After leaving Washington DC (where we did our presentation five times in one day), Windmill Bill and I flew to Los Angeles and stopped by the Current TV studios, where we were guests on Max and Jason: Still Up. The show was laid back and everyone was friendly, exactly what we needed after a grueling flight.
Christian Science Monitor publishes our first review.
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
The inspiring autobiography of the Malawian boy who taught himself physics in order to bring a windmill to his village.
By Kate Vander Wiede | October 15, 2009 edition
If you thought physics was tough to grasp in high school, William Kamkwamba will seem like a hero to you. And really, he is. Forced to drop out of secondary school when his family couldn’t afford school fees, 14-year-old Kamkwamba used his free time to build a windmill that operated on principles of physics he managed to teach himself.
This windmill brought electricity to his home and eventually his entire village – a luxury that in Malawi is often reserved for the government and the wealthy.
To help Kamkwamba tell his story, journalist Bryan Mealer traveled back to Africa. He’d lived in the Congo for three years while working for the Associated Press. His first book, “All Things Must Fight To Live,” came out in 2008, and told the story of a country ravaged by war. This time Mealer started in Malawi. There, he spent months living with Kamkwamba’s family, interviewing friends and relatives. He spent hours learning about physics, magnets, and electricity so he could understand what Kamkwamba had created.
The result is The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, an autobiography so moving that it is almost impossible to read without tears. In understated and simple prose, Kamkwamba and Mealer offer readers a tour through one Malawian boy’s inspiring life.
Kamkwamba’s inquisitive nature is apparent from the start. As a boy he takes apart radios to discover how they work, builds go-carts out of beer cartons, and creates screwdrivers with household materials. When he turns his inquisitive mind toward truck motors, he is taken aback that no one understands how they work. With the innocence that only a child can pull off, he wonders, “Really, how can you drive a truck and not know how it works?”
Then, as he fiddles and tinkers with all he can, tragedy strikes. A famine caused by drought ravages Malawi, and we see the results from Kamkwamba’s perspective. Friends are starving and people try to sell their children in the marketplace for food. Kamkwamba’s own family is reduced to eating one minuscule meal a day.
In a particularly disturbing scene, Kamkwamba recounts the day he witnessed mobs trampling children in their frantic push toward food. “If there’s anything I remember most about that day in Chamama,” he writes, “it’s the sound of crying babies.”
When the famine finally subsides, Kamkwamba, armed with American physics textbooks, starts construction on the windmill. His perseverance in creating this structure is coupled with altruism. Aiming to use the power of the windmill to pump water to the crops, he hopes to free his family from enslavement to the whims of weather.
Despite the highly charged events in Kamkwamba’s life, the telling of his story is surprisingly levelheaded. No sympathy is requested and no blame is bitterly assigned. In fact, a light humor darts in and out of the pages of this book, providing laughs where you wouldn’t have imagined even smiling. As the chief of Kamkwamba’s village begs the government to provide food during the famine and not toilets, Kamkwamba wryly asks the reader, “Because really, how can you use a toilet when you never eat?”
Pictures with captions are peppered throughout the book, giving the story depth and providing more humor. One image shows Kamkwamba as a toddler, with a caption explaining he was “surely plotting some mischief to cause [his] mother grief.”
After the windmill is constructed, Kamkwamba’s life becomes much more upbeat. He gets the chance to visit many places, among them New York City, California, and Las Vegas, (where Kamkwamba marvels that “women in their underpants serve free soda.”) When Kamkwamba is shown the Internet for the first time, his reaction is endearing.
If there is anything to complain about, it would be the simplifications. The authors describe bits of Malawian culture, like the roles of women and men, in mere sentences. The cycle of deforestation and poverty receives only a paragraph. A big slice of context seems to be missing, and Malawi is never more than a backdrop for this story.
