very grateful for,” 34-year-old Berry told me. “For most of us, the kind of support we need is not the kind of support a general Ghanaian populace think they should offer to their friends or their loved ones.”
Their experience contrasted starkly with one of the few stories I reported on in Ireland: the 2015 same-sex marriage referendum. I remembered the excitement as we stood in Dublin Castle, a jubilant crowd waving rainbow flags, cheering as the results came in. It was so strange to move so quickly between a location where love could be celebrated openly to one where it had to be conducted in the shadows, the constant anxiety of discovery hanging over every interaction.
The 2015 same-sex marriage referendum in Ireland. Photograph: Sally Hayden 
A dress for sale in Iraqi Kurdistan in 2016. Photograph: Sally Hayden
In Mosul, the northern Iraqi city once occupied by Islamic State, I specifically focused on learning about marriages. Locals told me that whether unions happened, and how exactly they were celebrated there, had always been influenced by external and political forces. I interviewed couples who married both during and after the jihadi group’s occupation. One couple, Marwa and Saif, described falling in love before their wedding over lengthy phone calls, made in secret because Islamic State suspected anyone with a phone of being a spy. They would shiver in the cold on their roofs at night, their devices pressed to their ears, because that was the only place they could get a signal at the time.
I have spent time documenting the presence of love amid crises for myself as much as anyone else. I needed to remember there is goodness in the world, that torture and exploitation and abuse are not the default behaviours of humans. I believe a lot of cruelty today is related to othering, distancing and silencing; that systems are deliberately being constructed to make it easier to forget that the rest of this planet is made up of people like us. I wanted to remind readers of something that should be obvious, but often is forgotten: that humans exist at the centre of geopolitics. Strip away headlines, statistics, front pages and photo captions, and what you are left with is a majority of people just trying to get by as best they can, while taking care of those that mean something to them.
Over the past few years, I have asked people I encountered around the world what love means to them. In a market in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, west Africa, men became emotional detailing their love for their mothers. “After God, I love my mother most. She suffered for me through the [civil] war, she took care of me until I could stand for myself,” said 42-year-old motorbike driver Ibrahim M Sesay. “I do many things for her. I ride this bike to make money. Everything I have, I use it to satisfy her.”
In March 2024, I travelled to Japan, where I searched for markers of love too. At the Meiji Shrine in Tokyo, I read “wishes” left by visitors:
– “I pray for a long and loving marriage like the camphor trees.”
– “I am grateful for my family. With love in my heart for them, I will always strive to be better, more grounded, and see the goodness in everyday life.”
– “I pray for love to be the overwhelming emotion and action expressed here on earth.”
There is a bigger purpose to learning and writing about love. Pointing out its presence feels like a way to confront the dangers of dehumanisation – used to enable atrocities. Love can also be the answer to a question about whether it is possible to perceive any beauty in humanity despite the horrific turn our world has taken. There is a type of detachment crisis taking place today: this is clear. Perhaps focusing on love is a way to counter that too?
In 2021, my grandfather Liam posted on Facebook about my grandmother Margaret. The following year, they both passed away within months of each other.
Sally Hayden’s grandparents, Margaret and Liam Hayden
“We have shared so much together – joys and sorrows – since the happiest of all our days, sixty-six years ago. 17 October, 1955. A sunny but cold autumnal day. I loved you then, Margaret, and still love you now. Thank you for such loyalty and commitment and understanding over the years. Happy anniversary.”
I regularly think back to these words; and to the many other examples of love that I have been lucky enough to witness and experience on a personal level, as well as through my career. I am grateful to have seen tremendous love among my family and friends in Ireland, in the same way I have seen it in countries across the world. It is not always a loud, announced love, or one without flaws, but a quiet presence, visible through actions. In writing my book, I got a chance to remember this version of the world – one where we can, and want to, be kind to each other.
This is Also a Love Story: Searching for Good in a Divided World by Sally Hayden is published by HarperCollins on May 21st.