Now, I am working on my biggest project yet, the Moving Windmills Innovation Center. This will be a hands-on, collaborative-learning center located in Kasungu, Malawi, East Africa. Crafted in partnership with MASS Design Group in Rwanda, the Innovation Center is designed to inspire the next generation of African innovators. There, young people will find the mentorship and tools necessary to address the complex problems unique to their communities. Good tools and mentorship are the two things I wished I had when I was building my windmill. The Moving Windmills team of mentors will guide student cohorts to ideate, co-create, and implement simple solutions that change lives and ease burdens. Watch a brief video about the Innovation Center or learn more about the Moving Windmills Project through this video introduction.

I’m no longer updating this blog. If you would like to hear more about the Moving Windmills Project and progress on the Innovation Center, please sign up for newsletter updates here: http://eepurl.com/gZl2A9 or visit my website:https://movingwindmills.org

Zikomo,

William

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Apart from working in schools, we have also sought ways to improve the livelihoods of the residents of Kasungu district. Last summer I piloted a biogas digester project in Masitala village. This digester uses cow dung to generate gas for cooking, thus providing an alternative energy source to firewood. Additionally, the processed manure can be used as fertilizer for crops, resulting in a win-win situation for the women. The project also reduces overreliance on firewood and overall deforestation. We hope to continue expanding this project into the neighboring villages. Along with the bio-gas project, we have also taught people how to fix and maintain water pumps for water wells. Indeed, most individuals contract water borne diseases because they lack someone who can repair and keep the water pumps in good condition. With such training having taken place in the villages surrounding Kasungu, we hope to see a reduction in the incidences of water-borne related illnesses.

While working with the community, we also saw it fit to create a soccer team for both girls and boys to provide a space for school drop outs to engage in meaningful activity, rather than remaining idle. The matches also create small business opportunities for women and families in the area, who bring food items to sell to the spectators. My younger sister, Doris Kamwamba, runs the female soccer team, while my friend, Binali Jamu, manages the male soccer team.

Away from Malawi, I have continued to participate in speaking engagements at various universities, colleges, high schools, and conferences around the US. Now I not only speak about my experiences  building the windmill, but I also inform audiences about the work that we are doing as we seek to bring development to different rural areas in Malawi.

As mentioned earlier, I have wrapped up my studies at Dartmouth College. I graduate last June. Coming to the US for college was a great experience. I had to learn how to balance my own cultural values while learning about other people’s cultures, and to recognize what I can take from the US and apply to my own culture. I noticed how we often take things for granted in our culture. Indeed, when you go out and learn other things, you come to appreciate your own culture and the other people’s cultures. I have also really enjoyed my classes, particularly how to solve challenges and come up with solutions. Such experiences taught me to think outside the box. Of course, there were challenging classes, but overall I enjoyed them. I would like to thank everyone who supported me during my time at Dartmouth, my professors—particularly Andrew Friedland, John Collier, Karen Gocsik, Peter Robbie, Terry Osborne, John Wilson, Mark Reed, and Brian Reed—my friends, and mentors who have treated me as a family member, in particular, Tom Reilly, Andrea Barthello, Bill Ritchie, Jackie and Mike Bezos, Jay and Ellen Walker and Bryan Mealer, and the countless others I have not mentioned but to whom I am continuously grateful. Thank you.

As I look into the future, I intend to return to Malawi and use the knowledge I have acquired through my studies and interactions to continue solving the problems facing people in the my community and Malawi in general. I would like to create an innovation center where students from different universities and high schools can work together to develop ideas that help solve problems that people face in different communities. Many young people are talented and have brilliant ideas, yet they don’t exploit the full potential of these ideas because of a dearth of organizations that can incubate them. In addition to establishing this innovation center, I also intend to continue working on renewable energies such as wind, solar, and biogas, based on my commitment to help people get the energy they need for daily use.

Thanks for reading this very long update, and I look forward to connecting more!

"New School Blocks at Wimbe Primary School 2010-2013"

"Installing Solar Panels at Kachokolo Community Day Secondary School"

"Biogas digester in Wimbe"

"Wimbe United getting ready to take on Kasunga Medicals"

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Read more here: http://www.star-telegram.com/2012/01/31/3701622/read-it-the-boy-who-harnessed.html#storylink=cpy

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By Elizabeth Floyd Mair
Special to the Times Union

Born in Albany and raised in the Ivory Coast in West Africa, painter and collagist Elizabeth Zunon has lived in the Capital Region since she was 12 and brings a multicultural sensibility to her work today as a children’s book illustrator. She’s 27 and just a few years out of design school, but two books that she illustrated have already been published. Another will be out in January, and she is at work on a fourth.

