The Boy who harnessed the wind

The spotlight today is on William Kamkwamba, the author of The Boy who Harnessed the Wind (ISBN:9780803735118), which was our story for Book Club Hour at Thorntree Prep today.

William Kamkwamba grew up in Malawi, Africa (born in 1987, so he’ll be 32 now). Like the rest of the people in Malawi, William’s family were all farmers of maize (white, sweet corn), which they cooked to make porridge (they called it nsima (pronounced SEEMA)). Maize is a staple food in Africa, and William had SEEMA for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Maize is a hardy plant, it doesn’t need much water to grow and it doesn’t die that easily, so it was planted widely for food. The people also raised tobacco to sell in the city to get money for clothes, medicine and other essentials.

So you would understand that the terrible drought that hit Malawi in 2001 and 2002 hugely affected the Malawians’ lifestyle! It destroyed their crops, and within several months there was a severe famine (the entire country had run out of food and began to starve).

One day William’s father announced that they’d only be able to eat a meal once a day from then on (their family was quite large, with William, his 6 sisters, mother and father). William was also not able to attend school any longer because they could simply just not afford it (William was 14 at the time).

But William wasn’t going to sit around sulking because he couldn’t have what some of the lucky few other kids could have (education)! He remembered that the Americans erected a library a few years before, so he found books and read up on his favourite subject – Science! English wasn’t William’s strong point (since his home-language was Chewa), so it was difficult to understand what the authors were speaking about, but he found dictionaries to learn what the intriguing pictures and words meant.

One of these pictures was of a windmill, and the words said that a windmill could produce electricity and pump water. So William set his mind on building a windmill, which he did, using a tractor fan, old shock absorber, and the frame of a broken bicycle missing a wheel. He melted plastic pipe over a fire and flattened it and carved it to form the blades. When the wind blew, the blades spun the tyre and produced a current, which powered some light bulbs in their home!

Years afterwards he managed to build his “Green Machine” which pulled water from a small well near his home, providing water for their vegetable garden, which meant food all year round.

William was able to eventually graduate from Dartmouth College (America), and is making a difference globally with his non-profit organization “Moving Windmills” to support community initiatives in Wimbe, Malawi that include

providing and installing water pumps for irrigation
running a lab for developing farm tools
providing secondary school scholarships
providing computer labs
biogas

Today the children learned about

inventions
research and non-fiction books
different genres of fiction and non-fiction books
how to do research using non-fiction books (introducing the Table of Contents, Index Pages, Page numbers, Asterisk & references, plagiarism, citation)
Habits of Mind #1 – Perseverance
Importance of serving your community

The picture book is a nutshell version of William’s autobiography with the same title, which has also been made into a very touching movie. The illustrations by Elizabeth Zunon (in the picture book) beautifully depict every scene.