Thursday & Friday, 26-27 June 1986: A Rotary Conference to Remember!

Sunday, June 29, 5:00PM, home of Abe and Vera Galaun, Lusaka, Zambia

It was about 3:00PM when my driver got me to Abe and Vera’s country home near Lusaka.  I took a bath, then Kenyas, the man servant, brought me a local lager.  Bob, the new 40-year-old president of the Selebi-Phikwe, Botswana Rotary Club, arrived back from the conference.  He was also staying here and we quaffed a couple of cool ones together. 

Soon Vera arrived home.  She’s a slight, pleasant but retiring Jewish woman in her late 60s.  Kenyas brought in her usual Scotch.  Then Abe arrived home from a Rotary golf game.  He is a gruff old Lithuanian Jew who immediately asked me to please move to another chair – I was sitting in his.  I found him to be a very interesting character once he opened up.  He still has a thick accent even though he’s been in Zambia since the 1940s when it was still a British colony, Northern Rhodesia.  I learned later that Abe is one of the largest commercial farmers in the country.  No wonder Vera, who runs the farm’s office, could easily find a spare driver to fetch me from the airport.   

One of the Galaun farms near Lusaka.  Left to right:  John Williams who manages the prize bulls, an 1800-pound Boran bull, an African employee, and Abe.  Abe and Vera Galaun own one of the largest commercial farming operations in Zambia.

The Rotarians had an informal dinner at the Longhorn, a local Chinese restaurant that featured a delicious buffet with lots of curry dishes.  Bob, Abe, Vera, and I arrived about 7:45 to meet a throng of perhaps 50 Rotarians and wives who were most definitely in a party mood.  It was the best time I’d had at a Rotarian event in Africa.  I was pleased to see that, unlike the South African clubs, the District 920 crowd looked like the friggin’ U.N. There were blacks, whites, browns, and yellows all mixing freely and enjoying each other’s company.  There were representatives from capitalist countries as well as socialist ones.  One table was predominantly French speakers.   There were Christians, Jews, Hindus, heathens, and maybe Moslems although I didn’t see any turbans until the meeting the following day.  On one side of my table was a multi-racial couple from Lusaka.  On the other a burly Irishman who owns a hotel in Mombasa, Kenya.  Wine kept magically appearing and quickly disappearing.  We ate like fucking pigs as we got more and more shit-faced.  It was Malagasy (Madagascar) Independence Day, so a group of well-oiled, French-speaking, multi-colored Malagasies stood up and sang their national anthem.  That started off a whole round of singing.  Several of us Irishmen crooned choruses of “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” and “Danny Boy”.  The French and Zambian national anthems were sung.  A jolly French-speaking Indian fellow from the Comoros Islands (in the Indian Ocean) danced with a raucous white English woman.  Soon the jokes started, of course: 

“What’s the difference between Australia and yoghurt?”  Answer:  “Yoghurt is a living culture.”

The restaurant staff kept watching us while laughing.  We’d taken over the bloody place.  They finally threw us out around 11:30PM.  Some of the “Frenchies” went off to a local disco to continue partying.  

The evening was what Rotary should be as far as I’m concerned.  Why raise money for charity (which Rotary does very well) if you can’t make friends with and have fun with people from all over the world in the process?  And drink a lot.

The next morning, I attended the final session of the conference.  Usually I get bored with meetings, but this one kept my attention.  For one thing, Rotary International has decreed that District 920 be subdivided into two new districts after next year’s conference.  It is a huge district comprising 12 countries stretching from Djibouti at the southern end of the Red Sea to Botswana several thousand miles to the south (South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Malawi are in separate districts).  Included are the Indian Ocean islands of Madagascar, the Comoros, the Seychelles, Mauritius, and Reunion.  Other countries on the African continent are Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, and Zambia.  There has been a big controversy over whether to split the district north-south or east-west.  The Francophones are pissed off because they want to stay together.  Rotary International (RI) has imposed new boundaries which call for new northern and southern districts.  No one seems too happy with the decision.

