Paul Chinn spent time in places like Moscow and France before tackling a project in Tanzania that got Africa into his bloodstream.
Ivone Vosloo was born and grew up on the Portuguese island of Madeira in the North Atlantic Ocean before coming to South Africa.
And so, from very different directions and backgrounds, the two have joined forces with the Rotary Club of Johannesburg New Dawn where they both had a turn to introduce themselves more fully during the meeting last week.
Paul was born in England in 1948 in what was then known as a Workhouse where, according to him, the destitute wound up. He was born to an unmarried mother whom he never knew and adopted into a family of foundry workers with eleven sons.
Just before he was due to start working there, somebody recognised his talent for mathematics and he was able to get a degree in maths and went into the oil industry. This was followed by a move to Aberdeen where he did Information Technology throughout the North Sea oil industry.
His next move was to New York City, where he was involved in an oil company takeover and then on to Cleveland, Ohio before going into consulting. This took him to Moscow, where he met Babette Gallard. They moved to France, where they traveled extensively on horseback, wrote travel books about their experiences and then started up in publishing.
The next stop was Tanzania, where they helped build a maternity hospital which could operate off the grid. "She was the project manager and I did the IT and managed the tax affairs and stuff like the relation between the government and NGO's.
The hospital was set up to counter the shocking rate of stuck births - there was a 15% probability in Tanzania where many people lived as afar as 70 km away from the nearest hospital and couldn't get there in time to give birth.
They aimed at 50 beds that could handle 2500 births per year, which was achieved.
When Brexit came along they couldn't go back to France and decided to come to South Africa, where Paul decided to improve his intellectual capital (his words) and go to Wits "as probably the oldest undergraduate" to study physics.
He is now using this knowledge to try to get 50% of the houses in Melville to convert to solar energy.
Ivone told the club that she grew up with her mother and grandparents in Madeira after her father, a carpenter by trade, went to work in Mozambique. Her grandparents owned a smallholding with vineyards, sugarcane and livestock. Her grandfather also rented out houses on the property.
Her father returned from Africa for a while, followed by the birth of her brother, but then went to South Africa where she, her brother and mother joined him when she was about 9 years old.
"I realised then that my parents had the same values as my grandparents who believed the more you give, the more you get back.
"I married, had two sons of my own and taught them the same values."
She says her grandparents taught them to be good, to be kind and to share what you have.
Ivone is currently married to a brother of Karlien Kruger, who introduced her to the club.
There was also feedback from the board meeting, amongst other issues that the board had accepted the annual financial statements from the previous Rotary financial year and that the club will invest in an online accounting system (Sage) to better deal with the challenges that a growing membership brings.
Joan Sainsbury reported that the membership committee is aiming at increasing membership to 60 by the end of June, and that people with specific skills that the club presently lacks, will be targeted.
Gavin Atkins said he would soon be able to start with training to get everybody in the club up to speed in the Google Workspace he's set up.
Speaker: Rev. Nick Bell is the speaker this week on the topic of Rotary and his church experience before returning to the UK after a prolonged visit to South Africa.
A Thought for the Week: A woman's guess is much more accurate than a man's certainty. - Rudyard Kipling (1865 - 1936)
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