He is, you're right. And I'm sure that it's individuals making incremental improvements in life quality that moves a place forward. But ... (and I'm trying to say this right) ... some part of me feels really depressed that a Malawi kid building a scrapyard generator is hailed as being so inspirational.

Is our view of Africa so pessimistic, then, so jaded, that what appears to be routine on Scrapheap Challenge is an inspirational act, just because it happened in Africa? Does it mean we normally operate on the underlying assumption that it is preposterous for the average African kid to work to improve his life, but perfectly normal for a kid in Texas or Utrecht to do so?

Does it mean we view the normal functioning of the good human spirit, of generosity and inventiveness, as somehow nonexistent in typical African children and therefore worthy of immense celebration in this one child? Do these views permeate our governments? Do we send aid not as the favor a good-natured neighbor would perform in times of duress, but rather as we might offer a beer to a man we have beggared, knowing his condition to be permanent but wishing nonetheless to lend him a moment's joy in a world of suffering?

Maybe our celebration of this kid (and it's true, what he did is awesome and helps his village and family out tremendously) is just about being genuinely warmed by the overcoming of a supremely difficult environment. Or maybe celebrating a minor victory assuages our guilt, pervasive hopelessness, and ultimate indifference regarding Africa.

I'm honestly not certain - but every time I see one of these stories, this same feeling of uneasiness comes up, and I'm not sure which way is the truth. Probably, like everything in the world, it's some of each.

I'm normally not very convinced that everyone who does something neat deserves that label (yay, everyone's a hacker! thus cheapening it), but this guy clearly does. He's solving real problems in creative, non-obvious ways to make something where there was nothing. Inspiring story.

You could not have said it better. This guy is truly amazing. I'm mostly impressed with the fact that he learned most of what he did from pictures, not words, and from scouring the junkyard and learning how things worked. Great analogy for anybody trying to learn in a new field, particularly hackers.