Zambia World Wide

I will continue for now as above, most of the work carried out by the township department was routine domestic repairs, water heaters, cookers, fridges and house wiring. It sounds like an easy job which in some ways it was, however they also had to be diplomats. It was quite amazing to see how many of the women could behave, I am sure their behaviour would have been different back in their own countries. If their neighbour had a better cooker or fridge than the one they had they would complain, they would complain if a neighbour had better light fittings, in fact many of them would look for any excuse to make a complaint. Some would speak to the men with unnecessary rudeness and use foul language. Such language might be fine in England but it is not here, or in many other parts of the world. On a number of occasions it was necessary to send letters to women reminding them that their attitude and language was un-acceptable and would not be tolerated. This is not to say that all the women were like that as the majority, were fine and got on well with my staff. Apart from the housing there was the fish farm to maintain plus two company clubs and quite often they carried out work for other clubs and organizations. We did all we could to assist various sections of the community. Our general manager had a policy of helping the community whenever possible, a policy I was in total agreement with. An example of this, which comes to mind, was an occasion when we were asked by the Rotary Club if we could repair some sterilizer units for the Kitwe Central Hospital. The hospital had seven units and over the months they had all failed, and they could get no new units or get the existing units repaired. The hospital had become desperate as they could no longer perform any kind of surgery. We checked the units and found in most cases the elements had gone, however we could not get the correct elements. We then came up with the idea of fitting twin kettle elements into each unit, this we knew would work. However because of the cost involved we needed permission from the general manager before we could go ahead. Needless to say, he gave permission and we managed to repair five of the seven units. It was because of the attitude our general manager had, that we became known not only in Kitwe but throughout most of Zambia as a helpful and caring company and we were proud of the company’s reputation. There was a lot of help we gave when we could to other charities and clubs, but that occasion stands out.

The transmission and rigging sections usually worked together, it was the only way that I could ensure they were efficient as they often had to share labour and resources. We were engaged in line construction and line maintenance from 220kv down to 66kv and even lower in some of our substations. The 220kv construction job that readily comes to mind is the building of the Likasi/Michelo Tee-off, probably because of the humorous incidents that occurred on this particular job. We were also constructing 66kv transmission lines mainly in the Chingola/ Chililabombwe area. As well as constructing new transmission lines we were also stripping out obsolete lines and equipment. While all this was happening we still had to carry out line maintenance on the existing lines and also continue with the line patrols which were important to the smooth running of our network. Joseph and Kaila were my two line patrol men, both were experienced linesmen and would know which faults would need immediate attention and which could wait. One would patrol the northern area and the other the southern area. Everyday they would patrol a different section of line and make out a daily report. Minor repairs such as earth-ing and fitting of labels on the towers they would do while on patrol, faults that required the isolation of the line would be reported to me and I would fit them in whenever I could. There was a fair amount of paperwork that needed to be kept up to date, but never was as I hated paperwork which was usually unnecessary and a complete waste of time, others however did not agree. The Likasi/Michelo 220kv line was always going to be difficult, it is a six conductor line and we only had equipment to pull two conductors at a time. The job was delayed through lack of materials for some time and by the time we were able to start so had the rainy season. We were struggling right from the start, it was almost impossible to construct the towers as the ground was a sea of mud. We would normally build the tower sections on the ground and then lift into position as we progressed up the tower. However this time we had to hand build all the way to the top, even then our problems were not over as we had difficulty in getting the mobile crane to whatever tower we were building at the time. Once the towers were finally erected we had a bigger problem, which was how to string the conductors without dragging them through the mud. We had self braking jacks, but nothing to pull and tension the conductors under these conditions.