The Rotary Club of Kitwe North

From Great North Road

By Maurice Timlin.

Shortly after arriving in Zambia in 1978 I was persuaded by my German boss to join the Rotary Club of Kitwe North as he felt that it was good for the image of the Company and that there was the potential for developing relationships with other members which could lead to business for us. There was a certain reluctance on my part to join partly because I was being pressurised into joining for the wrong reasons and secondly, because I believed that clubs such as Rotary and Round Table were a bit snobbish in who they invited to join and certainly, in the UK, they seemed to be the reserve of the Professional people such as Bankers, Accountants, Teachers and Business Owners who could easily find the time to attend the business lunches which were an essential requirement for members. Back home in England in the 20 years of work since leaving school I had never been invited to join a branch of the Rotary Club whereas here in Zambia I was actually being coerced into joining, not so much for charitable reasons but to enhance our Company’s business. However, I decided to join as I had the feeling that Erles Jones the Regional Governor who had founded the club in the early 70s was struggling to maintain a core membership in the face of a transient Copperbelt expatriate population.

Erles was a one man charitable crusade and was well-known for his work to improve prisoners’ welfare in Zambia as well as trying to run his own Business. As a result of Erles’s attitude towards charity and service to the community above all else, I soon modified my opinions that not all Rotarians were snobs and maybe during the previous 20 years I could have made some direct approach to my local branch back home if I had any serious intention of engaging in some charitable work in the community. I will not go into the reasons or excuses for not making such an approach other than to say that there are those who talk and those who act. Erles Jones was one of those who acted and I was one of those who talked.

There was no gentle easing into the activities of the club as membership was a constant battle and I was almost immediately placed with a committee which had the responsibility of finding worthy causes within the Kitwe community which could be taken on as a charitable project from start to finish. I was given a couple of potential projects to investigate including one to renovate the Mortuary at Kitwe General Hospital. Little did I realise what this would entail, as I made my way to the Hospital one Saturday morning. The first thing I noticed on arrival was a number of wheelchair- bound patients moving around on tyre-less wheels. These wheelchairs had been donated through Rotary International via a Rotary Club in Japan about six months previously for the use of convalescing patients who were recovering from operations but did not necessarily need to spend all day in bed. It did not take long for someone to realise that these wheelchair tyres were the same size as a standard bicycle and thus could be better employed on a Flying Pigeon Chinese bicycle, hence the tireless wheelchairs.

On my way to the Mortuary I passed what should have been a rather pleasant Ornamental Garden, again, suitable for long-stay convalescing patients to sit out in the sunshine during the day rather than in a bed in a stuffy ward. This garden had been completed as a Rotary Club project less than a year earlier but in that time had regressed back to bush as no-one had bothered to maintain it.

On arriving at the Mortuary the first thing to hit me was the smell of death. I did not recognise this smell at the time having never been in the vicinity of death or corpses before, however, as soon as I pulled open the Mortuary doors I was hit full-on by this unbelievable stench. The reason for the smell was obvious as the incumbents were dead but the smell was accentuated by the fact that the refrigeration, which should have maintained at an ideal temperature of around 40 Fahrenheit to prevent rapid decomposition of the corpses, was, in fact, broken and the room was at an ambient temperature of around 80 degrees. Furthermore, as many of the corpses were ‘John Does’ they could not be disposed of for burial until some token effort had been made to ascertain their true identity and a post-mortem had been carried out to determine the cause of death. Consequently, many of the bodies stored in the Mortuary had been in there longer than is ideal even under refrigerated conditions. I soon realised that in order to make a proper assessment of the renovation I would need to enter the main storage room where the corpses are stacked on shelves in their home-made shrouds. The lighting was not working so I was forced to wedge open the double doors in order to allow any light from outside into the room. Even then it was barely a half light which took some time to become accustomed to and to be able to work out the configuration of the room and the shelves on which the corpses were stacked. The stainless steel shelves or trays were in bad condition in that many were leaning drunkenly towards the floor on one side due to failure of the supports which held each shelf in a cantilever arrangement. I was half expecting the bodies to be sliding off while I was there but somehow I was spared this experience. I made some notes of what work needed doing on an urgent basis, which was almost everything that required doing except the final coat of paint.

While I was there the local police brought in a corpse on a theatre trolley which decided to shed one of the front wheels while in transit, thus discharging the corpse onto the ground with a sickening thud. “Don’t worry”, said the policeman “He is dead so he cannot feel it”. No sooner had I submitted my report on the renovations required when I was more or less promoted to committee chairman, again due to member turnover. This committee was to meet once per week in the back room of the Kitwe Club which was as near to the bar as you could get and still hold a private meeting. Notice was given to the various committee members who attended the regular Friday lunch at the same venue, that a meeting would be held on the following Wednesday at a specified time which was normally after 6.00pm so that all could attend.

On the due date I arrived at the Club some 15 minutes early so that I would have my prepared agenda ready for the meeting. I settled down with a Mosi waiting for the members to arrive for the meeting. I sat there, like a lemon, for the next 45 minutes during which not one member turned up. The only compensation I had from this wasted meeting was that I met my work colleague and friend Geoffrey Mporokoso who was the son of a previous Chief Chitimukulu of the Bemba tribe. We spent the remainder of the evening getting rat-faced, he commiserating with me that nobody had turned up for my meeting and me commiserating with him that he did not succeed to his father’s title as he expected, on his fathers death. It put things in perspective that he had more to gripe about than I had. Unfortunately, the chieftainship went sideways to an uncle who I believe was Lakement Ngandu. Geoffrey unfortunately died at a relatively young age around 1990.

At the following Friday lunch I made some grumbling noises through the Chairman John Veitch, the General Manager of Hybrid Poultry, who implored all committee members to ensure that they attended the next meeting on the following Wednesday. Sadly the same thing occurred with nobody turning up for the meeting. Once again, myself and Geoffrey Mporokoso got rat-faced in the commiserations to each other that started the week before. I later advised the Chairman privately that if nobody attended the next meeting, I would be resigning from the Rotary Club of Kitwe North. Unfortunately, the same thing happened the following Wednesday in that not one Committee member turned up for the meeting. Without further delay I submitted my resignation to the Club stating that my time was as precious as the next man and I was not going to waste it waiting for people to turn up for meetings which they failed to attend. Both John Veitch and Erles Jones asked me to reconsider my decision to resign but unfortunately my mind was made up. I never asked the other six members of my committee for their excuses and I cannot remember any being offered but like I said earlier, there are those who talk and there are those who do.

I later had the pleasure of meeting Lakement Ngandu, the new Chief Chitimukulu through the Bowling fraternity as he was a member of the Nchanga Bowling Club. I found him to be a kind and generous person with the wisdom to take on the burden of Chieftainship and he could also play a mean game of bowls.