Tap-tap, Tap-tap, Tap-tap, … rhythmical shake of the engine, of persons who sway at the streets and the vehicles-light trucks rithm, vehicles that takes them to their works, their houses, everywhere, … and that in certain form impregnate their lives.
People heads that rock to the compass of the unique and unrepeatable, original melody every time, that only is understood when it is lived as a mixture of sounds, smells, movements and colors
Showy, radiant, exultant colors, …. That come from the fantastic expressions of this exteriors; artistic, challenging, allegoric, often phantasmagoric. Often there portray famous stars of the world of the sport, of the music, the cinema and other scenic arts, even often pseudoreligious expressions.
The name if this Haitian transportantion describes the sound that passengers need do (slaping on the Vehicle sheet) to Chaim the chauffeur to stop: tap-tap.
The street fills of people, working, selling, with the animals, …in a chaotic traffic, speaking loudly the whole moment, doing noise, catching your attention. To raise a tap-tap is to leave yourself across the neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince, for the injured roads of the country, without prejudices, without constraint, without fears. It is to learn kreól, to estimate that the time makes a relative sense, it is to stop to feel White and foreigner, to eat, to converse, to sleep and to live with the people.
I went to Haiti to collaborate with the NGO Association for the Integrated Development of the North of Haiti (AIDNOH Inc.). When I stooped the tap-tap, I feel that I had learned more than I had teached.