Patricia McArdle
From Solar Cooking
New February 2009: Audio interview with Patricia McArdle
Contents |
[edit] Background
Patricia served as a Peace Corps volunteer health educator in Paraguay in the early 1970s then joined the U.S. Navy where she spent three years at a remote communications base in Morocco. After 27 years as a U.S. diplomat, she left government service in 2006. Her last overseas assignment was as the Department of State's representative at a British Army-run Provincial Reconstruction Team in Northern Afghanistan. Here in her own words is the story of her "solar cooker epiphany".
I had heard of solar cookers before I went to Afghanistan, but I knew little about them or their incredible potential to save forests, reduce indoor air pollution and improve the lives of millions of women.
My solar cooker epiphany occurred on a cold but sunny March day while on patrol in the Hindu Kush with one of our military observation teams. During my travels around northern Afghanistan, I had observed that there were almost no trees and little groundcover left in the region. People told me that the trees had been cut down for firewood or to make charcoal. As we drove that morning up a narrow mountain trail to a remote village for a meeting with local officials, we passed a group of young (five-seven year old) children leading donkeys down the trail.
After our meeting, the soldiers and I were given a tour of the village. The district governor showed us the one remaining “forest” in the area, a small grove of cedar and pine growing just above the village. It was guarded night and day to prevent the trees from being cut down for firewood. The governor explained to us that if they lost their “forest,” the next big rain would wash away the village. I was also invited into one of the family compounds and introduced to the women who were cooking lunch over a smoky fire fueled with what looked like tumbleweed stacked in a huge pile next to their mud-walled hut.
At the end of the day, heading down the mountain, we again passed the children, who were on their way home. Their donkeys were barely visible under enormous bundles of the same “tumbleweed” I had seen the women cooking with. As we traveled west into the glare of the setting sun, I thought to myself, “Someone should tell these people about solar cookers.” Since I didn’t know much about solar cookers myself, I did some research.
It was clear to me that there was a great potential in this country for the widespread distribution of solar cookers to:
- Reduce the amount of time children spend foraging for fuel
- Reduce erosion caused by a lack of ground cover (and the resulting flooding)
- Cut down on the amount of smoke that women are exposed to while cooking
I hoped to return eventually to the village that had inspired me to learn about solar cookers, to demonstrate the CooKit and see how the people would react to this remarkable technology. Four months later, we went back.
It was another cool, sunny day. A small group of men standing in front of the governor’s house watched in silence as we arrived for our meeting. (Women are not allowed out in public unless the gathering is all female). Before going in to see the governor, I poured a bottle of water into a black pot, put the pot inside a transparent oven bag, placed the bag in my homemade CooKit, turned the CooKit to face the sun and went inside with the soldiers.
When we came out of the meeting 90 minutes later, the pot was steaming and the crowd had swelled from 10 to about 40 men. They were scratching their beards, pointing at the CooKit and trying to figure out how this piece of cardboard covered with shiny paper was able to boil water. Where was the fire? It looked to them like magic even after I explained how it worked. The pot was clearly very hot, but the cardboard and aluminum foil were not. How could this be? They all insisted on coming up to touch the very hot pot and then the cool foil-covered cardboard to confirm what they were seeing.
One of the men exclaimed, “We could make our tea with this!” The others nodded enthusiastically. Another said he would be able to find cardboard, but “where,” he asked, “do I get that shiny paper?” They all looked at me in silence, waiting for an answer. I wasn’t certain how to reply, because I knew that aluminum foil was not sold anywhere but Kabul, which was more than 100 miles to the south over the Hindu Kush.
Another man smiled, reached into his back pocket and took out a pack of cigarettes. He pulled up the inner foil liner and shouted, “We could use this!” The other men nodded, and several more pulled out their own cigarette packs to examine the foil liners. Within five minutes, these men had figured out a use for this technology and they had discovered a way to manufacture it using a locally available resource. None of them suggested that their wives might be able to cook meals with this technology, but I was still very impressed with their positive and creative reaction to my very brief demonstration. If they only used the CooKit for heating tea water, they would still dramatically reduce the biomass consumption of their village.
I began inquiring about solar cooker projects in Afghanistan and found that only Gordon Magney, who has distributed several hundred SPORT solar box cookers, was currently involved with solar cookers there. (I learned later that Sun Ovens International had, several years earlier, distributed solar cookers in Afghanistan.) Magney gave me a detailed proposal for another solar cooker project. I tried to generate support for his project within our embassy and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) mission, but, sadly, was not successful. There are a few other dedicated individuals promoting solar cooking in Afghanistan. Please see Afghanistan for more information.
