By Madhava Smullen
One of the biggest book distributors in East Africa, Dwarka Vasini Devi Dasi, along with her teams Vaishnavi Sanga and Krsna Kids Sena, distributes about eighty percent of ISKCON Nairobi’s total during the December Prabhupada marathon every year. Throughout the rest of the year, she and her niece Ambika Gopi Devi Dasi are the main book distributors in the Kenyan capital. With her efforts, ISKCON Nairobi has gone from distributing about 5,000 books during the marathon to 30,000, to most recently (pre-pandemic) 50,000 books.
The seeds of Dwarka Vasini’s calling in life were clear from a very young age. Born and raised in the small town of Isiolo, 285 kilometers north of Nairobi, in the 1970s and ‘80s, she sought answers to questions like “Who is God?” and “What is our purpose?” even as a child.
Brought up in a Gujarati Hindu family, Dwarka Vasini took Christian religious education in school and asked her father what the Hindu equivalent to the Bible was. “The Bhagavad-gita,” he replied. As she could not read his Gujarati copy, her quest for an English edition began.
After searching throughout all the bookshops and several libraries in Nairobi, Dwarka received a copy of Srila Prabhupada’s Bhagavad-gita As It Is from her aunt, whose husband was a life member of ISKCON Nairobi.
“I brought it back to Isiolo and read it from cover to cover,” Dwarka Vasini says now. “It was like I had been given some kind of elixir.”
In the late 1990s, while visiting her sister in Nairobi, Dwarka asked where the Hare Krishna temple was, and visited it for the first time, becoming completely transfixed by the beauty of Sri Sr Radha Banke Bihari. After reading the Bhagavad-gita and chanting 100 names on her fingers every day at home, she moved to Nairobi in 2003 and began attending guru puja at the ISKCON temple daily before going to work.
Read more: https://iskconnews.org/dwarka-vasini-devi-dasi-called-to-serve,8130/
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