In February of this year, Zambian police chased some criminals into the township of Kansanshi near the copper smelter, shooting wildly. In the crossfire a young girl called Bukata (13 yrs old) was shot.
She was a keen footballer in the local girls’ team. Because of a delay getting treatment for her leg wound, the leg turned gangrenous and had to be amputated high above the knee. But Bukata didn’t give up and has now set her mind to a new goal – to complete her studies. With the help of Godfridah, a teacher and community leader known to us, she is striving to obtain good exam results with the same passion she once gave to sport.
Mabvuto (the son of Ethel who runs the hostel where the MMTA charity Friends of Mufulira’s electives stay) worked for a South African supplier of hygiene equipment in Lusaka for a number of years. He has an economics and accounting degree, he is charming, speaks goods English, and is a hard worker.
He is the person who meets our electives on arrival in Ndola and transfers them to Mufulira safely, answers their questions, tells them about the community and keeps an eye on them. But at his work, while the South African employers regularly improved the pay of his white colleagues, they did not improve his. And so Mabvuto resigned and explained the reasons to his bosses. He has set up on his own.
Besnart (Bessie) is a relative of Ethel, Mabvuto’s mum. Ethel has suffered for years with impaired health. But, like anyone who has a roof over their head in Mufulira (which Ethel has), she takes in children from poorer members of the family. Ethel was visiting her family in a village in the bush in Eastern Province.
As she was leaving, a girl of 12 ran after her and begged Ethel to take her with her, as the girl was due to be sold off in marriage to an older man. Poverty means that such arrangements are common. Elderly as Ethel is, she took the girl back with her to Mufulira. Bessy is now studying to become a health clinician – a Bachelor of Occupational Health and Safety Management – at the Zambia Catholic University in Kalalushi.
Friends of Mufulira’s medical student electives remain as heartbreakingly high-minded, selfless, intelligent, and wonderful as ever. Each cohort brings with it new accomplishments and skills. Last year we had one elective from Edinburgh and three from Liverpool. One of them produced a documentary film.
We showed it at the MMTA dinner on a big screen. The room was silent. We cannot distribute or show the film further because it was so accurate that a local doctor was concerned that, being an ethnic minority, she could be made a scapegoat for the reality it showed.
The above human stories are the things that push us at Friends of Mufulira (the MMTAs charity) to continue to work, to find ways to deliver support. Funding four new electives to spend a month at Ronald Ross Hospital in Mufulira (before graduating to be resident doctors in the UK) is our primary job. And understanding this community, we hope, helps us spread our net wider, sometimes to give as individuals too outside the charity.
The wider problems we see in Mufulira are common to all resource-based communities – that of pollution and its direct relationship to poverty, health and wellbeing. Nothing brings this home more than the February 2025 dam burst at Sino-Tech Leach’s Chamibishi plant when tailings heavy with arsenic, uranium and lead bled directly into the Kafue River.
Why is this relevant, you may ask? Perhaps, because it is an example of how people, communities, and the environment so often pay the price for the extraction of resources. In this case many in the farming community near Chambishi now have contaminated land, the fish in the river have been poisoned, and water has become undrinkable1 .
These facts are a memo to us all – to take care all along the supply chain about how we extract metals – not just how we sell them. We have the power, in ways large and small, to prevent the excesses of our extractive industry – so long as the will is there.
By Anthony Lipmann
Trustee,
Friends of Mufulira
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