'The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind'

Moreover, when examining the intersection between the medical impacts of malaria on the human and the social consequences, a vicious cycle is revealed in which the body, the community, and the economy are all similarly impacted by the presence of malaria in a

Malaria has been a huge problem among many developing nations over the past century. The amount of people in the entire world that die from malaria each year is between 700,000 and 2.7 million. 75% of these deaths are African children (Med. Letter on CDC & FDA, 2001). 90% of the malaria cases in the world are located in Sub-Saharan Africa. Once again, the majority of these deaths are of children (Randerson, 2002). The numbers speak for themselves. Malaria is a huge problem and needs to be dealt with immediately.

Malaria is a preventable disease transmitted by a female anopheles mosquito that has a global annual death impact of over one million mainly concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa (Patricia Schlagenhauf-Lawlor, & Funk-Baumann, M., 2005, pg. 6)(1). Although malaria is almost unheard of in developed countries like the United States, in the early 1900s malaria was just as prevalent as it is in sub-Saharan Africa today. The United States has eradicated local malaria due to increased finances and physician led public health missions in the 1940’s in the form of the DDT campaign(Humphries, 2001, pg. 2). However, in underdeveloped countries mainly located in tropical areas, the death toll to malaria continues to rise due to challenges and barriers between accumulating hefty finances, adequate resources and delivering affective outreach programs( Jennifer Kates, Michaud, J., Wexler, A., Valentine, A., 2013)(3).

In the book The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer, William Kamkwamba against all odds takes upon himself the task to fix not only his own family's problems, but his entire villages. He does so by creating a Windmill that ends up doing much more than anyone could of ever imagined, like bringing water up from the ground, and eventually putting Malawi on the map.

Malaria (also called biduoterian fever, blackwater fever, falciparum malaria, plasmodium, Quartan malaria, and tertian malaria) is one of the most infectious and most common diseases in the world. This serious, sometimes-fatal disease is caused by a parasite that is carried by a certain species of mosquito called the Anopheles. It claims more lives every year than any other transmissible disease except tuberculosis. Every year, five hundred million adults and children (around nine percent of the world’s population) contract the disease and of these, one hundred million people die. Children are more susceptible to the disease than adults, and in Africa, where ninety percent of the world’s cases occur and where eighty percent of the cases

According to the World Bank, more than fifty percent of citizens in Malawi were living beneath the poverty line in 2010. Because this issue is so widespread, the country is often forced to utilize cheap materials that more fortunate people would see as worthless. The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind, written by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer, tells the story of how William Kamkwamba, an ordinary Malawian boy, creates his own success by simply recycling old materials to create an invention that revolutionized his whole town and life. William constantly faces negativity and challenges in his journey to make his dream a reality due to his lack of readily available resources. However, the adversity he faces pushes him to keep going and forces

“The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind” is a powerful, great book about a boy, William Kamkwamba, who I shall admit is extremely innovative and determined. He lives in a very small, and not to mention poor, village where everyone needs each other and especially the maize crop to survive. His town is surrounded by this supposed magic, although William’s family is Christian based after his father’s experiences. William and his friend, Gilbert, go to school, but William is basically forced to drop out after a famine had hit hard on the poor village in Malowi. He tried to sneak into school, but of course that ended in failure. To catch up on what he was missing, he went to the library and looks through books. Then he found something interesting, a book

The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer, is an inspirational novel which moves the reader to make a change in the world. William grew up in Malawi, Africa where magic ruled and modern science was a total mystery, along with his mother, father, and sisters. They family grew maize on their farm and always had enough to sell and to eat throughout the winter, until one dreadful season. The country fell into a drought which lead to a famine, resulting in a myriad of deaths, some personal to William. William was then forced to drop out of school, which he adored, because his family could not afford it. Throughout all of this darkness, there was light. There was still a dream. William aspired to be educated, and when he

Aim - To explore the impacts Malaria has on citizens of developing countries which are effect by the disease.

Malaria has been in existence for thousands of years. Many historical records show that it has affected human civilization greatly by plaguing and causing mass death. The earliest record can be traced back to 2700 BC in China (Cox, 2002). It has been long associated with swamps and insects for hundreds of years but often believed to be the air from swamps causing the plague. The term malaria rooted from two Italian words ‘mala’ and ‘aria’ which literally means bad air. Humanity did not know the true nature of the long thought disease until 1894 when a Scottish physician, Sir Ronald Ross, discovered that it was actually the parasite in mosquito that is causing the malaria.

Ninety percent of all malaria deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa, which is the location and region of where this issue affects. In a concentrated effort to treat malaria since 2000, 700 million cases have been stopped in Africa, bringing the number of cases down by almost fifty percent. This pleasant news is the result of human interaction. Since the introduction of bed nets, malaria death rates have dropped by sixty percent, saving six million lives. All this progress has to be credited to the scientists who got notified by their respective countries when deaths constantly occur in a certain area through communication. Shortly after getting notified, the researchers travel to sub-Saharan Africa, which requires movement, to analyze the situation

Kamkwamba was born in a family of relative poverty and relied primarily on farming to survive. According to his biography, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, his father had been a rough fighting man who changed after discovering the Christian God. A crippling famine forced Kamkwamba to drop out of school, and he was not able to return to school because his family was unable to afford the tuition fees. In a desperate attempt to retain his education, Kamkwamba began to frequent the library. It was at the local library where Kamkwamba discovered his true love for electronics. Before, he had once set up a small business repairing his village's radios, but his work with the radios had been cheap.

William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer’s novel The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind incorperates multiple events where William opposes the will of the Majority. Living in William’s community has many insuperable obsticles. For example, growing food and recieving water is an extremely difficult task. Most of the villagers rely on others to grow their food for them, but William believes there is another option. William opposes the will of them majority by building a windmill despite other villagers and their criticism. Overall, this shows that those who oppose society can make a difference in their community.

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind was a very inspiring story. A boy that came from such beginnings would have never been expected to do what William Kamkwamba did, especially in a third world country. Although some of the book wandered off into what seemed like random information, it all was Kamkwamba’s life and described what he did in his childhood and up. Also, this random information gave detail to what his surroundings were like. For example, the gumball story in the beginning showed how much his village believed in magic, making it that much more spectacular of him to do something like create a renewable energy source in a place that knew more about magic and less about science. The book motivated me to do something great, even though I

About 3.3 billion people, that is about half of the world’s population are at risk of contracting malaria (figure 1). Every year there are 250 million cases of malaria, and nearly 1 million deaths. That amounts to 2,732 deaths per day. Out of those million people that die every year, 800,000 of them are African children under the age of 5. To control malaria three actions need to be taken: insecticides need to be used to decrease the vector population, people have to be educated as to how to prevent the vector from reproducing, and anti-malarial drugs need to be distributed. To understand the vector and what the vector is, scientists had to first discover what the parasite was and how it worked. It was not until the year 1880 that French Physician Charles Laveran discovered that Malaria was caused by a protozoan in the genus Plasmodium (Malaria, 2013)