The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (19 page)

The day I decided to ask my father if I could use his bicycle, I sat him down and explained the entire process, how the frame would make the perfect body of the windmill and would be sturdy enough to handle strong winds. The wind and blades would act as pedals and rotate the shaft and sprocket, and the chain would spin the tire and power the generator.

“Electricity!” I said, smiling big. “Water!”

My father just shook his head and said, “Son, please don’t break my bike. I’ve already lost so many radios. Besides, one day we’ll use that bike.”

I thought,
Use it for what?
To ride seven kilometers to buy kerosene when you could have lights for free? Oh, it took
so long
to convince my father to give up that bicycle. I must have begged for an hour, explaining
the process once more, almost putting together the radio windmill again just to remind him.

“I have a plan,” I said. “Allow me to try. Just think, we could have lights! We could pump water and have an extra harvest. We’ll never go hungry again.”

He considered this a while, and finally gave in. “Okay,” he said. “Perhaps you’re right. But please don’t mess it up.”

I was so happy to have that bicycle. I took it to my room and leaned it against the wall near the other parts. With all the stuff I was collecting, it didn’t take long for my room to appear like the scrapyard itself. All my cherished windmill pieces were arranged neatly on one side of the room—the shock absorber, tractor fan, bearings, with smaller pieces separated from large pieces for easy inventory. The rest of my room was covered in the extra junk I’d been gathering. Piles of random metal and old parts collected in the corners, around my bed, and behind my door. I never knew what I might need.

I forbade my sisters from sweeping or cleaning my room, because I was afraid they wouldn’t appreciate my treasures and would brush away something important.

“But we need to scrub the floors,” Aisha protested.

“Forget it,” I shouted. “No one is allowed. I’ll let you know the time!”

When I wasn’t in the scrapyard digging for treasure, I’d hang out at the library or sit in my hammock and read. Even if my father didn’t fully understand my windmill, he felt so bad about my schooling that he no longer forced me to work in the field. This made my sisters jealous.

“Why does William get to stay home and not us?” Doris asked my father one day. “Is it because he’s a boy and we’re girls? If he’s staying home, so are we!”

“William has a project,” my father said. “And if he’s really wasting time, he’ll be proven wrong eventually. You girls just worry about yourselves and go to work.”

“Yes, Papa,” they said and huffed away.

So with my father’s blessing, the mornings and afternoons became my time to study. As I planned my windmill, I pored through chapters in
Explaining Physics
about electricity and how it moves and behaves and how it can be harnessed. I reviewed sections on home wiring, parallel circuits versus series circuits, and more stuff on AC and DC power. Going to the library, I renewed the same three books over and over until one day Mrs. Sikelo raised her eyebrow.

“William, are you still preparing for exams? What are you up to?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Just building something. You’ll see.”

M
ORE AND MORE, GOING
to the scrapyard began to replace school in my mind. It was an environment where I learned something each day. I’d see strange and foreign materials and try to imagine their use. One thing looked like an old compressor, or perhaps it was a land mine. I found real compressors and shook them to hear the pieces rattling inside; then I would try to open them and investigate. My imagination was constantly working. One day I pretended to be a great mechanic, crawling on my back under the old rusted cars and tractors with the tall grass clutching me in its arms. I shouted up to the customer.

“Start it up! Let’s see how she sounds…push the gas, don’t be shy!
Whoa, whoa, whoa!
That’s too much!”

The engine didn’t sound right, so I gave it to them straight: “Looks like you’ll need an overhaul. I know, I know, it’s expensive, but it’s life.”

I shouted to my other mechanics, who were slacking as usual.

“Phiri, today you’re doing oil changes!”

“Yes, boss!”

Another walked over shaking his head. Problems again.

“Mister Kamkwamba, boss, we can’t fix this car. We’ve tried everything, but it still makes a noise. How can you advise?”

“Start it up. Hmm…yes…hmm…just as I thought. Injector pump.”

“Thank you, sir!”

“For sure.”

I climbed atop the old rusted tractors, pressed the ignition button with my foot, and pretended to drive. “Out of my way—your man Kamkwamba must work!”