I have told this story and given solar cooker presentations many times at the U.S. State Department, the Peace Corps, USAID and elsewhere since my return from Afghanistan. Currently the U.S. government's Environmental Protection Agency is partially funding one solar cooker project, in Bolivia. They will soon provide partial funding for an SCI project in Kenya. The STAR-TIDES group at the National Defense University has invited me two years in a row to demonstrate solar cookers at NDU and at the Pentagon. Every Peace Corps volunteer going to an energy-starved, sun drenched country should receive training in the promotion of solar cooker technology. I am hopeful that President Obama's administration will give more support to the spread of this simple, green, technology that uses earth's most abundant source of energy.
[edit] News and recent developments
- August 2008: Last Saturday I taught the 24 members of Boy Scout troop 684 in Mt. Vernon, Va, how to make a Larry Winiarski sixteen brick rocket stove, how to make a Cookit from a cardboard box and and how to make a hay basket using a black plastic garbage bag and crumpled newspaper. We baked cakes and cooked chicken and vegetables. We pasteurized water in the Cookit using the WAPI. I also gave a presentation on Bob's portable microbiology lab. The boys were enthusiastic learners and their Marine Corps dads were astounded at the simplicity of these powerful technologies. The boys will be demonstrating their new integrated cooking skills at the upcoming national scout jamboree.
- August 2008: Yesterday I set up another all day solar cooker demo at the U.S. Botanical Gardens with Dave Chalker (who distributes the Tulsi Hybrid in the U.S.) We were given a primo location right in front of the entrance to the gardens. Several thousand people walked by our exhibit (Dave cooked chicken and I baked six cakes). We were able to talk to several hundred people from countries all over the world. It was wonderful to be able to refer them to the Solar Cooking Archive which is so rich in information and so well organized. Many of the foreign visitors were delighted to learn that the information on solar cookers is available in multiple languages.
- March 2008: Last October, Pat McArdle hosted a two-week working demonstration that featured a variety of solar cookers, fuel-efficient stoves and heat-retention devices during the Transportable Infrastructures for Development and Emergency Support (TIDES) exhibit at the National Defense University (NDU) in Washington, DC. Several hundred military and civilian officials from area agencies visited the exhibit, which was held at Fort McNair. McArdle, a board member of Solar Cookers International (SCI), demonstrated the three common types of solar cookers: panel, box, and concentrator. The exhibit included posters on solar cooker technology and displays of Dr. Bob Metcalf’s Portable Microbiology Laboratory and SCI’s Water Pasteurization Indicator (WAPI). McArdle tested Anacostia River water and used an AquaPak™ to solar pasteurize the contaminated water. As often occurs at solar cooker exhibits, visitors had to burn their fingers on the steaming pots before they could believe what they were seeing! The weather was excellent, and food was solar cooked and served to visitors every day. On two partly cloudy days, fuel-efficient wood stoves and retained-heat devices were used to finish the cooking of chicken stew, rice, and beans begun in the solar cookers. The TIDES exhibit was repeated for two days in early November at the Pentagon. Cloudy weather unfortunately made it impossible to solar cook. At both exhibits, McArdle explained to visitors the principles of integrated solar cooking: use solar cookers whenever the sun is out, save precious fuel for nights and cloudy days when fuel-efficient stoves are the appropriate technology, and in either case use heat-retention devices to maintain cooking temperatures in pots that have been removed from their heat source. Under the overcast skies at the Pentagon, McArdle was able to cook chicken tajine, lentil stew, and couscous with a fuel-efficient stove, a heat-retention device, and a few small twigs gathered on site. The TIDES exhibit is an effort by Dr. Lin Wells of the NDU to bring together a volunteer cadre of “experts” that can pool their knowledge of easily deployable energy efficient technologies that could be used in disaster and humanitarian situations. The team will be repeating their displays at future events around the country.
[edit] Audio and video
- August 2009
| Solar Cooking and Food Processing in Afghanistan - the Future of Green Afghan Energy |
- February 2009: Audio interview with Patricia McArdle
[edit] External links
- March 2008: Louise Meyer and Patricia McArdle explain how the Solar Cookers work - YouTube
- September 2007: Security Through Solar - Washington Post (letter to the editor)
[edit] Contact
See Solar Household Energy, Inc. or Solar Cookers International.
