The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (16 page)

Every day that week, Geoffrey and I left the tobacco fields to check the
dowe,
making sure to always use secret codes. God forbid my sisters followed and discovered that it was ready.

“Geoffrey,” I said, “let’s go burn the wasps.”

“Yah, the wasps!”

Walking up and down the rows, we pointed out cobs that looked nearly done.

“Look at this one,” I said. “In three days it will be in my mouth.”

“Let’s get firewood ready. Can we do this?”

“I think we can.”

Then finally one day I spotted a cob that appeared ready, pressed my fingers against its grain. It was firm.

“It’s ready,” I said.

“Yes, it is,” said Geoffrey, feeling another. “And so is this one.”

“That means our long-awaited day has finally arrived.”

“For sure! Let’s proceed!”

I ran through the rows pulling the ripe
dowe,
gripping them lovingly in my hands. Soon I had fifteen ears spilling over in my arms. I peeled back the first layers of husks and tied them together, then draped them in a chain across my shoulders. Passing the tobacco shelter, I grabbed the armful of sticks we’d set aside for a fire. The sight of Geoffrey and me running into the compound with necklaces of
dowe
nearly started a riot.

“It’s ready?” my sister Aisha asked, eyes wide and excited.

“It’s ready.”

“DOWE IS READY!”

I ran into the kitchen and quickly made a fire. White smoke soon filled the room and burned my eyes, filling them with tears. But I didn’t care. I was too excited. My sisters now crowded into the tiny kitchen, fighting for space.

“Let me see!”

“No, I was here. You wait!”

“All of you go outside,” I shouted. “There’s enough
dowe
for all!”

I didn’t wait for the fire to die into embers. I placed several cobs directly on the flames, flipping them until the peels were brown and blackened just right. I didn’t even wait until the other side was finished cooking. I pulled the cob off the fire, so hot it scalded my fingers. I then peeled back the steaming husks and began to eat. The kernels were meaty and warm and filled with the essence of God. I chewed slowly and with great satisfaction, knowing I’d waited for so very long. Each time I swallowed was like returning something that was lost, some missing part of my being. When one side was eaten, I tossed the other back on the fire and moved to the next one.

My parents now gathered in the kitchen as I prepared the steaming food.

“I don’t think this
dowe
is ready,” said my father, snatching one quickly. “Let me have a taste.” He ripped off the silk and bit into the
dowe,
savoring it as I had. Within seconds, the blood of life seemed to rush back to his face. He knew we would live.

“It’s ready,” he said.

That afternoon, Geoffrey and I probably ate thirty ears of maize.

As if heaven were coming down, the first pumpkins in our fields were also ready. For weeks I’d watched them closely, waiting for them to grow into the right shape and color. Now after all that time, here they were, as big as a man’s head and orange as the morning sun. We cut them open and boiled them in a pot, seeds, skin, and all. My mother filled a basket with heaps of the warm, steaming meat and we devoured them right there. My God, to have a stomach filled with hot food was one of the greatest pleasures in life. Even Geoffrey came over and ate our pumpkins and
dowe.
Soon the swelling in his legs went away, and he began to smile again like his old self.

For me and Geoffrey, March was one big celebration. Each morning before working in the fields, we picked a handful of
dowe
and made a fire beneath the tobacco shelter, and ate a hearty breakfast.

“Mister Geoffrey, this is mine and this is yours.”

“Sure, sure, give me mine.”

I remembered a parable that Jesus told the disciples, the one about the sower of seeds. The seeds sown along the path get snatched away and damaged, those sown on rocky soil take no root and die, and those sown in the thorns get choked by the barbs. But the seeds sown on fertile soil will live and thrive.

“Mister Geoffrey, we’re like the seeds planted on fertile soil, not on the roadside, stepped on by those walking past.”

“No, no, we lived.”

“That’s right, Mister Geoffrey. We lived, we survived.”

T
HE BASKETS OF
DOWE
and steaming pumpkins were like a great army marching to save us from certain defeat. In the trading center, people began to smile and talk about the future now. Life wouldn’t really return to normal until after we harvested, and at home the usual blob of
nsima
still greeted us each night at supper, but at least it was the start of something good.

I started taking long walks to see how Malawi was doing, to see who’d survived and how they were getting along. With
dowe
now ready in the fields, people everywhere were drying it in their yards and making
chitibu,
which is a sweeter kind of
nsima.
People were regaining their strength, and smiling faces now greeted me along the roads. The same people who’d wandered weak and feeble now headed home carrying children on their backs and great bundles on their heads. But with the famine still fresh on my mind, I expected them to ask the same question I’d been hearing from every stranger for months:
Ganyu? I’m looking for ganyu…

Instead, it was our normal happy greeting.

