046. JaBig

JaBig @jabig was born in Rwanda. His family, looking for a better life, moved to South Africa and then decided to Immigrate to Canada 18 years ago.

Now, this Montreal based DJ is living his best life mixing tunes and riding bikes. JaBig’s YouTube channel, with almost 400,000 subscribers, features his DEEP & DOPE DJ mixes which are mostly recordings of his live sets.

in 2016, as a personal challenge, he decided to ride his fixed gear road bike across Canada… in the winter. The short video, Escape, put together by MEC, shows JaBig riding the ice roads in northern Canada and demonstrates some of the challenges he had tackling this great and vast country in the winter.

Last August, JaBig cycled across Canada, for the second time, to raise funds for World Bicycle Relief, a global charity that distributes bicycles to front line health care workers and schoolchildren in rural Africa. He was just 5 months into a round the globe tour, riding for the same cause, when the pandemic struck. At the recommendation of the Canadian Government he decided to return home.

In this episode, we chat about the importance of following your own path and living the life that you choose, the simplicity of life on the bike as well as some of the highlights from his journeys. JaBig also discusses the privilege we have here in the west to be able to recreate on bicycles whereas, in other parts of the world, they can mean the all the difference in a person’s quality of life. It’s a way for people to get to work, to school and to the market in order to make a living, which is why World Bicycle Relief is such an important organization.

Keep the rubber side down…