Yet the infectious enthusiasm, heartbreaking tragedy, and final triumph make for an unforgettable story of success in the face of overwhelming odds. And as the story ends, it leaves us wondering about the future: Kamkwamba is accepted into a prestigious South African school where students who are considered future leaders of Africa have been hand-selected to attend.
As you read this book (I’d suggest keeping a box of tissues handy) you can be sure that William Kamkwamba’s future is bright. If this tale is any indication, we’ll be hearing his name again in the years ahead.
Kate Vander Wiede is an intern at the Improper Bostonian magazine.
For the Powells Books website, an essay on finding Africa again
Rediscovering Africa through a Boy and His Windmill
One of the chief pleasures in writing The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind with William Kamkwamba was knowing that such an inspiring story was coming from a most unlikely place. With the daily news from Africa so traditionally grim, it’s no wonder most people have given up on the place. As one of those reporters who delivered that news, I was close to doing the same. Until I met William.
For five years I’d covered Africa’s cycle of misery and horror, both as a writer for Harper’s and a correspondent for the Associated Press. Mostly I worked in the Democratic Republic of Congo, reporting an insane war that’s killed over five million people in the past decade — more than any other conflict since the Second World War. I’d filled dozens of notebooks with accounts of rape, murder, and mutilation, and over the years, heard the same stories repeated in Somalia, Togo, Kenya, and Uganda. After a while they became part of my fabric, so commonplace I could practically finish their sentences for them. I’d grown numb without even knowing. And whenever I did realize this, it bothered me.
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Windmill Bill Rocks the Daily Show!
Big congratulations to my pal and co-author William Kamkwamba for completely acing the Daily Show with Jon Stewart last night. I’m so proud of him. Now we’re back on the road. Next stop: Dallas.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| William Kamkwamba | ||||
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See the interview here.
Amazon.com Podcast with William and Bryan
On our tour in Seattle, we stopped by the offices of Amazon.com and gave a presentation for the staff. Afterward, editor Dave Callanan sat down with William and me and recorded a short interview. Dave’s been a champion of our book from the beginning and we’re very grateful for his support and friendship. Thanks, Dave.
Here’s a podcast of that interview:
In Malawi, No More Sharing Water with Goats
From Huffington Post
By William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer
In my last post, I spoke about indicators for deforestation in Malawi. Today, I’ll share one for the problem of attaining clean drinking water, then explain a cool invention I’m working on to address this issue.
Until recently, my mother spent over 700 hours every year just bringing our family clean water from the well. That’s over two hours each day walking to the public water pump and hauling those buckets back home, sometimes even longer.
The work was hard and exhausting, but much better compared to our situation before. Until I was nine years old, we got all of our drinking water from the spring-fed marsh behind our house, something we called the dambo. The dambo was the only source of water for miles around, so everyone depended on it to live – including the goats and cows, who often relieved themselves while drinking. The women had to dip their buckets into the dirty water anyway, trying not to think about it. What choice did they have?
Because it was our only water source, the demand was very high. Women like my mother would wake up before the cock even crowed – around four am – hoping to reach the dambo before the line stretched into the tall elephant grass. If you were late, you’d find yourself waiting for two hours as the African sun cooked you from above.
In the dry season, the dambo was only full of water in the morning, and by afternoon, all the women and pigs and goats had drank it dry. If you were running late because your child was sick, or your husband needed you in the maize fields, you’d have to go without until the spring replenished itself overnight. In the wet season the dambo was always full, but dangerous. The heavy rains often flooded the latrines and washed waste and other garbage into into our water. My mother boiled our drinking water, but not everyone did this and became sick. Diarrhea was a frequent visitor to the villages during the rainy season, and cholera was always a concern.
Read the rest of the story here.
Nice piece from CNN.com
Malawian boy uses wind to power hope, electrify village
October 5, 2009 — Updated 0741 GMT (1541 HKT)
By Faith Karimi
CNN
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(CNN) — William Kamkwamba dreamed of powering his village with the only resource that was freely available to him.
