Reflections on Life, Liberty and Library Science

Last night I watched a truly inspiring interview on the Daily Show in which John Stewart interviewed a young man from Malawi named William Kamkwamba, who built a windmill to generate electricity for his village after reading a textbook he found in his local library.

This is one of those stories that demonstrates the transformative power of libraries and universal access to information.

I don’t know much about Malawi, but my wife tells me it is one of the poorest nations on earth. During his interview with John Stewart, Kamkwamba mentions that his village was suffering from famine and that he had been forced to drop out of school (here’s a picture of his classroom) when he came across a U.S. textbook in a rural library with a picture of a windmill generator.

There were many hilarious moments during the interview, such as when Kamkwamba talks about how other people in the village thought he was crazy for trying to build the windmill and told him he was smoking too much marijuana, or when he discovered Google during a subsequent trip to Russia (“when I Googled ‘windmill’ I found that there were millions of applications. I was like, ‘where was Google all this time?’”). And Kamkwambe’s humor is all the more amazing given the intensity of the struggles that people in Malawi face, and the transformative power that a single book, probably considered outdated by our schools, had on an entire village.

Kamkwambe has written a book about his experience called “The Boy who Harnessed the Wind” and journals his current experiences on Typepad, Facebook and Twitter. One can only hope that his book makes its way to that library in Malawi.