Before I ever met Tim Hetherington, the renowned photojournalist and filmmaker who died today in Misrata, Libya, he had already offered to help me. It was June 30, 2006, and I was on my way to Liberia, a country just settling back into a degree of normalcy and peace after decades of on-off civil war. I was an intern in Dakar, working for the New York Times West Africa bureau chief, Lydia Polgreen, who had put me in touch with Tim as a helpful contact on the ground. But I wanted to take a one-week trip to Monrovia to write a story about military reform. I wrote to Tim a few days earlier, and he quickly replied. "Beth, I can get you a driver. Let me know what time you'll arrive and he'll be there," he offered in an email. "Are you coming in with a photographer...perhaps we can do this [project] together if it suits you?"
Over the next week, Tim became a mentor and a friend. I tried to hide my age from his noticing -- attempting to look and act as professional as I could, but I'm sure he knew right away that I was barely 20-something. But without making me feel anything less than his peer, he never forgot to check in during that week I was in Monrovia. He was concerned for my safety, without being patronizing at all. He didn't have any stake in my story; it certainly wasn't going to make the pages of the Times. But he still helped out at every turn. That was Tim. He didn't have to care. He just did.
I distinctly remember the first face-to-face conversation we had once I landed in Monrovia. It was a Tuesday in July, and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan had come into town for the day to visit the newly elected (but not yet inaugurated) President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. That morning, I'd made my way across town from a friend of a friend's house toward the meeting point where the press would begin the whirlwind day of diplomatic convoy-chasing. Despite Tim's offer to arrange a car, I was on a ...
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