Sit Down Bus Driver!

I went to a party this past weekend in a distant part of Rwanda. There were a lot of Mzungus at this party, so it was pretty fun. A girl met the A&M Interns shortly after we arrived, and she is the person who put on the party. The party was interesting; however, it was not as interesting as the bus ride to the party.
The journey to this party would be a long one. We took a large bus from Kigali to Butare. We have taken this bus before, and it is a pretty good ride. The bus is large, and even though it is crowded, this bus is pretty comfortable. After arriving in Butare, the other Interns and I went to a nice restaurant and had dinner. We also did some shopping and a few other miscellaneous tasks. It finally came time for us to ride to this distant village in Rwanda. The bus we would have to take was not like the Bus before.
I saw the bus pull up to the bus top, and I was taken back. It was about the size of a small van. It was a white bus with green stripes painted on it. The seats were covered in plastic as well as the dashboard. This bus was not bus...it was a small van. Poorer families back in the US would probably have purchased this bust for a family of about 7 or 8. This is about how many people it would comfortably fit. We had about 18 on our bus....Van. They were all excited to be seated in a bus with white people. It was an interesting ride. It was dark when we left.
Just when I thought that we could not physically hold any more people in this VAN, we stopped a picked up 2 more. I had a window seat, so I could breathe. We were trucking a long just fine. It was to be a three hour ride. It would have been a two hour ride, but we had to stop several times so that people could pee on the side of the road. It was pretty uneventful except for the short stops for urination until our driver almost killed a guy.
In Rwanda, vehicles have the right of way. When our van was scooting down the highway, it would honk for people to get out of the way...they usually did. At one point on this trip, we were going through a small village. Another van was coming our direction on a narrow road. On this narrow road there was also a gentleman about 20 years old walking down the right side of the street. Usually our Van would have simply gone around him; however, this time it could not because another van was coming. This young man was standing on the right side of the road, the side that we were traveling down. He was with his back towards us, and he was not moving.
Our driver honked for the man to get out of the way, but the man would not move. Our driver continued to honk again and again, but still the man did not move. Finally our driver slammed on his breaks and all of us fell forward smashing our heads against the plastic covered seats in front of us. The bus driver came to a complete stop just in front of the man. The man’s back was facing us as he walked, but after hearing the screeching of breaks and a loud horn made him turn and face us.
After our driver stopped the van, he slowly put the Van in park. He opened the door very slowly as if something was wrong. Once he stepped out of the van, the man that we had almost hit started walking away. Our driver started chasing him. He was moving at a speed that I had never seen before. He would have lapped a Kenya Olympian. He was making ground, and the only other person in the world faster than him was the man that we had almost turned into hamburger meat. The driver was fast, the pedestrian was faster. The driver chased him for about 5 min before returning to the van and taking us on our journey. I still wonder what he would have done if he would have caught the man. I know that it would have been painful. When he returned to the van I started shouting, “Komera, Komera!” This means, “Power and Strength to you!” All of the Rwandans laughed at me for yelling this. At that moment, the bus driver was my hero. He had all the road rage of a New Yorker during rush hour, but twice the courage and 10 times the speed.
The moral to the story is:

Even if you don’t get hit by a speeding van carrying twice the legal limit of capacity,
you can still get hit by the fist of a disgruntle bus driver!
Look both ways before you cross the street, and be ready to run at any moment.