How a Malawian teenager harnessed the power of the wind

African Dynamo

• Posted by:
  Mark Frauenfelder
  
• on September 29, 2009 at 8:06 am
  

How a Malawian teenager harnessed the power of the wind.


William Kamkwamba’s parents couldn’t afford the $80 yearly tuition
for their son’s school. The boy sneaked into the classroom anyway,
dodging administrators for a few weeks until they caught him. Still
emaciated from the recent deadly famine that had killed friends and
neighbors, he went back to work on his family’s corn and tobacco farm
in rural Malawi, Africa.
With
no hope of getting the funds to go back to school, William continued
his education by teaching himself, borrowing books from the small
library at the elementary school in his village. One day, when William
was 14, he went to the library searching for an English-Chichewa
dictionary to find out what the English word “grapes” meant, and came
across a fifth-grade science book called Using Energy. Describing this moment in his autobiography, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (co-written with Bryan Mealer), William wrote, “The book has since changed my life.”
Using Energy described how windmills could be used to
generate electricity. Only two percent of Malawians have electricity,
and the service is notoriously unreliable. William decided an electric
windmill was something he wanted to make. Illuminating his house and
the other houses in his village would mean that people could read at
night after work. A windmill to pump water would mean that they could
grow two crops a year rather than one, grow vegetable gardens, and not
have to spend two hours a day hauling water. “A windmill meant more
than just power,” he wrote, “it was freedom.”
For an educated adult living in a developed nation, designing and
building a wind turbine that generates electricity is something to be
proud of. For a half-starved, uneducated boy living in a country
plagued with drought, famine, poverty, disease, a cruelly corrupt
government, crippling superstitions, and low expectations, it’s another
thing altogether. It’s nothing short of monumental.

William scoured trash bins and junkyards for materials he could use
to build his windmill. With only a couple of wrenches at his disposal,
and unable to afford even nuts and bolts, he collected things that most
people would consider garbage—slime-clogged plastic pipes, a broken
bicycle, a discarded tractor fan—and assembled them into a wind-powered
dynamo. For a soldering iron, he used a stiff piece of wire heated in a
fire. A bent bicycle spoke served as a size adapter for his wrenches.
Months later, in front of a crowd of disbelievers who had scoffed at
him for behaving strangely, William lashed his machine to the top of a
16-foot tower made from blue gum tree branches. As the blades began
turning in the breeze, a car light bulb in William’s hand started to
glow. In the weeks that followed, William went on to wire his house
with four light bulbs and two radios, installing switches made from
rubber sandals, and scratch-building a circuit breaker to keep the
thatch roof of his house from catching fire.
He begged his parents to send him to school—he had big dreams for
modernizing his village and needed to learn more math, physics, and
electricity to realize them—but they barely had enough money to feed
him and his five sisters.
William
and his windmill remained a local curiosity for a number of months,
until the head of a national teacher’s organization saw the windmill
and recognized the boy’s accomplishment as something extraordinary. A
media firestorm ensued, with newspaper articles, blog posts, radio
stories, and a presentation at TED Africa in Tanzania (TED stands for
Technology Entertainment Design), where William, who didn’t know about
laptop computers and had never heard of Google, discovered airplanes,
mattresses, hotels, air conditioning, and the mind-boggling concept of
having as much food as you wanted whenever you wanted it. Befriended by
Tom Rielly, TED’s irrepressible and well-connected partnership
director, William was taken on a tour of the United States, where he
met many high-tech millionaires who were charmed by the instantly
likable underdog who never complained about the lousy cards he got
dealt in the game of life. They happily contributed to William’s plans
to electrify, irrigate, and educate his village, as well as pay his
tuition at the prestigious African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg.
With so many tales of bloody hopelessness coming out of Africa, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
reads like a novel with a happy ending, even though it’s just the
beginning for this remarkable young man, now 21 years old. I have no
doubt that William—who is rapidly becoming a symbol of promise and
possibility for the people of Africa—will be leading the way.

LEARN MORE
Watch a short documentary about William Kamkwamba here.
Find The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer on Amazon.
Mark Frauenfelder is the editor-in-chief of Make magazine and the founder of Boing Boing. He is currently writing a book on the do-it-yourself movement for Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin.
Photos by Tom Rielly

what an interesting story. I am researching him on google to learn about his drive to success...Green energy is the way to the future...