Extraordinary Ability O-1 Visa

The day Kingston Wamburi made a windmill and got his Extraordinary Ability O-1 Visa

Kingston Theodore Wamburi had a natural aptitude for physics. More than that, he had an inventive mind, which became quite clear to everyone in his village of Kajulu when the boy turned 13. One day, the young Kenyan rigged his bicycle so that it would spin a whetstone when he worked the pedals. He set up a service for sharpening knives right away. He’d sit in one spot and pedal away, and the shillings would come flying in.

He figured out pretty soon that he could generate electricity with the same movement. Next thing you know, he was charging people’s cell phones for them by working the pedals. Most of his village had no electricity and the few people with generators used to charge killing prices for recharging phones. Kingston did it for nothing. He soon hired a younger boy to do the pedaling.

But Kingston really made history four years later the day he rigged a windmill and harnessed the power of the wind to light up houses in his village. He became an instant celebrity. Newspapers wrote about him, television crews came to interview him. A philanthropist offered to pay for the rest of his education, and he won the President’s Medal of Honor.

Pretty soon, he was international news. A major publishing house commissioned a book on his incredible achievement, and a BBC crew came down to do a documentary film on him. His windmill model was replicated in other remote villages, and lights began to go on all across the Kenyan hinterland.

One day, he received an invitation from the TED Talks organization to come to the USA and give a talk about how he harnessed the wind and his plans for the future. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab agreed to sponsor his visit and asked him if he could travel around the United States and share his experiences with different technical institutions after he was done with the TED Talk.

Kingston learned that he was uniquely eligible for a Extraordinary Ability O-1 Visa designed especially for people of extraordinary ability in the sciences, the arts, education, business or athletics, or extraordinary achievements in the film or TV industry. It was called the O-1 visa; in 2019, a total of 17,751 O-1 visas had been issued. And now Kingston was in line to get it.

The people at MIT filed a petition on his behalf to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services using Form I-129. Not long after, the approval arrived, on Form I-797. Armed with this, Kingston was all set to apply for the Extraordinary Ability O-1 Visa.

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