Above: A typical village in Malawi.
What were you doing when you were 14 years old? Hanging out with friends at the mall? Talking on the phone with your friends and watching MTV? If you were William Kamkwamba you were building a windmill to generate electricity based off of a ripped picture in a book.
William was born in the Republic of Malawi, a small, landlocked country in southeast Africa squished in between Tanzania, Mozambique and Zambia. Unfortunately for William it’s also one of the least developed and most densely populated countries in the world.
In 2002 one of Malawi’s worst droughts killed thousands of people and left William and his family on the brink of starvation. Unable to attend school due to its high price (school isn’t free there, be thankful for what you have), he kept up his education by using a local library.
Fascinated by science, his life changed one day when he picked up a tattered textbook and saw a picture of a windmill. The windmill intrigued him. It could be used to generate electricity and bring much needed water to the family farm. Scrounging parts here and there, William kept the photo of the windmill in mind and set his mind to building one of his own.
“Many, including my mother, thought I was going crazy,” he recalls. “They had never seen a windmill before.” (BBC)
The original windmill built by William Kamkwamba. Photo courtesy of Green Kenya.
Using spare bicycle parts, the fan blade of an old tractor, a car shock absorber and some plastic pipes that he had softened and flatened over a fire, William constructed a 16 foot tall blue-gum tree wood tower and mounted his windmill.
“People thought I was smoking marijuana,” he said. “So I told them I was only making something for juju [magic].’ Then they said: ‘Ah, I see.’” (BBC)
William scrambled to the top of the windmill and hooked the light from a car headlight to the makeshift turbine. As the breeze began to turn the blades of the windmill the lightbulb flickered to life and the crowd of astonished onlookers went wild.
One battle won, William designed switches to power light bulbs in his parent’s compound made out of bicycle spokes and the rubber off a pair of flip-flops, a circuit breaker from an old speaker magnet and a couple of nails.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| William Kamkwamba | ||||
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Today the a new windmill powers the compound where William’s family lives, this one set in concrete so termites won’t eat the base, and a solar pump fills storage tanks full of water for the entire region around the village. William, now 22, is attending the elite African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg, South Africa on scholarship and has been honored by notables such as Al Gore, John Stewart of the Daily Show , and he even has a book about his experience that has just been published.
Makes you wish you’d done more when you were 14 doesn’t it?
For more information on William Kamkwamba check out his blog or grab his book at Amazon.com.
What an amazing story. William is definitely brilliant. Yes, I should have probably done more at 14, but I know I was clueless. Thanks for sharing this story.