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Build a windmill, get invited to TED! Sep 6, 2009 (113 of 114 found this helpful)
This is the story of William Kamkwamba, a clever boy in Malawi, Africa who built his own windmill from found materials at age 14. Much of the energy of the book is that it is a very recent story, the main events taking place just in the last six years.
The story is in three parts. The first part tells of Willam's life growing up and that of his father, giving a fascinating glimpse of the village life of subsistence farmers whose culture has changed little in thousands of years. Daily existence includes very real fears of witchcraft, shamans for healing, and strong currents of superstition. Although written in clear, simple narrative (mostly by the co-author, Bryan Mealer, an AP reporter with extensive experience across Africa), it is by no means a child's bedtime story. Malawi, an interior country of 13 million, has minimal health care, primitive agriculture, and no free public high schools. Villagers can be killed by wild animals in the forest. In 2001 the maize crops failed, plunging the countryside into famine and near social collapse, and William loses friends to disease and starvation. The government comes off badly in this episode, incompetent, brutal against the local village chief who complains, and corrupt.
William is a bright boy eager for school, but his family cannot afford the fees. He is forced to drop out. In the second part of the story, doing the best he can in spite of this disappointment, William finds an elementary physics textbook in a local library and sees diagrams of windmills - he cannot even read the English text. From this bit of information, with impressive focus and persistence he manages to build his own version from scraps of wire, an old bicycle hub, and flattened PVC pipe for blades. He has zero resources - not even a soldering iron, which would be useless in any case since there is no electricity in his household. But he is a natural engineer, and even with no guidance or help, he succeeds in making an operating windmill which powers a few lightbulbs for home and village, charges cell phones, operates a water pump - all of which make a real difference in village life.
The third part of the book, just as remarkable as his technological triumph, is about William's discovery by the outside world. The hero of the discovery phase is really the Internet. William's windmill comes to the attention of an engineer working in the capital city, who blogs about it, inspiring others to take a four hour bus journey to find William, who then quickly comes to the attention of international entrepreneurs and technologists. His life quickly expands - amazingly, straight from his village he is invited to speak at an African conference organized by TED, the California organization which publicizes emerging ideas about technology and design. Taken under wing by US sponsors, he travels internationally and finds scholarships for his own education as well as funding for his village technology. He now has a website of course (just Google his name), a PayPal donation account, and a promotional video here on Amazon - more international attention within a short time than the coolest MIT Media Lab guru!
There are a few technical errors in the text - malaria is not a virus for example, and the core of a transformer is a ferromagnet, not a conductor. These are minor points; William is an appealing character and the story is inspiring. But there must be millions of Williams across the developing world. What the book really shows is that the best international assistance is in response to local energy rather than top-down through an ineffective government. The tools to find those kids and offer that help are now at hand. Whereas electric windmills are not new - everything William did has been known for a hundred years - instant cheap global communication is a revolutionary innovation which can help bring the best minds of Africa and many other places into the world communit
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An amazing story of determination and hope Sep 10, 2009 (46 of 46 found this helpful)
After barely surviving a famine in Malawi (sub-Saharan Africa), 14-year-old William Kamkwamba was determined to find a way to make life better for himself and his family. What if he could somehow bring electricity to his village, to pump water for crops in times of drought? Using diagrams in an old forgotten science book called "Using Energy" that he found in a grade school library, he cobbled together a contraption out of scraps and junk that worked to power a few light bulbs -- and changed the life of his village forever. His neighbors, steeped in superstition and with little or no knowledge of science, thought him crazy. But he had a gift for mechanical things, he understood the principles, and he knew he could do it. And he did. Eventually he got a second windmill going, powering a a water pump from a deep well, which is now used by all the women in the village. Today every house there has a solar panel and a battery to store electricity, too.
But this is much more than a story about an African boy who built a working windmill. It's a monument to the human spirit. In fact, we don't even get to making the windmill itself until halfway through the book. In the first half, William tells us a lot about his life in Africa, the terrible famine that swept his land, how he and his family survived, and the clues along the way which eventually led to him making the windmill. Even as a little kid, he was taking apart radios to see how they worked -- with no books or training, just trial and error. Then he saw a bicycle light that ran from a mechanical dynamo -- the kind that generates electricity when you pedal. Experimenting with this, he figured out how to get it to power his radio when he turned the bike pedals. When he finally found a picture of a windmill in the "Using Energy" book, it all came together. "In my mind I saw the dynamo," he explains, "saw myself with my neighbor's bicycle those many nights ago, spinning the pedals so I could listen to the radio... The wind would spin the blades of the windmill, rotating the magnets in the dynamo, and then creating current. Attach a wire to the dynamo and you could power anything..." Sounds simple? In principle, yes -- but there is no local Radio Shack in a Malawi village for William to go get the parts. He must make do with what he can scrounge -- and that's the really amazing part of this story.
