At Christmastime it is traditional to wish our community well, offer season’s blessings and share joyous stories that touch the heart. This is such a story. It is of a young African boy who rose above despair and followed his dream to better himself and his village against all odds.
At the age of fourteen in a rural village of Malawi, William Kamkwamba built a windmill from discarded scrap materials. While the rural farm area had no electricity, computers, or internet access, William was not fazed. He found a way. He used library book diagrams and photos, and his imagination to build the windmill. Initially, William’s windmill was used to power two light bulbs, and two radios for his family’s small house. During a season of intense hunger-the njala, the windmill was used to irrigate the farmland.
Malawi is a landlocked country in the warm heart of Southeastern Africa bordered by Tanzania, Zambia and Mozambique. The terrain consists of valleys and high plateau on the Great Rift Valley escarpment that runs down the land like a spine. To the east is one of Africa’s largest lakes, Lake Malawi, which lies 365 miles along the border of Mozambique.
The land of Malawi is unforgiving for subsistence farmers. At times the skies hold back seasonal rains, or worse, release burgeoning showers that flood the land and wash away seeds. While zebra, antelope and leopard regularly roam among baobab trees, during the dry years, elephants and hippos rampage the farmers’ small fields, and consume the crops. Famine is not new for Malawians. In 1949 while called Nyasaland under the British Protectorate, tens of thousands died from malnutrition and starvation.
Malawi is predominantly a rural nation populated with about 15 million in a 46,000 square mile area-about the size of Pennsylvania. The economy is based on agriculture; tobacco, sugar cane, maize, tea, coffee and potatoes. It is one of the least developed African nations and the most densely populated, with ninety percent of the people living in rural regions.
Famine struck again in Malawi in 2002, when the country’s poorest poor suffered silently from starvation. It was one of the worst famines in living memory. Nothing grew and thousands of people died of sickness, malnutrition or starvation. Farmers lost crops. There were no security food reserves. Silos were empty, hospitals filled and people could not afford the $80.00 fees to send their children to school. Thousands stood in lines for food and whispered hoarsely the single word; njala—starving.
School fees for the children’s education were the least of the worries for the Kamkwamba family, with seven children to feed from the thin yield of their subsistence farm in the village of Masitala. They ate one small bowl of nsima-maize porridge—each day, and went to bed hungry every night. Some people survived on patties of protein made from the juicy lake flies which are a rare delicacy when these seasonal insects come.
The countrywide famine and incredible adversity did not stop the young teenage boy William Kamkwamba, the only son in the family, from learning. He walked miles to the library when he wasforced to leave school and was determined to continue learning. And learn he did. He was fascinated by a basic physics science book filled with photographs and diagrams. He had a smattering of English but the diagrams in the book told him all he needed to know. He decided to build a windmill. But a windmill built with what and how?
William scrounged around a pile of discarded debris and hunted and gathered. He found a tractor fan, PVC pipe, nails, shock absorbers, wire, an old bicycle and wooden boards. He had found everything he needed to build himself a windmill. He assembled the parts even making a simple circuit breaker box with two nails, copper wire and a magnet. The first windmill took two months to build.
William was only fourteen years old at the time, filled with the curiosity of youth, as he waited for the wind. “If you struggle with your dreams, God bless you, don’t give up, whatever happens,” William wisely advises today.
The wind did come for William. It blew across the dry African plains of the Great Rift Valley, and the makeshift vanes turned on the bicycle frame. The windmill machine generated four volts of power that turned on two light bulbs in the family’s small house. It was the first time the family had light after dark and they could read after sunset. And the wind turbine pumped water for irrigation. The young boy had found a way to draw water from the ground and he eventually irrigated not only his father’s farm, but other crops in his village, with three more windmills.
Eureka! William was a modern-day Archimedes-an alchemist by chance, who knew nothing of alchemy but with his ingenuity, resilience, innovation and determination he had found a solution to a most difficult problem. He had harnessed precious power with the mere energy of the willy-nilly winds that were drawn to a modern marvel turbine machine, made from crude found objects, hunted and gathered from a scrap pile of discarded rubbish. William had made his own marvelous machine to catch the wind that blew in front of his little house on the rural plains of Malawi in the middle of a widespread, deadly famine.
“Build a better mousetrap and they will beat a path to your door,” someone once said. The villagers came to see the machine move with the wind and the story of William’s windmill raged across the plains like a wildfire. Then, a man from a news service came, and within four years of irrigating the land with windmills, the young man was finally accepted as an inventor and an entrepreneur.
“Then I could not get rid of them!” he joked. “The townspeople thought I was crazy. That’s OK you can think I’m crazy!” he smiled. William enrolled in the African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg, and, like they say, “the rest is history” for the inspiring, resourceful and determined young Malawian.
Today William is preparing to take his SAT Test and hopes to be offered a scholarship. He credits “book knowledge” for what he has learned, as he had never ever heard of computers let alone seen one. “I knew nothing of computers or the internet when I was learning and making things. Where was Google all this time?” he laughs, knowing that his home never even had electrical power.
William Kamkwamba is twenty two now and has appeared as an inspirational speaker at the TED Global 2007 Fellow Conference in Oxford (Ideas Worth Spreading) and the World Economic Forum in 2008. His inventions are displayed at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry and since the publication of his book “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind,” he has been reviewed in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and has appeared on GMA and The Daily Show. The Parents’ Association at Dorris Eaton School in Walnut Creek sponsored William’s book in their ‘Young Author’s Program’, and donated fifty percent of their one hundred book sales to the nonprofit, “The Moving Windmills Project.” The book was written by William KamKwamba with Brian Mealer, an Associated Press Correspondent.
One person with a simple idea and perseverance can work wondrous things, as evidenced by the young William, who has proven that resilience, determination and ingenuity can reach beyond what we can only imagine. Sales of his book generate a portion of the money for a non-profit NGO, helping to power villages in Malawi where a small percent of the rural population enjoy electricity.
