It was all down to Jill Dando that I first went to Haiti. One evening in the late 1980s I was watching her Holiday programme. I was working as a van driver at the time and the weather was miserable.

She was in the Dominican Republic, which she said was lovely. But she warned against crossing the border to Haiti, which was under military dictatorship at the time. It seemed all Haiti had to offer was death, black magic and voodoo – and the same great weather. I sat there and thought: “What am I doing here when I could be there?” A month later I was the only white person on a flight to Port-Au-Prince.