from delancyplace.com:

In today's excerpt - William Kamkwamba, a Malawian inventor, speaker and author.
He gained fame in his country when, in 2002, at the age of fourteen, he built a
windmill to power a few electrical appliances in his family's house in Masitala
using blue gum trees, bicycle parts, and materials collected in a local scrapyard.
Since then, he has built a solar-powered water pump that supplies the first drinking
water in his village and two other windmills and is planning two more, including
one in Lilongwe, the political capital of Malawi. As the son of a subsistence farmer
in his poverty-ravaged African country, his family's house had no electricity or
running water,
and he could not afford to go to school after famine left his family
destitute. Then he stumbled upon the book that changed his life:
"Most students at Kachokolo Secondary and Wimby Primary
stopped going to school during the famine. After I dropped out ... fewer and fewer
classmates showed
up. The teachers would call recess
around 9 A.M. and then disappear themselves into the fields and trading center
to search for food. By February
there was no school at all.
"But as the doweand pumpkins became ready ... students began returning to school
and classes
resumed ... because my family
still couldn't afford my school fees, I was forced to stay home doing nothing.
"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 Government. Perhaps reading
could keep my brain
from getting soft while being a drop out.
"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 Eng lish,
history, and science; secondary texts from Zambia and Zimba bwe; 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 spell ing - 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. ...
After about a month, the school term finally ended and [my
friend] Gil bert 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 sub ject or
author, which meant we had to scan every title to find some thing 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?'
" 'Hmmm' 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 pin wheel
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 cen ter 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
beauti ful 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."
Author: William Kamkwamba

Title: The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope
Publisher: Harper Perennial; Reprint edition
Date: July 27, 2010
Pages: --
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope (P.S.)
by William Kamkwamba by Harper Perennial