The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Picture Book Edition - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

William Kamkwamba grew up in a small village in Malawi. At the age of 14, he devised a windmill that brought electricity to his home during a catastrophic drought. His New York Times Bestselling autobiography has been translated into nearly twenty languages worldwide as well as a feature film, and William has appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Good Morning America. After graduating from Dartmouth College in Environmental Studies, William began work as a Global Fellow for the design firm IDEO.org. Now an entrepreneur and TED Fellow, he divides his time between the U.S. and Malawi and is currently working full-time with the Moving Windmills Project, a nonprofit he launched that’s dedicated to ethical, hands-on development in Malawi.


Bryan Mealer is the author of Muck City and the New York Times bestseller The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, which he wrote with William Kamkwamba. Since publication, the book has received many honors and has been translated into over a dozen languages. Mealer is also the author of All Things Must Fight to Live, which chronicled his years covering the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo for Harper's and the Associated Press. His book The Kings of Big Spring, is a multi-generational saga about his family in West Texas. He and his family live in Austin.

Elizabeth Zunon grew up in Ivory Coast, West Africa, and now lives in Albany, New York.

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PROLOGUE

The machine was ready. After so many months of preparation, the work was finally complete: The motor and blades were bolted and secured, the chain was taut and heavy with grease, and the tower stood steady on its legs. The muscles in my back and arms had grown as hard as green fruit from all the pulling and lifting. And although I’d barely slept the night before, I’d never felt so awake. My invention was complete. It appeared exactly as I’d seen it in my dreams.

News of my work had spread far and wide, and now people began to arrive. The traders in the market had watched it rise from a distance and they’d closed up their shops, while the truck drivers left their vehicles on the road. They’d crossed the valley toward my home, and now they gathered under the machine, looking up in wonder. I recognized their faces. These same men had teased me from the beginning, and still they whispered, even laughed.

Let them, I thought. It was time.

I pulled myself onto the tower’s first rung and began to climb. The soft wood groaned under my weight as I reached the top, where I stood level with my creation. Its steel bones were welded and bent, and its plastic arms were blackened from fire.

I admired its other pieces: the bottle-cap washers, rusted tractor parts, and the old bicycle frame. Each one told its own story of discovery. Each piece had been lost and then found in a time of fear and hunger and pain. Together now, we were all being reborn.

In one hand I clutched a small reed that held a tiny lightbulb. I now connected it to a pair of wires that dangled from the machine, then prepared for the final step. Down below, the crowd cackled like hens.

“Quiet, everyone,” someone said. “Let’s see how crazy this boy really is.”

Just then a strong gust of wind whistled through the rungs and pushed me into the tower. Reaching over, I unlocked the machine’s spinning wheel and watched it begin to turn. Slowly at first, then faster and faster, until the whole tower rocked back and forth. My knees turned to jelly, but I held on.

I pleaded in silence: Don’t let me down.

Then I gripped the reed and wires and waited for the miracle of electricity. Finally, it came, a tiny flicker in my palm, and then a magnificent glow. The crowd gasped, and the children pushed for a better look.

“It’s true!” someone said.

“Yes,” said another. “The boy has done it. He has made electric wind!”

CHAPTER ONE

My name is William Kamkwamba, and to understand the story I’m about to tell, you must first understand the country that raised me. Malawi is a tiny nation in southeastern Africa. On a map, it appears like a flatworm burrowing its way through Zambia, Mozambique, and Tanzania, looking for a little room. Malawi is often called “The Warm Heart of Africa,” which says nothing about its location, but everything about the people who call it home. The Kamkwambas hail from the center of the country, from a tiny village called Masitala, located on the outskirts of the town of Wimbe.

You might be wondering what an African village looks like. Well, ours consists of about ten houses, each one made of mud bricks and painted white. For most of my life, our roofs were made from long grasses that we picked near the swamps, or dambos in our Chichewa language. The grasses kept us cool in the hot months, but during the cold nights of winter, the frost crept into our bones and we slept under an extra pile of blankets.

Every house in Masitala belongs to my large extended family of aunts and uncles and cousins. In our house, there was me, my mother and father, and my six sisters, along with some goats and guinea fowl, and a few chickens.

When people hear I’m the only boy among six girls, they often say, “Eh, bambo”—which is like saying “Hey, man”—“so sorry for you!” And it’s true. The downside to having only sisters is that I often got bullied in school since I had no older brothers to protect me. And my sisters were always messing with my things—especially my tools and inventions—giving me no privacy.

Whenever I asked my parents, “Why do we have so many girls in the first place?” I always got the same answer: “Because the baby store was all out of boys.” But as you’ll see in this story, my sisters are actually pretty great. And when you live on a farm, you need all of the help you can get.

My family grew maize, which is another word for white corn. In our language, we lovingly referred to it as chimanga. And growing chimanga required all hands. Every planting season, my sisters and I would wake up before dawn to hoe the weeds, dig our careful rows, then push the seeds gently into the soft soil. When it came time to harvest, we were busy again.

Most families in Malawi are farmers. We live our entire lives out in the countryside, far away from cities, where we can tend our fields and raise our animals. Where we live, there are no computers or video games, very few televisions, and for most of my life, we didn’t have electricity—just oil lamps that spewed smoke and coated our lungs with soot.

Farmers here have always been poor, and not many can afford an education. Seeing a doctor is also difficult, since most of us don’t own cars. From the time we’re born, we’re given a life with very few options. Because of this poverty and lack of knowledge, Malawians found help wherever we could.

Many of us turned to magic—which is how my story begins.

You see, before I discovered the miracles of science, I believed that magic ruled the world. Not magician magic, like pulling rabbits out of hats or sawing ladies in half, the sort of thing you see on television. It was an invisible kind of magic, one that surrounded us like the air we breathe.

In Malawi, magic came in many forms—the most common being the witch doctor whom we called sing’anga. The wizards were mysterious people. Some appeared in public, usually in the market on Sundays, sitting on blankets spread with bones, spices, and powders that claimed to cure everything from dandruff to cancer. Poor people walked many miles to visit these men, since they didn’t have money for real doctors. This led to problems, especially if a person was truly sick.

Take diarrhea, for example. Diarrhea is a common ailment in the countryside that comes from drinking dirty water, and if left untreated, it can lead to dehydration. Every year, too many children die from something that’s easily cured by a regimen of fluids and simple antibiotics. But without money or faith in modern medicine, the villager takes his chances with the sing’anga’s crude diagnosis:

“Oh, I know what’s wrong,” the wizard says. “You have a snail.”

“A snail?”

“I’m almost positive. We must remove it at once!”

The wizard goes into his bag of roots, powders, and bones, and pulls out a lightbulb.

“Lift up your shirt,” he says.

Without plugging the bulb into anything, he moves it slowly across the person’s stomach, as if to illuminate something only he can detect.

“There it is! Can you see the snail moving?”

“Oh yes, I think I can see it. Yes, there it is!”

The wizard returns to his bag for some magic potion, which he splashes across the belly.

“All better?” he asks.

“Yes, I think the snail is gone. I don’t feel it moving.”

“Good. That will be three thousand kwacha.”

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