You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the

podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC.

It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world.

What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism

and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines.

And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject

you might not even have thought you were interested in.

Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment,

you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds. Hello and welcome to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Jill

Kursley.

Inundated streets, entire villages wiped off the map and people washed out to sea.

The powerful quake triggered towering tsunamis that smashed into nearby Samoa.

That's Al Jazeera English, describing what happened on the 29th of September 2009.

It's a small island, so 140-something people all dying in one morning is a lot.

We were all in it. It wasn't just those of us whose families died. I think the whole country was there.

That's LeMepa Hold.

I was staying on the beach at La Lomanaut, that's the name of the village.

I'm on the south coast of Upono, the main island for Samo, and I lived with my parents but in a different house.

I was living in a house with my daughters.

My eldest one was one a lay

and the younger one, Maloyola dealofa.

Mona Lee was nine, and the younger daughter whose name was shortened to

...