His native Malawi had gone through one of its worst droughts seven years ago, killing thousands. His family and others were surviving on one meal a day. The red soil in his Masitala hometown was parched, leaving his father, a farmer, without any income.
But amid all the shortages, one thing was still abundant.
Wind.
“I wanted to do something to help and change things,” he said. “Then I said to myself, ‘If they can make electricity out of wind, I can try, too.’”
Kamkwamba was kicked out of school when he couldn’t pay $80 in school fees, and he spent his days at the library, where a book with photographs of windmills caught his eye.
“I thought, this thing exists in this book, it means someone else managed to build this machine,” he said.
Armed with the book, the then-14-year-old taught himself to build windmills. He scoured through junkyards for items, including bicycle parts, plastic pipes, tractor fans and car batteries. For the tower, he collected wood from blue-gum trees.
“Everyone laughed at me when I told them I was building a windmill. They thought I was crazy,” he said. “Then I started telling them I was just playing with the parts. That sounded more normal.”
That was 2002. Now, he has five windmills, the tallest at 37 feet. He built one at an area school that he used to teach classes on windmill-building.
The windmills generate electricity and pump water in his hometown, north of the capital, Lilongwe. Neighbors regularly trek across the dusty footpaths to his house to charge their cellphones. Others stop by to listen to Malawian reggae music blaring from a radio.
When he started building the first windmill in 2002, word that he was “crazy” spread all over his village. Some people said he was bewitched — a common description for people with perplexing behavior in some African cultures.
“All of us, even my mother, thought that he had gone mad,” said his sister Doris Kamkwamba.
Villagers would surround him to snicker and point, Kamkwamba said. Ignoring them, he would quietly bolt pieces using a screwdriver made of a heated nail attached to a corncob. The heat — from both the crowd and the melted, flattened pipes he used as blades — did not deter him.
Three months later, his first windmill churned to life as relief swept over him. As the blades whirled, a bulb attached to the windmill flickered on.
“I wanted to finish it just to prove them wrong,” he said. “I knew people would then stop thinking I was crazy.”
Kamkwamba, now 22, is a student at the African Leadership Academy, an elite South African school for young leaders. Donors pay for his education.
His story has turned him into a globetrotter. Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, an avid advocate of green living, has applauded his work. Kamkwamba is invited to events worldwide to share his experience with entrepreneurs. During a recent trip to Palm Springs, California, he saw a real windmill for the first time — lofty and majestic — a far cry from the wobbly, wooden structures that spin in his backyard.
Former Associated Press correspondent Bryan Mealer, who covered Africa, wrote a book, “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind,” after hearing Kamkwamba’s story. The book was released in the United States last week.
Mealer, a native of San Antonio, Texas, said he lived with Kamkwamba in his village for months to write the book. The story was a refreshing change after years of covering bloody conflicts in the region, Mealer said.
Kamkwamba is part of a generation of Africans who are not waiting for their governments or aid groups to come to their rescue, according to the author.
“They are seizing opportunities and technology, and finding solutions to their own problems,” Mealer said. “One of the keys of his success is … he’s never wanted to rest on his laurels.”
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind in WIRED
Teen’s DIY Energy Hacking Gives African Village New Hope
- By Kim Zetter
- October 2, 2009 |
Some people see lemons and make lemonade. William Kamkwamba saw wind and made a windmill.
This might not seem like a mighty feat. But Kamkwamba, who grew up in Masitala, a tiny rural farming village off the grid in Malawi, was 14 years old in 2001 when he spotted a photo of a windmill in a U.S. textbook one day. He decided to make one, hacking together a contraption from strips of PVC pipe, rusty car and bicycle parts and blue gum trees.
Though he ultimately had big designs for his creation, all he really wanted to do initially was power a small bulb in his bedroom so he could stay up and read past sunset.
But one windmill has turned into three, which now generate enough electricity to light several bulbs in his family’s house, power radios and a TV, charge his neighbors’ cellphones and pump water for the village’s fields and household use.
