What’s Norwich got to do with Kenya?

Quite a bit, actually.

It started back in 2004. Norwich resident Emely Silver, coordinator of the Career Center at E.O. Smith in Mansfield, met Irene Kimenyi, a math tutor there. Irene and her husband Samson, a professor of economics at UConn, were both Kenyans.

The Kimenyis had a modest but beautiful dream. They wanted to establish a little community library in their hometown back in Kenya, maybe even distribute books to nearby schools.

It was modest, beautiful, and, though not impossible, not easy, either. The region had few books, and Connecticut had more than it needed. The problem was collecting the books and getting them shipped to the eastern side of Africa.

Irene wasn’t making much progress, but Emely knew how to coordinate a collection drive and get things moving. She rallied some volunteers, and by late summer, they had a shipment of books on its way.

Thirteen volunteers then flew to Kenya for the dedication of the brave little library on the other side of the world.

To Kenya and back

Kenya has a way of touching people. By the time the volunteers got home, they knew their job wasn’t done. Kenya still needed books, and Connecticut still had plenty to spare.

So Emely, her husband Wayne — at the time, Academic Dean at Three Rivers Community College — and several volunteers formed a Norwich-based organization, American Friends of Kenya. With so many dedicated people behind it, AFK expanded exponentially.

But Wayne Silver, current president, says it hasn’t been easy. It’s hard to coordinate things in rural, undeveloped corners of an African nation, hard to find the the right locals to work there, hard to understand Kenyan regulations, hard to account for cultural differences, hard to plan for the unforeseeable. Luck, good and bad, happens.

But they kept at it, and they learned, and little by little AFK became a lot more than books.

With 20 networks inside Kenya, the organization has been able to build 15 libraries across the country, including some specifically for the blind, and expand several others.

Two new libraries are planned.

A dream expanded

AFK now goes on beyond libraries. Four teams — Library, Education, Health Education, and the catch-all General — operate a list of activities that seems more impossible than the original dream.

The American and Kenyan partners create and promote a variety of school activities and programs to help girls and women. They hold workshops and training programs for librarians, teachers, counselors, and health workers. They hold conferences. They work with some 200 schools. They renovate schools. They donate computers and software.

They train Little League coaches. They distribute wheelchairs, crutches, and such for people with disabilities, much of the equipment coming from a program organized by Norwich’s AZ Pawn Shop.

Beyond Connecticut

AFK’s volunteers come from all over Connecticut, 20 other states, and even a few other countries, but its base in Norwich. Donations get dropped off at Otis Library (by appointment only) and stored in Franklin.

The list of local supporting organizations is long but worth mentioning: the Noontime, Sunrise, Community Corp, Stonington and Mystic Rotary groups, the Norwich Lions, the Norwich NAACP, Norwich Little League, Norwich Free Academy, Norwich Tech High School, Three Rivers, and the Unitarian-Universalist Church of Norwich.

It’s also worth nothing that AFK is entirely volunteer. There are no paid employees.

The teams that go to Kenya almost every year pay their own way.

On May 14, more than 25 volunteers converged on Murphy Storage in Franklin.

They packed 20,000 books, a lot of school supplies, sports equipment, library shelving, furniture, medical supplies and mobility equipment into a 40-foot shipping container.

And off it went to Kenya, from Connecticut, with love.

For more information or to donate funds or materials, contact AFK at AFKinc.org.

Glenn Alan Cheney is the author of “Love and Death in the Kingdom of Swaziland” and several other books. He can be reached at glenn@NLLibrarium.com.