“Muli bwanji!”
How are you?

“Ndiri bwino, kaya inu?”
Fine, and you?

“Ndiri bwino!”
Fine.

“Zikomo!”
Thanks for asking.

“Zikomo!”
No, thank you.

At the trading center, people now walked around shaking hands with their neighbors, as if they’d all returned from a long, hard journey.

“Good to see you, friend,” they said. “You’re still around.”

“I’m around. How did you manage yourself?”

“God was on my side.”

The blessing of
dowe
allowed us to return to our lives, but it also brought thieves. Many farmers who’d traveled to Wimbe from other districts weren’t benefiting from the
dowe
and pumpkins because they didn’t have their own fields. So instead they took it from others. The people living in Gilbert’s blue gum grove waited until it rained at night, then stole the ripe
dowe.
After two weeks of this, most of their fields were gone. The same happened to us. Each morning we walked the road that bordered our field and found it littered with green leaves and
dowe
gnawed to the pith, as if a battalion had feasted all night.

Horrible stories of revenge soon began circulating in the trading center. One day, I heard some boys talking about the crimes.

“I heard some farmers in Kenji caught some men in their fields,” one boy said. “You know what they did? Took pangas and chopped off their arms, asking, ‘Long sleeves or short sleeves?’”

“No!”

“My cousin caught a young boy stealing his
dowe,
” said Gilbert. “He put a metal pole in the fire until it became red hot, then told the boy to grab it. He did!”

All this talk about revenge made me wonder about our own fields. Later that night, I asked my father how we should punish those who stole from us.

“Should we kill them?” I asked. “Perhaps call the police?”

My father shook his head.

“We’re not killing anyone,” he said. “Even if I called the police, those men would only starve to death in jail. Everyone has the same hunger, son. We must learn to forgive.”

M
OST STUDENTS AT
K
ACHOKOLO
Secondary and Wimbe Primary stopped going to school during the famine. After I dropped out, Gilbert continued to go to classes, and he told me that each day fewer and fewer classmates showed up. The teachers would call recess around 9:00
A.M.,
then disappear themselves into the fields and trading center to search for food. By February, there was no school at all.

But as the
dowe
and pumpkins became ready, and the district slowly reclaimed its energy, students began returning to school and classes resumed. But because my family still couldn’t afford my school fees, I was forced to stay home doing nothing. Besides some weeding, there wasn’t even much work to do in the fields until the maize harvest—still two months away.

I started wasting time in the trading center playing
bawo.
Someone also taught me a wonderful game called chess, which I started playing every day. But chess and
bawo
weren’t enough to keep my mind occupied. I needed a better hobby, something to trick my brain into being happy. I missed school so terribly.

I remembered that the previous year a group called the Malawi Teacher Training Activity had opened a small library in Wimbe Primary School that was stocked with books donated by the American govern
ment. Perhaps reading could keep my brain from getting soft while being a dropout.

The library was in a small room near the main office. A woman was sitting behind a desk when I walked in. She smiled. “Come to borrow some books?” she said. This was Mrs. Edith Sikelo, a teacher at Wimbe who taught English and social studies and also operated the library. I nodded yes, then asked, “What are the rules of this place?” I’d never used such a facility.

Mrs. Sikelo took me behind a curtain to a smaller room, where three floor-to-ceiling shelves were filled with books. It smelled sweet and musty, like nothing I’d ever encountered. I took another deep breath. Mrs. Sikelo then explained the rules for borrowing books and showed me the collection. I’d expected to find nothing but primary readers and textbooks, boring things. But to my surprise, I saw American textbooks on English, history, and science; secondary texts from Zambia and Zimbabwe; and novels for leisurely reading.

I spent the day combing through the books while Mrs. Sikelo graded papers at her desk. Despite the variety of titles, I left that afternoon with books on geography, social studies, and basic spelling—the same textbooks my friends were studying in school. It was the end of the term, and my hope was to get caught up before classes started again.

At home I planted a thick blue gum pole deep in the ground near the mango tree out front, then made my own hammock out of knotted maize sacks. For the next three weeks, I began a rigorous course in independent study, visiting the library in the mornings, and spending the afternoons reading in the shade.

Gilbert offered to help right away. Each day I met him after school and he told me what they’d done in school.

“What did you cover today in geography?”

“Weather patterns.”

“Can I get your notes tomorrow?”

“For sure.”

