I received a call from a friend of mine telling me that she received a call from a doctor in North-Western. He told her that 5 clinical officers were needed and all she had to do was inform her other 3 friends about the opportunity and then pay for medical reports needed for one to work in the mines. He said he had a friend at a named hospital in Kitwe who would write the reports for us. We all sent him K700 ($30.90) each for the medicals and he told us to start off the following day and drop off in Kitwe as the busses taking us to North-Western would be found there. He assured us that we would start working the following week.

Following morning we started off from Lusaka around 5, reached Kitwe at 13, tried to call the man but he wasn’t picking up. He would only pick up if we used a strange number. We continued calling him till 17 but the calls went unanswered.

Luckily one of my friends has a sister in Kitwe where we went to send the night..

He called the following morning apologizing and said he’s sorry as he had misplaced his phone, he told us one of the recruiting officers was corrupt and we needed to pay money for us to get the jobs, he gave us the same officer’s number and told us to talk to him and see how much he would charge us.

We called the officer and he told us to pay a thousand each, we told him we didn’t have money at the moment and we would pay when we get to North-Western but he refused and said ”ok just give me K500 ($22.07) each” and the bus would come pick us. He said he was only doing us a favour because we were stranded in Kitwe. We sent him the K500 ($22.07) each and that’s how his phone went off, tried to call the doctor in North-Western but his phone was also off. We just had to get credit and come back to Lusaka the following morning.