Overcoming Adversity: The Story Of My Life By Helen Keller

648 Words3 Pages

People can overcome adversity in many ways. This can include building over them, feeling them, or just jumping over the hard to conquer obstacles, such as having a river block your path, build over it. While some people use physical objects like wood or stone, others can use their minds to conquer it. To start off, in the excerpt from “The Story of My Life” by Helen Keller, she explains how she learned how to talk and communicate with people with her teacher Anne Sullivan by feeling and “writing”. Since she is blind and deaf, it was a very hard challenge for her, but she eventually got the upper hand and defeated it. In the text in paragraph 2 on page 505 it states, “...Miss sullivan slowly spelled into my hand the word d-o-l-l. I was at once interested in this finger play and tried to imitate it. When I finally succeeded in making the letters correctly I was flushed with childish pleasure…” This shows that using her sense of feeling she learned how to write things such as doll. But she did not know what it meant yet. To add onto this, on page 506 in paragraph 3 the text continues and states “One day Miss …show more content…

In the small Country Masitala Malawi, there is very little electricity which means there was little power in houses. So what does william decide to do? William Kamkwamba decides to defeat the obstacle by building a windmill to solve his electricity needs for his family out of various materials. In the text on page 520 in paragraph 9 it states “The contraption that's causing all the fuss is a tower made from lashed-together blue-gum tree trunks… For blades Mr. Kamkwamba used flattened plastic pipes. He built a turbine from spare bicycle parts.” This shows that it wasn't the easiest way to make a windmill, but with time, hard work, and effort, people can accomplish and build many