Musical Moment #2

This isn't a new moment and the music doesn't match what was going on at the time, but it's still hilarious whenever I think about it, so I'm going to write about it anyway.

I spent three months in Rwanda and Uganda last summer, working at Rwanda's only English language daily newspaper, The New Times, as part of Carleton University's Rwanda Initiative.

I lived in Kigali, but on the weekends I would take off to other parts of Rwanda and one weekend I wandered up to Kampala and Jinja, which are in Uganda (but that's not relevant here). One weekend, I went with a group of fellow Rwanda Initiative participants to Gisenyi, which is a town that borders the Democratic Republic Of The Congo.

We went for a long walk to Rwanda's brewery, which is just outside Gisenyi (about an hour by foot). Rwandan beer is typically sold in bottles that are about twice the size of ours, and we wanted to see if we could buy some at the brewery or at least get a tour of it. Turns out it was closed.

On the way back to Gisenyi we were tired, so we got on a public bus. (Buses in Rwanda look like this and are actually called taxis. I never did manage to figure out what they call our version of taxis while I was there.)

The bus driver started talking to the three of us, put a tape in his stereo and said something about turning the volume up almost all the way. A ridiculous remix of Enrique Iglesias' "Hero" started blasting out of the sound system.

Not even five minutes into the journey, the bus stalled while going up a hill. We started to roll backwards. Now, they don't call Rwanda "le pays des mille collines" (the land of a thousand hills for those who don't parler francais) for no reason. Gisenyi has a nice beach on Lake Kivu and town square and is positively serene compared to the chaos in the DRC right across the border, but man is the area around it ever hilly (as all of Rwanda is). The entire area pretty much looks like this.

The fact that we were rolling backwards on a hill this size was scary, but that this particular song was playing over the stereo made the event ridiculously comedic. At one point, my friend David's cellphone rang and he picked it up, said, "Hello, I can't talk right now; I'm rolling backwards at rapid speed down a hill," to which everyone laughed.

Though I dislike "Hero," I'll forever associate it with this particular event, and that means I still can't listen to it without bursting out into laughter.