“Thanks. I’ll have the others back soon. I’m almost finished.”

“No problem.”

Reading on my own was often difficult. For one, my English was very poor, and sounding out words took a lot of time and energy. Plus, some of the material was confusing, and it would’ve helped to have a teacher to explain things.

“In agriculture,” I asked Gilbert, “what do they mean by weathering?”

“It’s when the rains disintegrate the rocks and soil.”

“Oh, right, thanks.”

O
NE
S
ATURDAY,
G
ILBERT MET
me in the library and we flipped through books we thought might be fun. I couldn’t study all the time. One book that caught my attention was the
Malawi Junior Integrated Science
book, used by Form Four students.
Hmm,
I thought, and flipped it open. There were lots of pictures and diagrams, which I found easy to understand. I saw pictures of cancer and scabies and children stricken with kwashiorkor, like so many who’d wandered the country. One picture had a man in a shiny silver suit walking on the moon.

“What’s happening here?” I asked Gilbert. “Why is he wearing this?”

“Looks cold,” he said.

Turning the pages, I came across a picture of Nkula Falls on the Shire River, located in southern Malawi. I’d always heard about the hydro plants, but never knew how they worked. Simply by asking enough people in the trading center, and at home, I knew that water from the river flowed down the country until it reached the ESCOM plant, where it produced electricity. But how and why this worked, I had no clue.

The book described how the water turned a giant wheel at the plant, called a turbine, which in turn produced the electricity. Well, this seemed like the same concept as the bicycle dynamo. Behind my house there was the
dambo,
and sometimes if the rain was heavy, we’d see a small waterfall. Perhaps if I had a dynamo, I could put it under the waterfall and make it
spin. Then I’d have electricity. The only problem was the
dambo
was just a soggy bog the rest of the year, and even in the rainy season, I’d have to run very long wires to my house to enjoy my music. That alone would cost a farmer’s pay for an entire year.

Gilbert and I found another book called
Explaining Physics.
To my delight, it also used pictures and illustrations, mainly from England, to answer some of the questions I’d had for a long time—such as how engines burned petrol in order to move. Another illustration explained how brakes in a car worked. I’d always wondered if cars used strips of rubber to stop the wheels, like a bicycle. The book said otherwise.

“Vacuum brakes?” I said. “I need to borrow this book.”

“Yah, for sure.”

But
Explaining Physics
was much more difficult to read than
Integrated Science.
It was filled with long and complicated words and phrases. Over the next week, I struggled with the text but managed to figure out every few words and was able to grasp the context. For instance, I’d be interested in an illustration labeled “Figure 10,” so I’d go through the text until I found where “Figure 10” was mentioned and study the sentences around it. For words that had no translation in Chichewa, I’d write them down and go to Mrs. Sikelo.

“Can you look up the word
electroscope
in the dictionary?”

“Okay,” she said. “Any others?”

“Kinetic energy
and
diode.”

“I think you’re going above and beyond your fellow students. They’re not studying this stuff.”

“I know, but I want to know about this.”

“Well, keep it up. Come back if you need more help.”

A
FTER TWO MORE WEEKS
of reading this book, I found the most fascinating chapter—the discussion of magnets. I knew about magnets because they were used to make the speakers in radios. I’d busted off a few and taken them to school as toys, moving little slivers of metal around through
a piece of paper. But as I read further, I discovered that some magnets—called electromagnets—are used to generate electricity, specifically in simple motors, like those found in a radio.

I also knew about the magnet’s opposing sides. If you had two magnets, one side would always fight the other, refusing to stick together. However, flip one of the magnets over and it will snap to its fellow magnet. This book explained that all magnets have north and south poles. The north pole of the magnet will always attract the south pole, while two similar poles push away from each other. Because of its liquid iron core, the earth itself is a kind of large bar magnet, with magnetic north and south poles. Magnets, just like the earth, have natural magnetic fields that radiate between the poles. These lines are invisible, of course, but if you were to see them, they’d appear like the wings of a butterfly. One end of the bar magnet will always be pulled toward the magnetic north pole of the earth. This is how a compass works—inside there’s a small bar magnet that finds north and keeps you from getting lost.

The book also showed how to make magnets out of everyday objects, such as nails, wire, and dry cells. When electricity from a power source—such as a battery—passes though a wire, it creates its own kind of natural magnetic field around the wire. This magnetic field can become even greater if that wire is coiled around a good conductor, like a nail.