I dug the ridges in my field using my tractor, making up for all the days I’d swung a hoe in the hot sun. Oh, how I wished one of those tractors had actually fired up and moved. If it had, I would have taken the whole scrapyard home.

N
O MATTER HOW ENCHANTED
I became in the scrapyard, my wonderful moods never lasted long. The students across the street in the schoolyard could easily see me banging away on metal. When I wasn’t being careful, they even heard me talking to myself. When I walked out carrying my windmill pieces, they would yell out, “Hey look, it’s William, digging in the garbage again!”

At first I’d tried to explain the windmill, but they just laughed and said, “
Iwe,
you’re wasting your time. This junk is good for nothing.”

Even days when I tried sneaking past, someone would spot me through the open window and yell, “There goes the madman off to smoke his
chamba!
”

Chamba
is marijuana.

Luckily I did have a few supporters and well-wishers. But Geoffrey had accepted an invitation from my uncle Musaiwale to work at the maize mill in Chipumba, and that meant that Gilbert was the only person who didn’t laugh. Finally I decided that whenever someone shouted from the schoolyard, “William, what are you doing in the garbage?” I’d just smile and say, “Nothing, only playing.”

These students immediately told their parents about the crazy boy in the scrapyard, and soon my mother was getting an earful in the trading center. Now when I came home with my pieces, she stared at me and shook her head. One day she came into my room quite worried.

“What’s wrong with you?” she said. “Your friends don’t behave this
way. When you go to Gilbert’s house, you don’t see this kind of thing. I mean, look at this room! It looks like a madman’s room. Only madmen collect garbage.”

That night she told my father, “He’s never going to find a wife like this, and even if he does, how will he care for her and feed his family?”

“Leave the boy alone,” my father said. “Let’s see what he has up his sleeve.”

O
VER THE NEXT FEW
weeks, my scrap pieces kept revealing themselves like a magic puzzle. At one point, I realized I needed more PVC pipe, so without Gilbert’s father looking, we dug out the drainage pipe from his shower stall. Inside, it was covered with several inches of slime that I had to scrape with my fingers. It smelled horrible.

Once it was clean and dry, I took the pipe home and cut it down the middle with a bow saw. Next I made a long grass fire behind the kitchen, then tossed the pipe atop the flames. When it began to bubble and curl, I rolled it off and pounded it flat. I then cut four blades at four feet each. I wanted to go ahead and connect them to the tractor fan rotor, but I had no nuts and bolts. So I spent two weeks in the scrapyard searching every piece of metal. But I had only one size wrench, which was too large for most of the nuts on the machines. To compensate, I wrapped a bicycle spoke inside the wrench hole and managed to loosen a few. However, most of them were so rusted they stripped against the tool or refused to even budge.

Gilbert then offered to help. He went to Daud’s shop with fifty kwacha and bought a big bag of nuts and bolts. I was so grateful. But I still had no money to hire a welder to connect my pieces. Then one day while in the trading center, I had an amazing stroke of luck.

I was there playing
bawo
with some friends when a man pulled up in a truck. He was from Kasungu and needed some boys to help him load some wood.

“I’ll pay two hundred kwacha for the job,” he said.

I ran over waving my arms, “I’m ready, I’ll do it,” and the man told
me to jump in back, along with about ten other boys. “Work hard,
ganyu
man!” the others yelled, knowing I was lucky. I spent all afternoon throwing logs into the truck and sweating in the sun, never so happy to be working in my whole life.

With my two hundred kwacha, I was able to pay a welder to connect the shock absorber to the sprocket to make it spin. I also needed him to melt holes in the blades of the tractor fan so I could attach the blades of my windmill.

Mister Godsten’s shop was in the trading center, under a grass-covered shelter near the Iponga Barber Shop. Even though I had the money for the job, Godsten laughed when I walked up carrying my pieces.

“You want me to weld a broken shock absorber to a bicycle with one wheel?” he asked, mocking me. Several others were playing
bawo
under the fig tree and overheard.

“Ah, look, the madman has come with his garbage. We’ve heard about you.”

“Iwe,
he’s not a man—just a lazy boy who plays with toys. He’s
misala.”

That meant crazy. I’d grown so tired of hearing these words.

