Where others see only miscellaneous junkyard remnants, William Kamkwamba sees the building blocks for a better life.

A coil of wire, clear blinker bulbs, greasy alloy bike sprockets and a rusted cooling fan from a Ford pickup lie scattered around William Kamkwamba. He holds a dynamo used to generate electricity from a spinning bicycle tire. These scraps and castoffs are being used as scene-setting material for a photo shoot during his U.S. book tour. Yet where others see only miscellaneous junkyard remnants, William sees the building blocks for a better life. These are the core pieces of an electricity-generating, water-pumping windmill.

William--born August 5, 1987--is from Masitala Village in the Kasungu district of Malawi: a southeast African plateau country of rolling hills and blue gum trees. Landlocked Malawi is bordered by Mozambique, Tanzania and Zambia. Smaller than Pennsylvania, with few natural resources, it's a land of farmers.

"My father is a farmer; he's a subsistence farmer," William says in a lilting accent. "He grows maybe 1.5 to 3 acres of maize [corn]." Living from one harvest to the next with seven children to feed--six daughters and William--was a normal existence for William's parents, Trywell and Agnes.

In early 2001, normal disappeared in the face of a devastating drought. Crops wasted away. Food vanished. With nothing to fall back on, subsistence farmers were left hungry.

By November, "people ran out of food," William says. "Then people started starving to death--including my family."

"We had to start eating one meal per day--only at night... We're just waiting for the sun to go, so that we can eat a little bit of something," William says. Each would only get two or three mouthfuls of a cake-like substance made from maize flour. The starvation diet left fourteen-yearold William's pants sagging on his body like oversized hand-me-downs.

With few crops and little food, the rain began to fall again; but instead of bringing life, the water brought death. Handdug latrines--the closest thing to a sewer system in rural Malawi--overflowed, spreading germs and disease. Starving people, weakened and willing to eat anything, ate scraps off the ground. The "food" was contaminated by Cholera bacteria, and an outbreak followed. By March 2002, there were 22,023 infected and 609 dead in a country of 14 million people.

Subsistence farming wasn't working. Drought had brought about a systemic failure. Without a backup food supply or other employment options, it was difficult for families to provide the bare necessities, let alone anything else.

"Because of the famine, my parents didn't have any money to send me to school, and I was forced to drop out," William says. Without farming or schoolwork to be done, William was shackled at home by boredom and semi-starvation. "I was looking in my future, and I thought, 'I will not automatically continue with my education; I will automatically become a farmer as my parents,'" William explains. "I didn't hate to become a farmer, but to become a farmer [only growing] to live and not grow[ing] to benefit--I didn't like that."

William's mental hunger for education drove him to the library in nearby Wimbe, next door to Wimbe Primary School, where he had received his elementary education.

The science textbooks fascinated him. They contained the knowledge to harness the natural world.

One textbook, Using Energy, featured a picture of a windmill on the cover. The book said that the "windmill could pump water and generate electricity," William says. "So pump water for me meant irrigation for the second crop--defense against hunger. I say, 'If I can build one of these machine, I'm going to be able to pump water, and then we can start growing crops three or two times a year.' By doing that, I can protect my family from experiencing famine again. I can solve this problem."

William began by going to the junkyard and other locations to collect anything that looked like it might be useful in windmill construction.

Masitalans, including his neighbors and mother, thought he had lost his mind. "There was some resistance from people saying: 'You are going crazy. Why are you going to collect all this garbages and putting them together?'" William says. Despite the resistance, William remained confident: "I was encouraged by the picture of the windmill. [I thought] 'if this thing is existing in this book, it means that somewhere else somebody did this same thing, and built this machine. This thing didn't just come from the sky and land somewhere. So me, I can also do the same thing.'"

William gathered a cooling fan from a tractor, a shock absorber, a bicycle dynamo, the rear half of a bike, PVC pipes, wire, rusty nails and old headlight bulbs. He harvested limbs from blue gum trees near his home.

Construction of the windmill--built with no proper tools--took six months. When the time came to test the windmill, a crowd from the village gathered. The wind blew. William positioned the dynamo on the bike tire. "I released the windmill to start spinning," William says. "Once it started spinning, the light bulb came on from the power from the windmill." For the first time, electric light shined in the village of Masitala.

Kids pushed and shoved for a better look and William's face lit up. "For me it was a joyful time… now it was like I'm resting after working so hard. And then to see it working, producing electricity: it was a great time," he says.

The success of the first windmill inspired William to build two more. With the help of his cousin Geoffrey and more junkyard scavenging, there was soon another electricity-generating windmill and a third with a William-designed water pump.

Until November 2006, no one outside the Masitala and Wimbe area knew about William's windmill. Then, during an inspection trip to Wimbe, officials from the Malawi Teacher Training Activity discovered the windmill. Press coverage followed, including a newspaper feature in the Daily Times --the newspaper in Malawi's chief commercial city, Blantyre--launching William into the public light. Bloggers picked up the story, and the cascade of exposure continued.

William was invited to attend the Technology Entertainment and Design (TED) conference in Tanzania as a featured fellow in 2007. Money to support his return to education flowed in from conference attendees. William was chosen to attend the African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg, South Africa -- where students from across the continent are accepted based on merit and educated to become ethical leaders for Africa.

An article in The Wall Street Journal further spread his story.

Bryan Mealer, an Associated Press journalist, read the article and proposed co-authoring a book with William about his life. In 2009, The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind was published by HarperCollins. "Some of the money from the book, I'm using it to support other kids in my community. I'm sending all my cousins to school, my sisters and my neighbors' kids -- I'm sending them to school," William says.

William is currently studying for the SATs and looking into his college options. He has also started a nonprofit to rebuild Wimbe Primary School. The school was built 50 years ago for 400 students. "Right now there are 1,400 kids," William says. "There are no desks in classrooms. It's real difficult to study in such an environment. So I'm seeing that to improve peoples' lives we also need to work on the education system. So if we can support these kids studying at a primary level, then they will have a good foundation when they are growing up."

William's future plans involve starting a renewable energy company -- he is already developing a steam engine powered by a solar oven, and a hand-operated well drill. William's goal is to provide everyday people with the means to improve their own lives without having to wait for government or outside help -- to use what is at hand to succeed in living a rich life.

"For me, I feel like living a rich life is to have food, to have a chance to access clean water, have access to medicine, and have access to education," William says. "The thing that makes me happy is when I'm seeing people everywhere living in a happy life, having enough to eat, kids are going to school. When I'm seeing people are happy, it also makes me happy."

Sources: williamkamkwamba.typepad.com, bbc.co.uk, who.int, mayoclinic.com, cia.gov, bryanmealer.com, britannica.com, wsj.com, africanleadershipacademy.org, William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer, The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2009).