The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind

Humans aren’t the only ones suffering in the famine. Khamba is having a rough time, too. When William realizes that the dog hasn’t eaten well in a long time, he and Charity decide to take Khamba hunting. They don’t catch any animals, and the trek wearies Khamba considerably, so William and Charity decide that the best thing is for Khamba to pass on. They tie him to a tree and, when they return the next day, they realize that Khamba not only passed away, but that he didn’t even move from the spot where they tied him.

William takes the loss personally. He insists that seeing him leave killed Khamba. This is his confession—writing the story of Khamba’s demise in The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind is the first time William has told anyone what really happened to the dog.

As though famine were not bad enough, the people of Malawi are also forced to deal with a cholera epidemic. Hundreds are lost to the disease, and even though William’s family is giving Geoffrey what extra food they can spare, his anemia is getting worse and he’s getting weaker. Meanwhile, that sacrifice is leading members of William’s family \to starve.

Finally, the crops come in and Trywell is able to start selling the tobacco crop before it has even harvested. They’re able to eat the maize. Geoffrey gets better and William’s family survives. As they’re pulling through the famine, Muluzi finally acknowledges that it happened. Despite the fact that the community is healing, many are still desperate and resort to thievery, which Trywell tells William he must forgive, because they too need to eat.

With farms succeeding again, school starts once more. Gilbert is able to return, but William still cannot afford the fees, so he spends his days in the library. There, he’s attracted to books on the sciences. He reads about magnetism and thinks about the magnets he pulled out of the radio, and how he used them under a piece of paper to make scraps of metal move atop the page. He learns about electromagnetism, magnets that create electricity. That leads him to turbines and, one day, after school is out and he and Gilbert are in the library, he reads about windmills. He thinks back to the bicycle dynamo and concludes, “…the rider is the wind” (168).

This thought allows him to understand that he can use the power of wind to provide electricity for his family. He can use it to pump the well, which will allow them to water the crops during a drought so that they can prevent another famine. He starts to build a windmill. He manages to create a working model that he tests on one of the radios. When that succeeds, William decides he will build a larger model. He starts sorting through rubbish bins and the dump to find the necessary parts. With the crops coming in, there will soon be money with which he can buy more parts, and return to school.

William is finally able to return to school in time for the second term. Since the rest of the class has continued without him, he has plenty of catching up to do. He then discovers that he has to pay for the first term, not just the second term, even though he didn’t attend school. Unable to pay so much, William sneaks into his classes until he’s able to negotiate with the school that he will pay his fees once the tobacco crop is harvested.

However, after the harvest, and after Trywell pays back his creditors, there’s not enough money left over to cover the cost of William’s schooling. He withdraws again and worries he won’t ever be able to pay the fees in arrears and return to school.

There’s little time to think about himself and his education though, as the maize is ready to be fully harvested. It takes weeks to bring in what amounts to the Kamkwambas’ most successful harvest in years. Meals become a regular event once more, and the family jests about how thin they’d gotten during the famine.

With his farm work finished, William focuses on the windmill. After salvaging scrap and completing odd job after odd job to earn enough to buy the supplies he cannot salvage, William is almost ready to build the windmill. The only thing he’s missing is the generator. Without money though, he’s unsure how he will come by one, until Gilbert buys him the equipment he requires to create his operational windmill.