“That’s right,” I said. “I’m lazy,
misala,
but I know what I’m doing, and soon all of you will see!”

They laughed at me anyway. I then turned to Godsten.

“To answer your question, mister,” I said. “Weld the shock absorber to the bicycle. And make sure it’s centered.”

When the work was finished, I took the bicycle back to my room and leaned it against the wall. I could see why people were saying it looked like a madman’s creation: the shock absorber jutted out from the sprocket like the arm of a strange robot, its joint fused with melted, blackened steel. My blades stood nearby, tall and beautiful, their white surface scorched and bubbled like the skin of a burned marshmallow. There were bags of bolts and nails and globs of grease hanging off the bike chain. The tractor fan looked like a dazzling orange star that would soon spin through the darkness. I couldn’t wait to put them all together.

But even with this great design, I was still missing something, and it was a big something. Once again, I had all my pieces, but no generator. Where in the world was I going to find such an important and expensive thing? My family had no money, and I didn’t dare ask my father to pay for the dynamo in Daud’s shop.

I then thought of building my own simple AC generator. From all my research, I knew I’d need simple things such as a magnet, nails, and wire. But these materials weren’t so easy to find. I didn’t have the right gauge of insulated wire to use for my electromagnetic coils. I thought about busting apart a radio and taking the wire from its motor, but those motors didn’t produce many volts, and as a result, the wire would be too short and thin.

I spent the next several weeks back in the scrapyard, turning over the rusted chassis of cars, the jagged slabs of sheet metal, and digging carefully through the tall grass, hoping I’d missed seeing a generator among the junk, perhaps an alternator I could take apart and use, or a bicycle dynamo. But no such luck. Unfortunately, I wasn’t the only person looking for such materials. Some younger boys from the trading center had also discovered the importance of electric motors. But they just wanted to strip out the coils of copper wire and use them to sculpt toy trucks.

One day I caught a couple of them as I entered the scrapyard, and when I called out, “Hey you!” they took off running. I don’t know why they were afraid. Maybe they’d heard stories about the
chamba
-smoking madman and feared for their lives. Anyway, when I reached where they’d been standing, I looked down and saw a perfectly good motor, stripped of its wires, lying there like one of those poached elephants without its tusks.

So with no generator, I began to fear my windmill would never be built. Every time I’d see a dynamo on someone’s bike—usually broken or not even attached to bulbs—I’d think,
God, what a waste. Give it to me and I’ll show you how to really use it!
I saw several dynamos during this period, but I didn’t know these people so I never had the courage to stop them. Instead, I woke up each morning and looked at the pile of metal in the corner of my room, then went to help my father clear the fields. At night
my windmill pieces were easier to look at, since everything disappeared in the dark.

A
BOUT A MONTH PASSED.
Then one Friday in July, Gilbert and I were walking home from the trading center.

“How’s the windmill going?” he asked.

“I have everything, but still no generator,” I said. “If I had this, I could build it tomorrow. I’m afraid this dream will never come true.”

“Oh, sorry.”

Just then, a guy passed us pushing his bike. I’d never seen this person, but he was around our age. As he went by, I looked down and noticed a familiar glitter by the tire.

“Look Gilbert, another dynamo.”

However, by this point I’d stopped being bashful. I ran over to the guy and asked if I could see his bike. I bent down and gave the pedal a good spin, and when I did, the headlamp—an old car bulb—flickered on.

“It’s perfect.”

Gilbert turned to the guy. “How much to buy the dynamo?” he said.

“No, Gilbert,” I said, “I don’t have any—”

“How much?” Gilbert asked.

The guy refused at first, but finally gave in. No one was fool enough to refuse money at this time. “Two hundred kwacha,” he said, “with the bulb.”

“My father gave me some small money,” said Gilbert. “Let’s use it to buy the dynamo. Let’s finish the windmill!”

Gilbert’s father had given away all their food during the famine, and he wasn’t farming as much because of his health. I was pretty sure their money was low. Still, Gilbert had bought my nuts and bolts for the rotor, and he now reached into his pocket and pulled out two hundred more kwacha—two red paper notes—and handed them to the man. After some messing around to get the dynamo and bulb off the bike, I was holding them in my hand.