The magnetic field will become even stronger depending on the number of times the wire is wrapped around the nail. Because of this, electromagnets have many uses. They can be used as giant magnets to pick up cars and heavy pieces of metal, while smaller electromagnets help power the simple motors found in many things around us—radios, appliances, alternators in cars.

In a simple electric motor, a coil of wire on a shaft is housed inside a large magnet. When the coil is connected to a battery and becomes magnetized, it creates a kind of fight with the larger magnet. The push and pull between these two magnetic fields causes the shaft to spin. Take, for instance, the fan that we use in hot weather. The blades spin round and round because there’s a fight going on inside the fan.

The books said that if a power source can create this spinning mo
tion—like in the fan—it can also cause the opposite to happen. Just as electricity causes a coil to become magnetic, a spinning coil that cuts a magnetic field will itself produce electricity. When a coil of wire rotates inside a magnetic field, it will produce a pulse of current. If a wire is connected to the coil, you can capture that pulse.

This is called electromagnetic induction, and it produces alternating current, or AC, since the direction of the current is changing. With electricity, you also have direct current, or DC, which is mostly found in batteries. It flows in one direction from one end of a battery to the other, through a bulb (or whatever load it’s powering) to complete the circuit.

But most electricity found in your home is alternating current, produced by a giant spinning coil somewhere in a power station. The best example of an AC generator given by the book was a bicycle dynamo.

“The movement energy is provided by the rider,” the science book said.
Of course,
I thought. This is how spinning motion generates power, both in the dynamo and in the hydro plant!

I can’t tell you how exciting I thought this was. Even if the words sometimes confused me, the concepts that were illustrated in the drawings were clear and real in my mind. The various symbols—those for positive and negative, dry cells and switches in a circuit, and arrows indicating direction of current—made perfect sense and needed no explanation. And through them, I was able to grasp principles like magnetism and induction and the differences between AC and DC. It was as if my brain had long ago made a place for these symbols, and once I discovered them in these books, they snapped right into place.

I kept this book for a month and studied it daily, most often while ignoring my independent studies. It was like delicious food, and I seemed to want to share my knowledge with everyone I encountered. In the video show one day, the only television working was a black-and-white one, and some patrons were getting upset.

“Make it color,” one said. “I want to see the colors!”

“But it’s a black-and-white television,” the owner answered.

“It looks like the other one, so make it color. It’s all the same.”

“Excuse me,” I interrupted. “It’s really not the same. A color television uses three electron tubes and a screen with fluorescence. It’s right here in my book.”

A
FTER ABOUT A MONTH,
the school term finally ended and Gilbert was free to hang out. One morning we went to the library to kill some time—we often stayed for hours, just sitting in chairs and reading—but today Mrs. Sikelo was in a rush.

“You boys spend hours in here taking my time,” she said, “but today I have an appointment. Just find something quickly.”

“Yes, madame.”

The reason it took so long was that none of the books were arranged properly. The titles weren’t shelved alphabetically, or by subject or author, which meant we had to scan every title to find something we liked. So that day while Gilbert and I looked for a good read, I remembered an English word I’d stumbled across in one of my books.

“Gilbert, what’s the word
grapes
mean?”

“Hmm,” he said, “never heard of it. Look it up in the dictionary.”

The English-Chichewa dictionaries were actually kept on the bottom shelf, but I never really spent much time looking down there. Instead I asked Mrs. Sikelo. So I squatted down to grab one of the dictionaries, and when I did, I noticed a book I’d never seen, pushed into the shelf and slightly concealed.
What is this?
I thought. Pulling it out, I saw it was an American textbook called
Using Energy,
and this book has since changed my life.

The cover featured a long row of windmills—though at the time I had no idea what a
windmill
was. All I saw were tall white towers with three blades spinning like a giant fan. They looked like the pinwheel toys Geoffrey and I once made as kids when we were bored. We’d find old water bottles people threw away in the trading center, cut the plastic into blades like a fan, then put a nail through the center attached to a stick. When the wind blew, they would spin. That’s it, just a stupid pinwheel.

But the fans on this book were not toys. They were giant beautiful machines that towered into the sky, so powerful that they made the photo itself appear to be in motion. I opened the book and began to read.

“Energy is all around you every day,” it said. “Sometimes energy needs to be converted to another form before it is useful to us. How can we convert forms of energy? Read on and you’ll see.”

I read on.

“Imagine that hostile forces have invaded your town, and defeat seems certain. If you needed a hero to ‘save the day,’ it’s unlikely you would go to the nearest university and drag a scientist to the battlefront. Yet, according to legend, it was not a general who saved the Greek city of Syracuse when the Roman fleet attacked it in 214
B.C.
”