Strange TED video (William Kamkwamba and a windmill)
Usually you can find really good and inspiring videos from TED site. Having said that, I can’t help wondering what was the purpose of this video of William Kamkwamba from Tanzania. The guy build a windmill for his family at the age 14. He did all this by watching photos from a book. It’s REALLY impressive but what is the point of flying him across the world to speak 10 sentences.
Just look at his face when to crowd applauses him every now and then. His got no glue why they are doing it. He just build the windmill the get light to his house not to get famous. I don’t know. For me it’s sensation seeking from a continent that is suffering from food and water shortage. The worst example of this kind of ’sensation seeking’ was a documentary about a kid from Africa with a badly deformed face. They flew him to L.A and made about dozen plastic surgeries. Nothing wrong with that but why the hell did they have to make an hour long documentary about him?! Maybe to put on TV something that nobody has ever seen before?
I read about this windmill kid a few years ago and it was impressive thing to hear but I can’t help feeling that TED had some self interests when they put him on the Internet. Maybe it’s just me. Tell me if I’m wrong.
EDIT: Apparently I was wrong. Community Director Tom Rielly from TED commented on this post and cleared some issues on my post. I admit jumping into conclusions but having said that the 4 minute video clip does leave lots of thing unclear (at least for me). But now I now the background of the story and I like TED more than yesterday :)
Thanks Tom!
Reader Comments
Dear Nestori,
My name is Tom Rielly from TED Conferences. Some context on William’s talk. The conference where he spoke was TEDGlobal in Arusha, Tanzania, 2 hours from his home. He was attending as a conference Fellow, meaning a member of the audience who came at our expense. We invited him because of his remarkable achievement, which is all the more remarkable once you learn more about the circumstances that led him to do it.
When I met him at the conference, I realized that his story was quite powerful, and invited him to give a short talk, even though his English was limited at the time. This was not planned in advance.
Later, members of the TED Community helped him go back to School and achieve his goals of bringing food security, clean water, irrigation and more to his family.
He has a book coming out in the fall which tells the WHOLE story, and he himself speaks more about his journey in a short film below.
Find out more here:
http://www.williamkamkwamba.com
http://missingpiecesvideo.com/kamkwamba/movingwindmillsFINALsubtitle.mov
Please let me know if you have more questions.
Kind regards,
Tom Rielly
Community Director
Hi Tom!
Thanks for your comment/information. I updated my post.
Having worked on a Internet startup I’d give A+ for your brand monitoring. I don’t think ours was this fast :)
Kääk! Varo sitä sikainfluenssaa. Jookosta.