We get on a many taptaps. Tap taps are pick up trucks with a metal oval overhead. To stop the truck you tap with a coin against the metal and the driver in the front hears. I don’t know if the Haitian people call them taptap. At first I called them popo’s due to my minor dyslexia, people still understood what I was saying, similar to how I understood them when I spoke no Creole. This is public transportation. Throughout the city you see people from school, work or just getting around on taptaps usually with minimal belongings. As you travel through the country on a taptap you see people with straw bags weighing as much as a person and buckets and things you would never expect to see, like chickens sitting in bags and random transported goods. The taptaps fill up fast, they are lined with tiny benches to fit half your buttocks and sometimes depending on size one bench in the middle so seated passengers face either way. Extra people get on and if the truck is big stand in the middle and another person will somehow always manage to squeeze in along the ends of benches when you feel like no more squeezing is possible. Everyone is nice. This is Haiti. I have searched for cranky people on the taptaps. Why we take taptaps across the country I do not know. It is indeed a struggling new task. Once after vomiting across the back of the bus I rested my arm on a lady’s bag. After a while the bag started shaking, I felt as if I was really losing it. Then I heard a chicken. Usually chickens are visible and not in bags, but this is Haiti, anything here goes. This doesn’t happen on nonpublic. Another common form of transportation is taxis, you pay morotocyle taxi’s to take you around, the cost is 3x as much per person. Some people on motorcycles aren’t taxi drivers, but the hollering continues none the less. I’ve also felt my moments where my life ends and others where it also begin on these rides. I’ve only felt this awkward while riding and being in control of someone else to navigate as we ride through countryside.
I take a long taptap to Portauprince for a few days. The other home we visit is in Pationville, a suburb of Portauprince. There its all bungalows and houses with walled boundaries and such. You don’t see tents or shanty towns or unpainted one bedroom brick and mortar houses there. Half an hour ride or less in and you arrive into Portauprince proper. Some volunteers come to Jacmel. The poverty is nonstop there they remark. Jacmel and Pationville are quite different. Our neighbors minus one are all tent families. They have all been moved here by a German NGO post earthquake. Further down we have some houses, on other side some houses are being built. Paint is a luxury. Some houses do not have roofs and thus it’s never quite clear which house is finished, which is abandoned, which is inhabited or was inhabited. Everything is judged by the people present. Walking down in one direction you see a trash dump along the street and metal shack houses. In another direction more tents. In another direction more bungalows being built. We are the only one bungalow on our dirt road. On the other side of the mini tent city that lies in the soccer field is a walled boundary. Half a mile form the walled boundary are two mansions, right on the beach front. I wonder if dominos were part of real life. I wonder how they would fall, how they would line up. I feel like the earthquake was a preview to a domino affect. Beach front property mansions with massive amounts of land, hit on the boundary with a tent city, on a soccer field attached to a bungalow, that keeps former boys from the street, the boundary on the other side which hits the school, both inside and outside the tent, the first Montessori program in the city. Alongside all this stray animals and patches of empty fields of grass and such. Further down a church. Every night there is service. Every night when you walk down the street and at some point you hearing singing all from the churches.
