The wind-down of PST was more like a whirlwind. After model school, we had one awkward week before the last week of preparing to go to site. It felt odd to be going to normal sessions again after spending two weeks doing what we were preparing to do for the next two years. But perhaps Peace Corps knew this, because the week had a few surprises we weren’t prepared for.

The first was that, early in the week, after our final session on PACA (the story of PACA is a post for another time), we were suddenly given cold ice cream. Malawi has ice cream, but nowhere near the place where we actually were. Apparently they had brought it in from Lilongwe especially for us earlier that morning. It was only just beginning to melt. I had had ice cream once on site visit (Blantyre is pretty big with restaurants), but I was still overjoyed at seeing this and tasting it, even though having to go eat nsima immediately afterwards sort of killed the enjoyment and excitement.

The second surprise was a person. At the beginning of PST, Peace Corps had given us a training schedule that told us each individual session in each timeslot. However, sometimes the schedule changed. On this particular day, the last session had been combined with another session and no one had told us what was replacing the slot where it was originally supposed to be. We all just hung out in the large church we were using as a hall, and at some point the language coordinator came into set up a sound system with a microphone which was highly unusual. I went outside and overheard someone in Chichewa saying “when he/she arrives, give him/her this” (the third-person singular pronoun in Chichewa is gender-neutral so I couldn’t get a clue as to who it was from that). It was definitely a hint that it was someone important. I spent the next 20 minutes giving wild speculations to the people around me as to who it could be, including but not limited to Joyce Banda, Faith Mussa, Peter Mutharika, and Michelle Obama. Eventually, the Country Director came in with a few people, one of them a man we didn’t recognize and I heard a friend behind me ask, “Is that the boy who harnessed the wind?” It turned out she was right.

William Kwamkamba is from Kasungu (the same district as our training village), a village about an hour away from us. He became internationally famous around 12 years ago when, after losing the ability to pay school fees and one of Malawi’s worst famines, he began building a windmill from junkyard parts, mainly PVC pipes and an old bicycle frame. Even though his English wasn’t great at the time, he went to a library every day and got some books on electricity and power, mostly looking at the diagrams for guides, and using a Chichewa-English dictionary for extra assistance. His community wasn’t super supportive of his project while he was building it, thinking that he was wasting time on unimportant things (with us he related that his mother told him at one point, after he had attempted to speed along the process of biogas by cooking poop on the stove, “You are never going to get a wife if you keep on like this”). That is, until he actually built the windmill and was able to power a few lights and—a thing most important in nearly every region of Africa these days—charge cell phones. Then people noticed. Long story short, a reporter found him and he was able to fly to a TEDx conference where he gave a talk explaining what he had done (go Google and watch it right now!). He also, with some assistance, wrote a memoir entitled The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, which is a brief and easy read and gives a pretty good portrayal of Malawian life and the context in which he was living when he built his machine.

The first part of his talk to us was him giving us a more detailed version of the story pretty much all of us had already heard. Then he told us about what he had been doing since then. He had gone to engineering school and come back home and had just kept on working with various projects of different energy types, not just windmills. The famine of 2002 really affected his desires—the main thing he’s wanted to do for a while is build improved sustainable irrigation systems to prevent food shortages (he discusses some of the early inklings of this in his book). I was surprised (but in hindsight I shouldn’t have been) to hear him discuss how he’d recently even been working with biogas! Biogas is essentially power from poop. You take a bunch of manure and put it in a sealed tank underground and through natural processes, the methane will rise to the top, which you can then use to cook with. It’s been active in Asia since the 1970s but for some reason hasn’t really hit Africa until recently. In the question and answer someone asked him if he had ever considered using the pit latrines as a source for biogas. After his response, the Country Director said, “I’m impressed that it only took this Peace Corps group 45 minutes to bring up the topic of feces.” Afterwards I asked him if he knew of any good resources for learning more about biogas and he told me, “I’ve just been looking on Google and YouTube and I’ve found some good things there.” It was refreshing to hear that our research strategies were the same.

Kamkwamba is a really good icon for kids here. The new syllabi of the schools are trying very hard to encourage critical thinking, which has mostly been overlooked in Malawi in the past. Kamkwamba related a story to us about when, as a child, he asked someone how a car worked, and their response was “you turn the key and it turns on, and then you go.” This was not a joke or a snide remark. This was an earnest response to his question. Kamkwamba encouraged us (especially education) to encourage our students in their critical thinking activities and creativity, and give them space to be creative in whatever way they can.

The next day we had a long test-like thing (not really sure I can explain the parameters of it here), followed by a luncheon with all of the staff at one of the Peace Corps offices. One of the environment sector staff leaders had brought along his friend who plays violin and was self-taught. He played a few pop song melodies with backing track on his violin before singing a song, in his words, “to prove that violin players can do more than just play violin.” The song he chose to sing? Lucille. Yes, that Lucille. “You picked a fine time to leave me Lucille…” The country song. It was extremely weird to hear a country song (especially an older classic one like that) in Malawi being sung by a Malawian. But, as I was to discover, country, especially classic country, is actually a fairly popular genre here (the following day one of my neighbors in the village told me he loved Kenny Rogers and recognized and sang along with me when I played “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town” on my guitar). After he was finished playing and singing, the DJ played “Coward of the County.”

We had one final surprise. One of the staff members from the office, who was himself a volunteer here in Malawi (most non-Malawian staff are former Peace Corps Volunteers but in other countries besides Malawi) recently, read something to us. Apparently there is a tradition that at the Close of Service interview, people are asked, “what advice would you give to the people who come after you?” And then now, they read a collection of the words they’ve received from many former volunteers. So it’s like handing down words of wisdom to us from those who have already been there and seen and done it all. One could tell he was even a bit emotional reading these.