A truly inspiring story about creativity - From the cluttered desk with Keith Roulston

Recently we attended the wedding of our oldest granddaughter up near the edge of Georgian Bay to a young man she met after going to school up there, years ago.

 

Though she graduated from Central Huron Secondary School in Clinton, our granddaughter had lived a transient life because her father was in the Canadian Armed Forces, serving first at Gagetown, in New Brunswick and then in Meaford. where he also was deployed to Afghanistan, before retiring to a job in Clinton.

 

I remember when our daughter said she was planning to come home and show us her first-born shortly after her birth. It was a hot, dry summer and our shallow well was empty. Worried about caring for a newborn with a water shortage, we had a new well drilled and a new pump installed to pump clean water from deep beneath the earth.

 

I thought of that experience recently when we watched the movie The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind on Netflix, the true story of William Kamkwamda, who was born in Malawi. He was the inventive young boy who scavenged waste sites and found parts for radios, which he repaired for his community.

 

In 2001, his area of Malawi, in central Africa, where people depended on a few crops for a meagre existence, was hit by drought. People were desperate. There were riots as people sought food. William’s family’s food supply was stolen by a desperate stranger. His older sister, realizing there would be one less mouth to feed, eloped with a teacher. His father went to work with a road gang to earn cash.

 

William had been in school, but, in Malawi, you had to pay tuition to go to school, unlike rich Canada where school is free. Unable to pay tuition, William was expelled, but because he knew of the secret relationship between the teacher and his sister, he had undisclosed access to school, and the school library. He discovered a book on using windmills to pump water from wells. He decided to build one.

 

After constructing a tower from local trees, he was inventive enough to see how the mechanism works that transmits the power from the windmill to the generator that powers the electric pump and realized that the one way to make it work was by cannibalizing a bicycle, the only one available being his father’s pride and joy.

 

After weeks of arguing, his father gave in and William cut the bike apart and reconstructed it to power the pump. The windmill was built, the pump worked and water trickled to the crops. The crop was saved. The people prospered.

 

I couldn’t help but think about how fortunate we are in Canada by comparison. We live in a house now in its second century and there are the remnants (metal posts) of a windmill still buried in the yard. But people in this house (and what used to be the nearby barn) long ago outgrew it, replacing it with electric pumps. 

 

William’s life in Malawi, looks so desperately poor to us. People elsewhere in Africa who have to carry their daily water supply miles in jugs on their heads, seem even more remote from our lifestyle. Here, meanwhile, I picked up the phone and 
someone came to drill a well and hook up our water.

 

As fascinating as this story is, the real-life story of William Kamkwamda is even more amazing. I was intrigued by the movie enough to seek more information about William Kamkwamda on the internet. 

 

In 2007, William entered an intensive two-year academic program combining the Cambridge University A-levels curriculum with leadership, entrepreneurship and African studies at the African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg, South Africa.

 

William is one of four recipients of the 2010 GO Ingenuity Award, a prize awarded by the Santa Monica-based nonprofit GO Campaign to inventors, artists and makers to promote the sharing of their innovations and skills with marginalized youth in developing nations. With the grant, William held workshops in his home village, teaching youths to make wind turbines and repair water pumps.

 

He won a university scholarship to attend Dartmouth College in the U.S. There he met and married Olivia Scott Kamkwamda who grew up in Charlotte, South Carolina.

 

The couple returned to Malawi where, in 2008, they founded the Moving Windmills Project, teaching people to build windmills to provide clean water to drink. 

 

In 2013, Time magazine named William one of the “30 People Under 30 Changing The World”. Currently, he is creating an innovation centre in Malawi to allow people to come and work to develop their ideas.

 

There’s often excitement about this or that new development in our world but the creativity of one inventor like William Kamkwamda in far-off Africa is truly inspiring.