There is a particular kind of friend that every Kigali professional eventually meets. They arrive on Monday morning looking suspiciously well, their skin doing something you cannot quite name but very much want to replicate, and when you ask what happened over the weekend, they do not mention a retreat or a flight anywhere with a beach. They say: I have been doing shots.
The mind goes where it usually goes in Kigali. This city, which sits across the street from a running track in one direction and bad decisions in another, has given the word “shot” a thoroughly established meaning. You order them at the bar, regret them at approximately 2 AM (harya utubari dufuga ryari?), and spend Sunday reconstructing events in reverse chronological order. A shot is not, in the common understanding, something you take for your health, which makes the wellness shot’s increasingly visible presence in this city something of a plot twist nobody saw arriving.
These are small, concentrated drinks built from ingredients rather than fermentation, designed to address specific physical concerns with an efficiency that their modest size makes look slightly aggressive. They come in a 60ml bottle with the quiet confidence of something that knows exactly what it is doing, which is considerably more than can be said for the other kind of shot from last Friday.
The name that draws the most attention, without much contest, is the Flat Tummy Shot. The ingredients are lemon, cucumber, ginger and mint, which is a perfectly reasonable combination, but nobody is ordering this because of the cucumber. The Flat Tummy Shot speaks to a very specific human experience that concentrates itself in Kigali most powerfully between Monday and Wednesday, when the weekend’s accounting has started coming through and there is a gap between how one currently looks and how one fully intends to look by Friday. The shot does not promise surgery. It simply exists in the space between ambition and the weekend, and that space, apparently, is large enough to sustain considerable demand.
The Glow Drop operates on entirely different psychology. Its ingredients, cucumber, mint, aloe vera and lime, sound more like a facial than a drink, and the people who order it are not primarily thinking about their digestive system. They are thinking about their colleague, the one who has recently developed the kind of complexion that makes everyone else quietly review how much water they have been drinking, which is almost certainly not enough. Nobody announces that they have started taking the Glow Drop. They simply start looking better and allow the mystery to develop at its own pace, which is exactly the correct strategy and one that requires no explanation to anyone who has ever successfully changed something about their appearance without telling a single person at the office.
The Appetite Control Shot is where things get philosophically interesting. Green apple, cinnamon, lemon and ginger, in a blend designed to moderate how much the body believes it needs to consume. The people who order it most enthusiastically are often, and this observation comes without any judgment whatsoever, the people who follow it immediately with a full meal. The expectation appears to be that the appetite will be controlled by the next meal rather than the current one, which is a generous interpretation of the timeframe but a perfectly human response to optimism.
There is also the G-Fire, which contains pineapple, cucumber, green apple, celery and ginger, and which sounds like it should arrive with some kind of ceremony. It does not. It comes in the same modest bottle as the others, which is slightly disappointing given what the name implies. It tastes less like fire and more like something that has decided to have a serious conversation with your immune system, which depending on the week you have just come through is either exactly what you need or considerably more than you bargained for on a Tuesday afternoon.
The doctor referenced in the headline is not genuinely alarmed. Any concern that exists is more that these things work than that they do not. Concentrated ginger, taken consistently, does something measurable to inflammation. Aloe vera consumed rather than applied does something real to skin over time. Apple cider vinegar, which appears in more than one of these shots, has a body of research behind it that is longer and more serious than most people sitting at a Kigali bar on a Friday would expect or particularly want to hear about. None of this is dramatic, but very little that actually produces results ever is.
Bowl’d carries the full range at RWF 1,500 each, which is, for anyone keeping a running comparison with the previous article, roughly the cost of one quarter of one beer.
The shot your doctor is genuinely worried about remains the one from the bar. These are the ones they might eventually start recommending, once the profession catches up to what your most unreasonably radiant colleague has already figured out.