Her first book, “My Hands Sing the Blues,” written by Jeanne Walker Harvey, is a biography focusing on the childhood of twentieth-century African-American artist Romare Bearden. Published just this month, her second is titled “Lala Salama: A Tanzanian Lullaby,” written by Patricia MacLachlan, the Newbery Award-winning author of “Sarah, Plain and Tall.” The third will be “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind,” a picture-book version of the New York Times nonfiction bestseller by the same title.

Zunon and MacLachlan will sign copies of their book together on Saturday at the Open Door Bookstore in Schenectady.

Zunon works mainly in collage involving several different media—usually an oil-painted background with elements of cut paper, fabric, or beadwork. She also makes jewelry and handbags that she sells at craft fairs in the area. On a recent visit to her home studio in Albany she said, “This past summer I also started experimenting with silkscreen.”

Throughout her apartment, paintings in rich corals that looked as if they might be paintings of wind were laid out to dry. When asked if they were for “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind,” she explained that no, they were for “A President from Hawaii,” which she needs to complete by Thanksgiving (“it’s a bit of a rush project”). Photos of tropical leaves and plants were tacked up on bulletin boards as reference. Zunon said that she was inspired, while working on that fourth book, by the plant shapes she used in silkscreening fabrics for her handbags and pouches (“Everything is all connected in my work”).

Her parents met when both were students at the University at Albany. Her mother was born and raised in Albany, and her father was from the Ivory Coast. The family moved to West Africa when Zunon was just two months old, but maintained a deep connection to Albany, spending six weeks or so every year here with Zunon’s maternal grandparents.

As a child she loved stopping with her family at the marketplace every Sunday, where she would admire the patterned fabrics and the traditional crafts of West African artisans (“I always spent my whole allowance on beads”).

The family returned to the Capital Region when Zunon was 12, and she attended Guilderland schools beginning in eighth grade. It was at high school that, she says, “I started being a lot more invested in my art classes and the art teachers were really pushing me to perhaps focus on furthering my education in the arts.” Zunon attended the Rhode Island School of Design, majoring in illustration (“I took a lot of drawing and painting classes”) and graduating in 2006.

She then moved to the New York City area and began looking for jobs at museums and galleries, but “you can’t really get a full-time job anywhere painting portraits and still-lifes.” When she eventually found work, it was at a flower shop, as “the girl who hand-wrote all the notes to people and wrapped up all the flower arrangements.” She worked there for almost a year, till two days before Christmas 2008, when changes in the economy forced the shop to downsize (“I was on the train coming back to Albany and I got a phone call, ‘We won’t be asking you to come back’”).
But since graduating she had also gone to many conferences and portfolio reviews — one-on-one critiques of an artist’s work by art directors, agents, and other professionals in the publishing industry — and at one of these had met Lori Nowicki, who would later become her agent.

It was just two weeks after being laid off from the flower shop that she learned she’d be doing the illustrations for “My Hands Sing the Blues.”

Elizabeth Floyd Mair is a freelance writer living in Guilderland.

At a glance
What: Illustrator Elizabeth Zunon and author Patricia MacLachlan sign copies of their new book “Lala Salama: A Tanzanian Lullaby.”
When: 1 to 2:30 p.m. Saturday
Where: Open Door Bookstore, 128 Jay St., Schenectady
Admission: Free
Info: 346-2719; http://www.opendoor-bookstore.com/

About the books
“My Hands Sing the Blues: Romare Bearden’s Childhood Journey”
Author: Jeanne Walker Harvey
Illustrator: Elizabeth Zunon
Info: Marshall Cavendish; September 2011; 40 pages; $17.99; ages 4 and up
“Lala Salama: A Tanzanian Lullaby”
Author: Patricia MacLachlan
Illustrator: Zunon
Info: Candlewick Press; November 2011; 32 pages; $16.99; ages 4 and up
“The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Young Readers Edition”
Author: William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer
Illustrator: Zunon
Info: Dial Books for Young Readers; January 2012; 32 pages; $16.99; age 6 and up

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by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer, illustrated by Elizabeth Zunon ($16.99) [note: I change the cover to the kid's version, they had the adult version]

Farmers in Malawi, as in so many African countries, are desperate for water. Often, people hike for several hours to a common well, where they fill pots and bring them back home to dole out carefully, plant by plant. When a drought ravaged William Kamkwamba's family farm, his father reduced their meals to one a day and told William, then 14, that he could no longer afford to send him to school.

