Today I randomly chose a movie in Netflix with the title "The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind." After the movie was over did I realize it was based upon the real life of William Kamkwamba.
William grew up in a rural farming community in Malawi. In the year 2000, when he was 13, famine hit Malawi and he saw the helplessness in his father's face as starvation began to take its toll. Then and there, William decided to be different from the rest of his community. He decided not to be a farmer like his father who depended in the mercy of the weather.
But by then, he was forced to drop out of school as his father could not pay his school fee. Starvation and expulsion from the school did not diminish William's resolve to do something that would change the destiny of his people.
He often sneaked into the village school library where he found one book that talked about the windmills. That was it, in the next few months, William would put together the scrap metals and erect a first windmill in his village that could light his house. Eventually, William was able to pump water and irrigate his father's land and the rest is history now. His reputation went far beyond his village, thanks to a blogger.
Today William is a graduate of a top university in the US and a great innovator, engineer, environmentalist, and a social entrepreneur who is changing his country one village at a time, putting his country in the world map.
It all goes back to that one decision he made when he was 13; that he won't be a farmer who depended in the mercy of the weather.
Stories like these are the evidence that if you can change your thinking; if you can think differently from what you have been taught, what the society had always made you think, you can change your life and the life of many others for the better.
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