When he started building the first windmill in 2002, word that he was "crazy" spread all over his village. Others stop by to listen to Malawian reggae music blaring from a radio. Neighbors regularly trek across the dusty footpaths to his house to charge their cellphones. The windmills generate electricity and pump water in his hometown, north of the capital, Lilongwe. He built one at an area school that he used to teach classes on windmill-building. Now, he has five windmills, the tallest at 37 feet. "Then I started telling them I was just playing with the parts. "Everyone laughed at me when I told them I was building a windmill. For the tower, he collected wood from blue-gum trees. He scoured through junkyards for items, including bicycle parts, plastic pipes, tractor fans and car batteries. "I thought, this thing exists in this book, it means someone else managed to build this machine," he said.Īrmed with the book, the then-14-year-old taught himself to build windmills. Kamkwamba was kicked out of school when he couldn't pay $80 in school fees, and he spent his days at the library, where a book with photographs of windmills caught his eye. "Then I said to myself, 'If they can make electricity out of wind, I can try, too.'" "I wanted to do something to help and change things," he said. The red soil in his Masitala hometown was parched, leaving his father, a farmer, without any income.īut amid all the shortages, one thing was still abundant. His family and others were surviving on one meal a day. His native Malawi had gone through one of its worst droughts seven years ago, killing thousands.
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