Now 22, Kamkwamba wants to build windmills across Malawi and perhaps beyond. Next summer he also plans to construct a drilling machine to bore 40-meter holes for water and pumps. His aim is to help Africans become self-sufficient and resolve their problems without reliance on foreign aid.
“The problem we have is electricity and water problems,” he says. “I want to be tackling all of them at once.”
In a country steeped in superstition and wracked by crushing hardship and government corruption, Kamkwamba’s story is remarkable for its ingenuity and persistence.
Kamkwamba wasn’t a natural-born over-achiever. Before windmills, his biggest ambition was to be a car mechanic. But when he was ejected from public school at 14 because his family couldn’t afford the $80 tuition, his life seemed destined for the planting fields and back-breaking labor of his father, an impoverished maize and tobacco grower. Even that fate fell into question when drought and severe famine struck Malawi, one of Africa’s poorest nations, in 2001 and 2002. It whittled away at Kamkwamba’s already thin frame and killed off neighbors and friends, which he recounts with journalist Bryan Mealer in an engaging and spirited new book, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind.
Rain and crops slowly returned the following season, but Kamkwamba still couldn’t afford tuition. So with time on his hands, he began visiting a rural library where he found two textbooks — Explaining Physics and Using Energy — that detailed the marvels of electricity. The cover of the latter book featured a long row of towering windmills planted on brown hills, which “appeared so powerful that they made the photo itself appear to be in motion.”
Malawi was short on many resources, but not wind. A windmill, Kamkwamba thought, would solve many problems for his parents and six sisters. Not only could it generate free electricity — saving his family the economic costs and health hazards of burning kerosene — but it could also pump deep well water to the family’s maize and tobacco crops, releasing them from the tyranny of weather patterns and allowing them to add a second growing season to their harvest year.
“With a windmill, I could stay awake at night reading instead of going to bed at seven with the rest of Malawi,” he writes. But more importantly, “with a windmill, we’d finally release ourselves from the troubles of darkness and hunger. . . A windmill meant more than just power, it was freedom.”
He started with a small prototype. Then, with help from a cousin and friend, spent many weeks scrounging makeshift parts to construct the real thing.
The plan was to attach blades to the back axle of a bicycle and generate electricity through a bike dynamo. When the wind blew the blades, the sprocket and bike chain would spin the bike wheel, which would charge the dynamo and send a current through wire to the house.
For windmill blades, Kamkwamba slit a bathhouse PVC pipe in two, then heated the pieces over hot coals to press the curled edges flat. To bore holes into the blades, he stuck a nail through half a corn cob, heated the metal red and twisted it through the blades. It took three hours to repeatedly heat the nail and bore the needed holes.
Read the rest of the story HERE.
Great Interview by John Hockenberry and Celeste Headlee on the Takeaway
A Windmill That Saves a Village
By John Hockenberry, Celeste HeadleeFriday, October 2 2009
Original radio story and post here
In 2002, teenaged William Kamkwamba had a vision in the very poor African nation of Malawi: A little bicycle generator that powers a light, if connected to a windmill, could allow him to read his schoolbooks at night. As he went further with his plans, he began to see how such a windmill might actually bring the 20th century to his own village. Out this week is “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind,” a book that tells Kamkwamba’s story. We talked with William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer, the book’s co-authors.
“He didn’t have washers, so he would go collect bottle caps, beer bottle caps, in front of the bar and flatten them out and put a hole through the middle. He didn’t have a drill, so he would use a nail and heat it over his mom’s cooking fire, that he would bore holes through this plastic … His cousin found a car battery so he was able to hook the windmill up to a car battery, charge it and then power four more bulbs which he ran through a circuit breaker system that he made out of nails and wire and a magnet that he busted out of a stereo speaker. And it worked.”
—Bryan Mealer, co-author of “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind,” on how William made the windmill
“The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind” book explains William Kamkwamba vision for his village in Malaawi. (Flickr user Sephari(cc: by-nd))