Step by step, Willam explains what he needed for the windmill, how he adapted things he found in the junkyard, or took odd jobs to get money to buy what he could not make. Some simple tasks took three or four hours because he did not have the right tools and had to improvise. But he kept at it. All in all, he probably put a hundred or more hours into this project. Talk about determination! As I read the story, I could not help thinking how wasteful we are here in America. Over an over, I was astonished at William's creativity in finding uses for things I would have considered useless junk. That gave me serious pause for thought.
One more point: I finished this book the same week as President Obama's "stay in school" pep talk to students in America (Sept 8, 2009). Here in a land where every child can get a free education, we have a 30% dropout rate, even higher in some places. In Malawi where William is growing up, school is only for those who can afford to pay tuition, and he is desperate to study. Because of the famine, his family had lost everything and could no longer afford to send him to school, so he was forced to drop out. Yet he wanted to go so badly, he was sneaking INTO class. Eventually he does get a scholarship, thanks to the publicity generated by his windmill project. Had it not been for that, his genius might have gone to waste, and who knows what future inventions the world would miss? Perhaps this book should be required reading in American schools, so kids here will know just how lucky they are to h
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Inspiring true story of hope and invention set against Malawi's worst famine in 50 years Aug 29, 2009 (13 of 14 found this helpful)
You can't help but be moved by the tale of William Kamkwamba, a poor young Malawian boy who was forced to drop out of high school for lack of school fees. Rather than waste his life, he decided to educate himself via a small library at his former primary school. He sees the cover of a 5th grade textbook from the United States which depicts a windmill, and decides to build one to power his family's home, despite no knowledge of exactly how to do so and no money for parts. Whether he succeeds and what happens after I won't spoil here.
Set against the backdrop of the country's worst famine in 50 years where people were literally starving to death, this story is also the journey of a boy who believes in magic as he becomes a young man of science. Co-written with journalist Bryan Mealer, the book reads like a novel. You'll find it lyrical, poignant and in parts, heartbreaking, but ultimately uplifting, hopeful and life-affirming. Perfect for anyone who enjoys thrilling and inspiring true-life tales. Besides general readers, I recommend "The Boy" for bookclubs, gifts, do-it-yourself enthusiasts (Makers!) and for middle school, high school and college readers.
If you loved Greg Mortensen's "Three Cups of Tea," you'll love "The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind."
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everyday survival and determination Sep 13, 2009 (11 of 12 found this helpful)
As a scholar working in African Studies I always approach popular writing on Africa with a degree of skepticism, given the narrow range of tropes and stereotypes that one usually finds (see Binyavanga Wainaina's brilliant satire, "How to Write About Africa"). Fortunately this book runs against most of the common (mis)representations of rural Africa. From the start Kamkwamba is writing of a world shaped by colonialism, cash cropping, and the brutal pro-market policies of the World Bank and IMF. He vividly brings to life the risks of rainfed agriculture and the realities of hunger and HIV without falling into a depiction of Africa as victim, instead focusing on the myriad strategies (including his own) that people use to survive the uncertainties of climate and neoliberalism.
Overall the book is a delight to read, grounded in anecdotes of everyday life in rural Malawi, and evoking for me many memories of travelling and living in east and southern Africa. Some readers may find it a bit too free of descriptions of landscape and setting - I was constantly conjuring images from my own memory of the kind of small trading town where William seems to live.
The last part of the book is probably the least satisfying -- after the dramatic stories of impoverished people on the edge of survival, the account of various wealthy Western sponsors who pop in and out of rural Africa was not so interesting. I was also frustrated that the nature of the relationship between author and co-author had been clarified -- the text makes no mention of the process of authorship.
Despite these minor complaints, I really enjoyed the book, from the tales of witchcraft to the recaps of basic electrical engineering. It's certainly suited for high school level courses, and maybe first-year college courses. I could also see using some chapters as supplementary readings on famine and food security. Readers should also check out the afrigadget blog which has dozens of examples of African "makers" as well as reprints of some of the Malawian newspaper coverage of William's windmill.
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Humanity prevailing against odds Sep 14, 2009 (13 of 15 found this helpful)
I was actually thinking this book was going to be about the technical challenges that the character (who is also the author) had when attempting to build a windmill to harness power for his village. My initial take was wrong - this book is so much better.
This book is The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, mixed with The Invention of Air: A Story Of Science, Faith, Revolution, And The Birth Of America, but with its own twist... a struggling country that hasn't known anything else in modern history (rather than Depression/Dust bowl America) is "introduced" to a person who is unwilling to let things play out as others have.
Can't pay for school? Then become a lazy drunk or a farmer. William Kamkwamba proves that those are not the only two options for those struggling with 3rd world poverty and a corrupt government. It's not so much that he is willing to build the windmill (or do self-study, or experiment on his own), because, given time, parts, and lack of distractions (TV/Video games/etc), I think many intelligent individuals would attempt similar feats. The powerful message here is - it can be done, and it was done. Despite challenges, being called crazy, living in poverty, and his own turmoil of almost starving, there was no giving up.
A very good book - would recommend to anyone. While it doesn't deter at all from the value of book, for my own interest, I wish there would have been a few pictures of his windmill...it would have visually driven home the fact of technical improvising.