It seems to center on opportunities....

When I made my first visit to Kenya in the fall of 2002 I was in the midst of completing my Masters of Library Science, despite having worked in an academic library for a little more than a decade (this is for another blog at another time...). While I was at NEGST my visit overlapped with a visit by Ferne Weimer, then director of the Billy Graham Center library. After my visit one of the themes that seemed to come to the fore was that the West was roughly about 10 years ahead of the library at NEGST, and I assumed the libraries in Kenya. I was struck that the staff were functioning well in an analog context but that they being stymied in moving towards becoming a library in a digital context.
After my return Ferne and I talked and a way was found (mainly by Ferne) to attempt to bring some of the librarians at the theological institutions in Nairobi to Wheaton to provide opportunities to view libraries that were functioning in a digital manner. Opportunities seemed to be key. Opportunities, or in other words, experiences, were what could widen the perspective of these librarians. One of the librarians that were able to visit in the summer of 2003 was Charles Nandain, from the Nairobi International School of Theology.
NIST is roughly a 20-25 minute ride from NEGST. It is in a more densely populated area, not like the rural setting that NEGST has in Karen. Whereas NEGST has a 50 acre compound, NIST is situated on less than a handful of acreage. The look and feel are quite different. NEGST feels expansive and NIST seems crowded. NIST was begun under the leadership of Campus Crusade, Africa--unfortunately the receive no real funding from Campus Crusade in the States and the relationship between NIST and the USA group has dwindled since the death of Bill Bright.

In July of 2003, Charles and a librarian from Daystar, another Christian university in Nairobi, came for a month long visit. During that time I worked with Charles to convert the records of his library, which were kept in an MSAccess database, into MARC format--the format that online catalogs use. This was a helpful exercise for me, but it was invaluable for Charles. The data that we converted now serves as the core of their online catalog. Something that can take a Western librarian a week to do could very likely take months, if not years, in Kenya. We've been blessed with opportunities.