Mrs. Anna Wie born in the Ukraine, in 1938, and became a refugee to Canada during World War II, after her father was killed by ‘Stalin’s regime’. She got bachelors and master degrees in Library Science in 1967 and in 1988 respectively from the University of Toronto. She came to Eritrea in September 1999, with her husband, Prof Rudy, and has been working as a librarian and as a teacher of library studies at the University of Asmara. Here is an excerpt of the interview with her regarding her activities and related issues during her stay at the University of Asmara:

Q. You have served for more than four years here and I think your stay is nearing its end. What can you tell us about your experience in Eritrea and specifically in the university of Asmara?

Anna: It has been a very good experience. I measure it in several ways, one of which is my personal job satisfaction. I’ve felt satisfied with what I did and with the responses to my work.

Q. You were among the first to set up the Resource Center in the Faculty of Education in 1999. What progress has the library come across?

Anna: When I arrived the shelves were empty, although the books (purchased by the DANIDA fund program) were there waiting for someone to process them. The library was under the supervision of the late Dr. Fesseha; who provided graduate assistants to process data entry using the dbaseIV library program. With all that support, we processed 800 books by the middle of October 1999 and that’s when the Center officially started giving services. One of the specialties of the Resource Center is that it doesn’t only have books but Internet connection, videos and the possibility to preview those videos. The Center attracted visitors from the Ministry of Education and other institutions, so the center was heavily used and students especially at the Faculty of Education showed their appreciation.

Q. Many members of the university community portray you as a model of hard work, dedication and devotion. How did you cultivate these ethics of work?

Anna: I was brought up in a home and situation where hard work was necessary; it was fostered by our extended family. Also the ethics of work in the northern hemisphere necessitates a good work ethics. The other combination is that, whenever I set a goal and achieve it I always got a reward or positive strokes of some sort either within the family or from work. So these motivate me to keep on hard working.

 

Q. It is extremely rare to find people at your age working in Eritrea. What sort of problems do you encounter and how do you manage to overcome them?

Anna: You are as young as your heart is. It is not your chronological age that defines how much you can do. Governments, and the society tend to that, but the individual person need not do that.
I am fortunate to have good health and like doing what I am doing and that gives me stamina. And I like to see things done well if I am involved in it. My end goal here in the library has always been getting information to the user.

Q. We heard the university library is introducing a new program (software). Could you give us some insights about it?

Anna: I taught a course about automation in that we looked at what library automation is and how it is implemented. When it came to the end of my 4th year here, we saw that the MHO program from The Netherlands was anxious to get automation started in the Main Library; I was asked to consider helping during the initial stages of the process.

Changing manual labor to automotive labor in itself is a long and tedious transition. Once it is made, however, the benefits are worth all the efforts put into it. The benefits being easy access to information by author, title and subject. Keeping track of books: where it is, who has it, when it is due and so on. The program’s final target is providing easy access to information for the users.
Now we have 8 computers in the cataloging room ready to be fully connected to the ADLIB server.

 

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