The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer

This is not a book of our genre. I learned about it from one of the Amazon emails that I’ve been blitzed with during the holiday season. Nonetheless, an interesting story. The first author is the main character in the story. Malawi is a very poor country sandwiched between Tanzania, Mozambique, and Zambia. By reading the book, you’ll get a sense of the desperate lives of most of the population who do subsistence farming. There are a couple droughts to be survived, and the family of William eke out a continued existence, but not all of his friends do. While the authors tell of such difficulties, just the hardships of day-to-day life, William’s family cannot afford to keep him in school, something he deeply wants. Due to drought and corruption, they lose out and go broke despite his father’s best efforts. In William’s free time, when he is not helping his father with the farm, he dreams up the idea of building a windmill to generate electricity. About halfway through the book, the authors get down to describing the details of how one would go about doing that without any money and without any materials. He spends a lot of time scrounging through a junkyard to find the parts that he needs, which he eventually pulls off. He repeatedly returns to his school’s library to read physics books to learn about electricity. Once the windmill is complete, at first he just lights a light bulb, and then he extends the wires to his room so he can read at night. Not only are his immediate neighbors impressed, but people begin traveling for miles to see the “electric wind.” William figures out how to use batteries to store power and how to extend the electricity to the other rooms of the house. Better yet, he figures out how to use the electricity to pump water from their deep wells so women don’t have to walk for miles to get good water. He is eventually discovered by some reporters and then he is discovered by “TED,” an organization I’m assuming you know about. He wins a scholarship even though he has been out of school for five years, so he is that much older than his classmates. But, he was so happy to be back in school, and with his scholarship money, he could do so much more. Because of his fame, he became a world traveler and continued to bring prosperity to his village. The writing was not all that great, but it does give a clear picture of a very difficult life. It is inspiring that such a creative mind could come from such a place as Malawi. I’m glad I read this one, but it may not be your cup of tea.

West Coast Don