Patricia McArdle

From Solar Cooking

Patricia McArdle, a staunch advocate of solar cooking, joined the board of Solar Household Energy and Solar Cookers International in 2007 to help promote the production of clean, safe, distributable, and renewable energy. Ms. McArdle has more than 30 years of international and public affairs experience.

[edit] Background

She 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 pollution and improve the lives of millions of women.

Patricia McArdle demonstrating her homemade Cookit to the governor, chief of police and villagers of Marmol in Balkh Province, Northern Afghanistan in March 2005

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.

That night, back at our camp in Mazar-e Sharif, I trolled the Internet for information on solar cookers and was astounded at the number of Web sites I found. I spent the next few evenings learning about this remarkably simple technology. Eventually I downloaded several plans, and asked the British Army kitchen staff for some old cardboard boxes, aluminum foil and flour to make paste. With the help of the soldiers, I constructed five different box- and panel-type solar cookers. We took them up to the roof of our heavily guarded compound and, over a period of several weeks, tested them and measured the results. The solar CooKit won the competition.

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. 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 is partially funding only one solar cooker project, with Solar Household Energy (SHE) in Mexico. I plan to continue working to convince my colleagues in the government to support the spread of solar cooker technology around the world.