William, unhappy about this, remembered pictures of a windmill in a library that Americans established near his village. He scavenged trash — a broken bicycle, a tractor fan, a shock absorber — and created a wobbly but working windmill. His prototype eventually led to a windmill and solar pumps that irrigated his mother's garden and his father's fields. This picture book simplifies the best-selling nonfiction book that the same authors published three years ago. Ages 6 and up.

Claire Martin: 303-954-1477 orcmartin@denverpost.com

Read more:Children's Books: Scientists explore the gentle side of polar bears, and more – The Denver Posthttp://www.denverpost.com/search/ci_19778516#ixzz1kswEBZJK

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Kamkwamba, William           The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind; by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer; illus. by Elizabeth Zunon.

Dial, 2012                  [32p]

ISBN 978-0-8037-3511-8               $16.99

Reviewed from galleys                     R                      5-9 yrs

 At age fourteen, William is forced to drop out of school; the drought in Malawi has wreaked havoc on his family’s crops and there is no money for tuition. He starts spending time at the American library, where he learns about windmills and their power to “produce electricity and pump water.” Determined (and, according to his neighbors, slightly “misala,” or crazy), he hits the junkyard and constructs a windmill that produces enough energy to light a small bulb. This is only the beginning for William, who later went on to create a solar-powered water pump in his family’s field and is currently an engineering student at Dartmouth with plans to return to Malawi “to work on renewable energy for electricity and pumping water in villages.” This young reader’s edition of Kamkwamba and Mealer’s bestselling adult title is perfectly whittled down for the picture-book set, and the story of William’s creativity and perseverance is well suited for young dreamers. The language is rich and evocative, from descriptions of the ravages of hunger (“alone with the monster in his belly and the lump in his throat”) to his imaginings of how a windmill could impact his village. Zunon’s compositions seamlessly combine oil paintings with touches of cut-paper collage work, and rich, unexpected colors and textures bring warmth and intensity to the scenes.

Kamkwamba’s tale will appeal to a wide cross-section of kids, from those drawn to human-interest stories to those who like to construct and deconstruct things; supplementary details are provided in the extensive author’s note, which includes a photograph of William atop his actual windmill.  HM

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by Maria Popova

What bamboo poles and bicycle chains have to do with sparking the spirit of entrepreneurship.

When he was only 14 years old, William Kamkwamba dreamt up a windmill that would produce electricity for his village in Malawi. The trouble? As Malawi was experiencing the worst famine in 50 years, William had to drop out of school because his family could no longer afford the $80 annual tuition. This meant he not only had no money to purchase the parts, but also no formal education to teach him how to put them together. Determined, he headed to the local library and voraciously devoured its limited selection of textbooks, then gathered some scrap parts — a bicycle dynamo, bamboo poles, a tractor fan, rubber belts, a bike chain ring — and brought his vision to life, building a functioning windmill. He spent the next five years perfecting the design and went on to found the Moving Windmills Project in 2008 to foster rural economic development and education projects in Malawi.

In 2009, Kamkwamba shared his moving story of perseverance, curiosity, and ingenuity in the memoir The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope. Now, this modern-day entrepreneurial fairy tale is being adapted for young hearts and minds in the beautifully illustrated children’s book The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Young Readers Edition. Kamkwamba’s story shines with all the more optimism and tenacity in the hands of 27-year-old artist Elizabeth Zunon, whose rich, lyrical, almost three-dimensional oil-and-cut-paper illustrations, reminiscent of Sophie Blackall’s, vibrate with exceptional whimsy and buoyancy.

Coupled with the launch is a wonderful literacy effort — for every book parents, teacher, and children read online on We Give Books, the Wimbe community lending library, where Kamkwamba’s journey began, gets a new book, up to 10,000. Despite serving some 1,500 pupils, the library currently has no picture books.

Beautiful, moving, and immensely inspirational, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Young Readers Edition tells the kind of story that helps budding entrepreneurs relate to the world through a lens of infinite possibility — the kind of message that might, just might, empower them to harness if not the wind the future itself.

Thanks, Tom

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