Vocational Talk

At lunchtime on Tuesday 18 April President Mark welcomed 26 members to the weekly meeting. He announced that sadly the Big Dinner planned for 21^st April had had to be postponed owing to a last minute reduction in numbers attending. On the other hand the first evening meeting of a more informal Friends of Kirkcaldy Rotary Club had been held and there will be another such meeting soon. Our meeting on 25^th April will be an Evening Meeting at 6.30pm and will have an emphasis on Youth activities we support.

Other intimations: The second round of the Primary School Quiz will be held in Balwearie on Wednesday 26 April and helpers are asked to arrive by 5.30pm. There are 11 teams participating.

Those involved in the Yoga class on 25 April should arrive by 5.45pm. Kirkcaldy Raith Rotary Club are having their fundraising Golf Day in June. Entry fee is £199 for 4 players, including eats. The April 200 Club draw, which currently has 4 vacancies had winners who were club members, former club members, family members or just friends. The top prize was £191. From April 25^th the prize for each ticket for the weekly raffle will increase to £2

The speaker was Rotarian Zahid Mukhtar, telling us about his life and activities to date. He started by giving the credit which he thought was due to his father for urging him from and early age to work hard, stay fit and try to be a better person. He was born in India as the fourth child in the family who moved from India to Pakistan after Partition. His native languages are Punjabi and Urdu and he had no English when the family moved to Huddersfield in 1972 aged 4 but soon became fluent. On the “hard work” front he started with a paper round in 1984 worked in his fathers' retail business and eventually became the manager. In the last 3 decades his activities have

become very varied, adding times as a building contractor, developing a chip shop in Glenrothes, a carefully researched car wash and successfully combining a post office with an online wine export business.  He and his wife have 3 sons, 2 of whom are hoping to get into the medical profession and the youngest one who sees an opportunity in running an English-speaking taxi service in Beijing.

To keep fit Zahid has a daily workout and has missed only 2 days in the last 30 weeks. In his garden in Leslie his chicken were on one occasion slaughtered by a fox. To prevent a repeat visit he invested in some alpacas, sheep like animals,which escaped one day into Leslie High St.  In the press report of the incident they were wrongly described as llamas. He joined Rotary because he felt its aims coincided with his  In his presentation Zahid demonstrated that he had also mastered the British sense of humour and President Mark led the vote of thanks for a very informative and interesting talk