Egg's gone to Haiti

Posted by Katy Regan at 21:42 on 3 Feb 2010

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This is what I admire about Egg: he said about four days ago "I think I might go to Haiti" and then before I knew it, he'd booked a flight and gone. Egg the adventurer!
He's gone in his capacity as a documentary photographer rather than to help the aid effort although as one person said to me, I'm sure he won't have much choice but to join in the aid effort once he's over there and I'm sure he'll want to.

Grimness aside, I would have loved to have gone with him. This is how we met, Egg and I, as a journalist-photographer twosome, travelling places; him as snapper, me as the scribe. Little did I know ten years ago when I was lugging his photography equipment around the globe, nailing stories together that one day, I'd have his child.

Suffice to say I was very worried about him going.  I'd heard horror stories about the looting, the human trafficking, the lack of food and water not to mention the indescribable scenes of devastation he'd see and I wondered whether he was really prepared. Last night I watched a documentary about it - a whole country destroyed.. How on earth can anyone get their head around that?!  As usually happens though, from what Egg has told me  - and we've only been able to snatch a few minutes conversation - the experience of being there is not half as bleak, corrupt and lawless as the media might have us believe. I mean obviously the tragedy is on a level few of us can understand but Egg says that people are friendly, hopeful, just getting on with it. They are ‘waiting for God' to do his work.

I worried he'd be sleeping in a car, living on biscuits as one hack - a friend of a friend had reported doing. Not Egg. Egg is the jammiest man alive. He has been taken in by Christian missionaries, who live in a  Haitian place on top of a mountain. Keeping it real to the end.

    

Still, I felt ridiculous talking to him sitting in the café of Waitrose with my latte today whilst he told me how he'd been to the morgue.

At least I didn't make a faux pas on a level of the one I made when he went to Afghanistan last year. He was gone for three weeks. I was at home with Fergus.  I called him up one day in tears to tell him that I'd had the most disastrous hair-cut of all time (in my defence, it was hideous: A kind of Posh Spice slanted bob horror that would have looked lovely with some Creole earrings.)

The day after that phone-call, there was a suicide bombing, then a kidnapping. At one point I couldn't get hold of him for forty-eight hours. Talk about reality check. Jesus.  I've never been allowed to forget that phone call and nor should I.

I doubt Egg will ever moan about anything again after coming backs from a trip like this and I'm sure only his pictures will give me anything near a true glimpse of what's really going on there. Come home safely Egg x

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