Gardens and Volunteers in Haiti--'In Port-au-Prince They're Picking Up' with Kidd and Morikeba + the Jardin Tap Tap in Cité Soleil

Kidd and Morikewba and I on 'a people / Who have never been defeated' + one of many Community-Gardens

March 16, 2024

January 2014, Maryse and I visited Haiti as guests of the Port-au-Prince International Jazz Festival. The Festival was spectacularly accomplishing, its musicians and stages and accompanying video equal to the most celebrated in the West. We loved its energies.

Most impressive to me, though, we’re the Haitians of Port-au-Prince whom we observed on all eight days of our stay. They were dozens on the Places and along the Boulevards. They wore clothes that looked threadbare. They were uniformly lean. They worked constantly and at a steady “pace” to clear away rubble that still remained after the 7.0 Earthquake four years earlier.

“Are they just doing this? For free and on their own?” I asked a translator.

“Yes,” he said.

On July 24 of that year, Kidd Jordan of New Orleans and Morikeba Kouyaté of Senegal and I recorded ‘In Port-au-Prince They’re Picking Up’ for our album Women Center Earth, Sea And Sky.

You many want to visit this Web-page of 2019, concerning sculptors and community-gardens of Port-au-Prince, to see more of Haitians’ dignity, energies, intelligence, and principles.

From the album Women Center Earth, Sea And Sky.