come on when you pedal?” I’d ask.
“The dynamo is rotating, that’s why.”
“I know it’s rotating, but why does it work? What is the secret?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can I play with it?”
“Help yourself.”
I spun the wheel and watched the light. One day while playing with my father’s friend’s bike, I noticed the wires had come loose from the bulb. With the wheel spinning, I accidentally touched the ends to the metal handlebar and saw a spark. This gave me my next idea.
One afternoon Geoffrey and I borrowed that same bike, flipped it upside down, and connected the wires to the positive and negative heads on a radio, where the batteries would normally go. When we cranked the pedal, nothing happened. I then attached the wires directly to the base of the dynamo’s bulb. This time when I pedaled, the light flickered on. Taking the batteries I’d removed from the radio, I stacked them together and ran a separate wire from the batteries to the bulb. Again, the light worked.
“Mister Geoffrey, my experiment shows that the dynamo and the bulb are both working properly,” I said. “So why won’t the radio play?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Try connecting them there.”
He was pointing toward a socket on the radio labeled “AC,” and when I shoved the wires inside, the radio came to life. We shouted with excitement. As I pedaled the bicycle, I could hear the great Billy Kaunda playing his happy music on Radio Two, and that made Geoffrey start to dance.
“Keep pedaling,” he said. “That’s it, just keep pedaling”
“Hey, I want to dance, too.”
“You’ll have to wait your turn.”
Without realizing it, I’d just discovered the difference between alternating and direct current. Of course, I wouldn’t know what this meant until much later.
After a few minutes of pedaling this upside-down bike by hand, my arm grew tired and the radio slowly died. So I began thinking, What can do the pedaling for us so Geoffrey and I can dance?
The dynamo had given me a small taste of electricity, and that mademe want to figure out how to create my own. Only 2 percent of Malawians have electricity, and this is a huge problem. Having no electricity meant no lights, which meant I could never do anything at night, such as study or finish my radio repairs, much less see the roaches, mice, and spiders that crawled the walls and floors in the dark. Once the sun goes down, and if there’s no moon, everyone stops what they’re doing, brushes their teeth, and just goes to sleep. Not at 10:00 P.M. , or even nine o’clock—but seven in the evening! Who goes to bed at seven in the evening? Well, I can tell you, most of Africa.
Like most people, my family used kerosene lamps to find our way at night. These lamps were nothing more than a Nido powdered milk can with a cloth wick, filled with fuel and bent closed at the top. The fuel was very expensive, and the only place to buy it for a good price was at the petrol station in Mtunthama seven kilometers away. The lamps produced thick black smoke that burned your eyes and made you cough. Of course, you can buy hurricane lamps made with glass and a top that prevents the smoke from coming out, but most people can’t afford these.
Our country’s power is supplied by the government through the Electricity Supply Corporation of Malawi (ESCOM), which produces electricity using turbines on the Shire River in the south—another object of my fascination that I’ll describe later.
If you have money and a lot of patience, you can ask ESCOM to bring electricity to your home by wire. You have to catch a pickup to Kasungu, then a minibus one hundred kilometers to the capital Lilongwe, where you’ll find the ESCOM office in Magetsi House. There you pay someone thousands of kwacha, submit an application, and draw them a map of your home so they can find it. And if you’re lucky, maybe your application will get approved and the workers will find your home and
“The dynamo is rotating, that’s why.”
“I know it’s rotating, but why does it work? What is the secret?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can I play with it?”
“Help yourself.”
I spun the wheel and watched the light. One day while playing with my father’s friend’s bike, I noticed the wires had come loose from the bulb. With the wheel spinning, I accidentally touched the ends to the metal handlebar and saw a spark. This gave me my next idea.
One afternoon Geoffrey and I borrowed that same bike, flipped it upside down, and connected the wires to the positive and negative heads on a radio, where the batteries would normally go. When we cranked the pedal, nothing happened. I then attached the wires directly to the base of the dynamo’s bulb. This time when I pedaled, the light flickered on. Taking the batteries I’d removed from the radio, I stacked them together and ran a separate wire from the batteries to the bulb. Again, the light worked.
“Mister Geoffrey, my experiment shows that the dynamo and the bulb are both working properly,” I said. “So why won’t the radio play?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Try connecting them there.”
He was pointing toward a socket on the radio labeled “AC,” and when I shoved the wires inside, the radio came to life. We shouted with excitement. As I pedaled the bicycle, I could hear the great Billy Kaunda playing his happy music on Radio Two, and that made Geoffrey start to dance.
“Keep pedaling,” he said. “That’s it, just keep pedaling”
“Hey, I want to dance, too.”
“You’ll have to wait your turn.”
Without realizing it, I’d just discovered the difference between alternating and direct current. Of course, I wouldn’t know what this meant until much later.
After a few minutes of pedaling this upside-down bike by hand, my arm grew tired and the radio slowly died. So I began thinking, What can do the pedaling for us so Geoffrey and I can dance?
The dynamo had given me a small taste of electricity, and that mademe want to figure out how to create my own. Only 2 percent of Malawians have electricity, and this is a huge problem. Having no electricity meant no lights, which meant I could never do anything at night, such as study or finish my radio repairs, much less see the roaches, mice, and spiders that crawled the walls and floors in the dark. Once the sun goes down, and if there’s no moon, everyone stops what they’re doing, brushes their teeth, and just goes to sleep. Not at 10:00 P.M. , or even nine o’clock—but seven in the evening! Who goes to bed at seven in the evening? Well, I can tell you, most of Africa.
Like most people, my family used kerosene lamps to find our way at night. These lamps were nothing more than a Nido powdered milk can with a cloth wick, filled with fuel and bent closed at the top. The fuel was very expensive, and the only place to buy it for a good price was at the petrol station in Mtunthama seven kilometers away. The lamps produced thick black smoke that burned your eyes and made you cough. Of course, you can buy hurricane lamps made with glass and a top that prevents the smoke from coming out, but most people can’t afford these.
Our country’s power is supplied by the government through the Electricity Supply Corporation of Malawi (ESCOM), which produces electricity using turbines on the Shire River in the south—another object of my fascination that I’ll describe later.
If you have money and a lot of patience, you can ask ESCOM to bring electricity to your home by wire. You have to catch a pickup to Kasungu, then a minibus one hundred kilometers to the capital Lilongwe, where you’ll find the ESCOM office in Magetsi House. There you pay someone thousands of kwacha, submit an application, and draw them a map of your home so they can find it. And if you’re lucky, maybe your application will get approved and the workers will find your home and
Similar Books
