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The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
Oct. 8th, 2009 02:04 am"Where was this Google all this time?"
-William Kamkwamba, on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Alright, this kid is so awesome! I was watching The Daily Show, and Jon said that he was having William on to talk about his homemade wind powered generator, but I really didn't think much about it until I saw him.
William is Malawi (from Malawi, Africa), and had to drop out of school to help his family because of the famine in his region. He still went to the library, though, and found a diagram of a windmill, and then managed to use left over bits of junked machines like a bicycle to make a windmill that produced electricity for his home. Also, he went on to make a circuit breaker out of nails, wire, and a magnet.
The kid is freaking great! (Okay, so as I pointed out to my husband earlier in a completely unrelated story, I call everyone kid, even if you are only a year or two younger than me. William is a few months younger than Husband, who is almost two years younger than me)
As Jon so truly put it, William is like MacGuyver. According to William, he didn't even know what the internet was until after he had already built his windmill. Someone was asking if he had used it or Google, specifically, to find information, and after they explained what it was and showed him how to use Google, he replied with the quotation above. I've decided to love him muchly, and to continue to wish him well as he finished school and goes on to college.
William's Website
-William Kamkwamba, on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Alright, this kid is so awesome! I was watching The Daily Show, and Jon said that he was having William on to talk about his homemade wind powered generator, but I really didn't think much about it until I saw him.
William is Malawi (from Malawi, Africa), and had to drop out of school to help his family because of the famine in his region. He still went to the library, though, and found a diagram of a windmill, and then managed to use left over bits of junked machines like a bicycle to make a windmill that produced electricity for his home. Also, he went on to make a circuit breaker out of nails, wire, and a magnet.
The kid is freaking great! (Okay, so as I pointed out to my husband earlier in a completely unrelated story, I call everyone kid, even if you are only a year or two younger than me. William is a few months younger than Husband, who is almost two years younger than me)
As Jon so truly put it, William is like MacGuyver. According to William, he didn't even know what the internet was until after he had already built his windmill. Someone was asking if he had used it or Google, specifically, to find information, and after they explained what it was and showed him how to use Google, he replied with the quotation above. I've decided to love him muchly, and to continue to wish him well as he finished school and goes on to college.
William's Website
