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William Kamkwamba born in in the tiny farming village of Wimbe, Malawi.

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Six year old William got tricked by a boy claiming to be a sing'anga, claiming that he can give him super strength. He cut Williams knuckles with a "Magic" razor and sprinkled the wounds with powder. When it (obviously) doesn't work, the boy makes an excuse that taking a bath negated the effects.

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When his uncle gets fired from his job, he moved back to his village, bring his dog, Khamba, with him. After a while, William and the dog become friends. The two start hunting together, setting chikhwapus and bring back doves for dinner.

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William and his friend, Gilbert, start taking apart radios. As they started to fix radios for people, they learned about circuit boards and transistors. One day, they borrow a person's dynamo and try to connect it to the radio. However, when they start pedaling, nothing happens. Gilbert and William solved this by connecting the wired to the little outlet labed AC. When Will got tired of pedaling for the music, he started to wonder, what could  do pedaling for me?

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To get into a decent Secondary School, the kids in Malawi had to make a good grade on the Standard Eight Exam. William and his Friends Studied hard in Agriculture, Social Studies, Math, and Chichewa.

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The year the Government decided to stop providing fertilizer for the crops, everything goes horribly wrong. A huge flood wiped all the seeds and the soil away, followed by a drought. The stalks that survived shriveled up and were only up to a person's chest. Usually, William's Family fills the entire storeroom to the roof, but this year they only filled five bags.

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The people of Malawi begin to starve. People were coming from villages across the country for Ganyu, but with little success. People began eating pig food and underripe foods. Williams family had to sell their goats, the only sign of a farmer's class. They had to go down to one small meal a day to save their food. They decided to sell their last bucket of food by making cakes and using the money to buy more food.

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When William's mother heard about a surplus of food in Chamama, she has him ride his bicycle twelve miles with an empty flour sack and some cash. At the Government Surplus Center, there is a line the size of two soccer fields. After a while, the line pushes ahead, nearly trampling him. Originally, they advertised the price to be 400 kwacha for 25 kilos of maize, but the people there cheated him and only gave him 15.

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This Christmas was not the Christmas the people in Malawi expected. William went to his friend's Charity place. They convinced local kenyenya stand to give them goat skins for a drum. Charity then took the skins and boiled them. They turned out grey and slimy, but William and Charity weren't in the position to argue with hunger.

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Once the test results were in, William's hopes were crushed: his best score was a B in Chichewa; the rest were C's. The school he was put in was the Kachokolo Anglican Parish, one of the worst schools in the area! After a few weeks, however, he had to dropout because his family could not pay the dues.

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Although the stalks were high and the village smelled of food, not one piece was edible. Khamba was on the verge of dying, so William had to put him down. They tied his back leg to a skinny tree in the forest. The next day, he gave up the will to live and died. William never spoke of this until he wrote this book.

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Only twenty days afterwards, the corn was ripe enough to eat. although full harvest was a few weeks away, they survived.

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After the harvest with little to do, William decided to go to the Wimbe Library and try to catch up with the school he missed. While studying he found two books: Explaining Physics by Stephen Pople and Using Energy*. William learned how moters worked by having an electromagnet spin around and how windmills could use a moto to provide power. William then decided that he was going to making one using a Dynamo.(*I couldn't fing the author)

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William went right to work on a test model. Since he didn't have the money to buy a Dynamo, he used a small cassette player. He connected it to a small PVC blades that he hammered from old pipes and using a body care lotion cap. It powered a small radio. The small scale success drove him to try a bigger scale.

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Near Williams house was an abandoned Tobacco farm- full of old parts, gears, and bolts. Right away he found a tractor fan that he could attach huge PVC fans on. Under an old cab, he found a shock absorber and some ball bearings. Although he got a majority of his parts from the scrapyard, it was right next to Kachokolo. Whenever the children saw him scurrying through the junk  they would open the window and say, "There goes the crazy guy off to smoke his chamba! (I am honoring this quote to our North American test)"

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After hours of pleading, William was able to use his father's old bike for the Windmill. After doing a job at the trading center, he was able to afford the local welder to  make holes in his tractor fan and make a piston. The only thing he needed was a Dynamo. Thankfully his friend Gilbert bought one off a Ganyu worker.

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With William's father away in another village for a furnal, Gilber, William, and Geoffrey went to work. they went to the Blue Gum forest with their macetes and got as much wood as they could. After building the tower and nearly destroying the machine in the process, the machine was complete. As a crowd gathered, he connected the Dynamo to a lightbulb and released the blade. He had made magesti a mphepo. Electric Wind.

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After Charity gave William some copper wire and an old car battery, he was able to light up his entire house. When William nearly burned the house down, he created a sort of breaker box using an electric bell. He also was able to make a light switch out of flip flops. However, he wasn't as successful when he tried to create a pump or even biogas (boiling goat poop in a pot isn't combustible, only stinky)

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After a school inspector for Wimbe Primary noticed William's windmill, he told his boss, Dr. Mchazime. Dr. Mchazime came to Wimbe as fast as possible and was amazed at William's work. A few weeks later, reporters from all over Malawi were wanting to see the "school dropout with a streak of genius." One thing led to another, and the director of TED Global, Emeka Okafor, found out about the story. After "digging under every rock in Malawi" he found William and had him apply for a fellowship. He was accepted and became a speaker for the next conference held in Arusha, Tanzania.

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TED Global 2007: Africa: The Next Chapter

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TED Global 2007: Africa: The Next Chapter

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Once he arrived, William was amazed by all the things at the convention. Before coming to the conference, he had no idea even what the internet was. Now he was surrounded by people yelling on their phones. During the presentation, William was a ball of nerves, but he was able to still get the audience to applaud for his work. He was finally accepted for his work.

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At the age of 19, William finally re enrolled in school, being one of the first students chosen for the African Leadership Academy in South Africa. After the TED convention, William went to the U.S. for a while (Fun Fact: despite living in Africa, he never saw giraffes, hippos or lions until he went to a zoo in America). In California, he went to Palm Springs Wind Farm, which powers more than six thousands megawatts of energy. In comparison, The entire county of Malawi could run on only six hundred, and ESCOM only produced 224. With a lot of help from donors from TED, William was able to power his entire village and provide computers to Wimbe Primary and Kachokolo. He eventually graduated Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. He helped his dad provide an irrigation system to his fields and tripled his yield. William's two main dreams came true: to make sure that his family never went hungry again and to finish is education. If you want to make it, all you have to do is try.