Names of countries included in Rotary District 920 are surrounded by red boxes.

Map source:  https://www.loc.gov/resource/g8200.ct002535/?r=-0.227,0.128,1.519,0.999,0

 

All reports at the meeting were read first in English, then in French.  Thus, I had a chance to practice listening to and understanding French.  My French is rusty as I’ve not used it much since took the Graduate Student Foreign Language Test in French back in 1971.  A report on local Rotary bulletins criticized some of them for being too heavy on the chit-chat, including who said grace at the last meeting and other trivial matters. 

The financial report was presented, interestingly enough, in U.S. dollars.  It seems that George Washington has become the world’s monetary standard.  Some of the clubs in countries with highly unstable currencies (e.g., Zambia and Tanzania) have had difficulty making their dues payments to RI in U.S. dollars.  Their currencies have become deflated, so they don’t have enough money and wind up operating in the red.  RI even had to give the Addis Ababa, Ethiopia club a special dispensation or they would have gone under. 

To give you an idea of how bad currency fluctuations can be in this part of the world, the U.S. dollar equaled 2.5 Zambian Kwachas last year.  Last week, the rate was at 7.25Kw to the dollar.  The rate is based on what Zambian businesses are willing to pay for foreign exchange at auctions held by the bank of Zambia.  The fewer U.S. dollars available, the more they’re willing to pay.  This week the rate has jumped to 7.51.  You can imagine what this does to inflation here.  Every time the Kwacha goes down, prices eventually have to go up because items like chemicals, spare auto parts, heavy machinery, and office equipment are imported.  When their price goes up, it has a ripple effect through the economy. 

I noticed that in today’s paper that Abe Galaun bid 7.46Kw to obtain US$3.2 million to buy equipment for a new abattoir (slaughter house).  His bank may be willing to loan him that much money in kwacha or he may even have that much in cash.  But he won’t get the 3.2 million bucks this time around because his bid wasn’t at least 7.51Kw. 

You can’t buy stuff abroad with a soft currency like the kwacha or Zimbabwe dollar which no one wants and are illegal to export anyway.  It’s tough being a businessman in the third world – it’s even tougher being a consumer!

A One Kwacha note from the 1970s has a portrait of President Kenneth Kaunda on the front and commemorates the birth of the second republic on the back.

 

Back to the district Rotary meeting.  It was chaired by Chris, the District Governor.  Chris is a black, bespectacled Lusaka veterinarian who is shaped like a Chicago Bears fullback.  There were about 100 Rotarians and wives present at the meeting.  We heard a report on the Rotary Scholarship Fund.  Sadly, some scholarships in certain fields go unused, a real loss in a part of the world that desperately needs more educated professionals.  

George, the French-speaking District Governor-elect who hails from Madagascar, gave a short talk on the RI theme for ’86-87:  “Rotary Brings Hope.”  Wearing a spiffy ascot, George talked about the humanitarian commitment of Rotary and unity in diversity, a phrase which most certainly applied to this cosmopolitan group. 

District Governor Chris gave his farewell report.  He told of how, when he visited the Mombasa, Kenya club, they took him out to an African village.  He was made a chief and presented with a new wife.  I suspected that the latter did not meet with approval from his present wife and six daughters.  He visited Djibouti with the president of RI who was persuaded that Rotary should give aid to the drought-stricken little country which is sandwiched between Ethiopia, Somalia, and the Gulf of Aden.  When Chris visited Uganda, he saw an area covered with human skulls and bones.  He was pleased to report that Rotary in Uganda is now strong, but he spoke movingly about the suffering and atrocities which many Uganda Rotarians endured under that asshole-monster (my description, not his), Idi Amin.  I would like to see a few right-wing South Africans meet Chris, then justify to me how they could deny equal rights to a bright, eloquent African man like him, were he living in South Africa.     

 

Some of the victims of the Idi Amin regime recovered by local farmers in the Luwero Triangle region north of Kampala, Uganda in 1987.

Source:  http://links.org.au/node/2784