The Foreign Service Journal, May 2016

58 may 2016 | the foreign Service journal FromDiplomat to Solar Cooking Fanatic By Patr i c i a McArdl e D uring entry-level officer training, new diplo- mats are often asked to ponder the challenge we all face at some point during our careers—what to do when you disagree with a policy you are required to defend. Retirement frees us from that conundrum and allows us to speak truth to power without risking our jobs or our pensions. My primary activity since returning from a 2005 tour of duty in northern Afghanistan and retiring nine months later has been the promotion of a renewable energy technology—solar thermal cooking. Over the past decade I’ve demonstrated solar cookers in Sudanese refugee camps, on the Navajo reservation, in Nepali villages, central Mexico, Morocco, India, Guyana and all over Washington, D.C. In 2007 I organized the first in a series of annual solar cooking demonstrations in the center courtyard of the Pentagon. How did this retired grandmother become a solar cooking fanatic? Afghanistan’s abundant sunshine, its vanishing forests and the sad processions of small children I saw everywhere hauling mounds of brush back to their villages for their mother’s cooking fires reminded me of a solar cooker I’d made as a Girl Scout. This memory inspired me to build a new one and demon- strate it when I accompanied NATOmilitary observation teams on peacekeeping patrols in northern Afghanistan. The first time I boiled a pot of water with a cardboard and foil solar cooker for a group of astounded Afghan villagers, I was hooked. I assumed that USAID and State’s Bureau of Popula- tion, Refugees, and Migration would share my enthusiasmwhen I came home. They did not. Ten years later, the U.S. government continues to spend millions of dollars improving and promoting biomass-burning stoves and even liquefied natural gas stoves but still almost nothing on solar cookers, the cleanest of all cook stoves. One of my initial “political” acts after retiring was to join the first 1,000 volunteers selected for Al Gore’s Climate Project train- ing. After attending sessions in Nashville, we fanned out across the country to give presentations based on his film, “An Inconve- nient Truth.” My personal politics included more than a concern about global warming. On Sept. 11, 2001, I was looking out a window at FSI and saw a black mushroom cloud billowing into the cloudless blue sky after American Airlines Flight 77 hit the Pentagon. While I supported our initial military actions in Afghanistan, I was horrified at the unprovoked invasion of Iraq in 2003. I knew that when I returned from Afghanistan I could not in good conscience accept another overseas assignment, since I would be required to defend this disastrous war of choice. I chose to leave the service early, albeit quietly. My other passion is writing—and I don’t mean briefing memos and talking points. When I returned from Afghanistan with hundreds of pages of journal notes and a minor case of PTSD (which like many of my colleagues I did not discuss with anyone), I decided to turn my notes into a novel—a literary catharsis of sorts. I entered my manuscript in the 2010 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest and miraculously won a pub- lishing contract with Penguin Books later that year. I have another novel in the works, and I continue to produce short videos on solar cooking and related topics for my “solar- windmama” YouTube channel. n Patricia McArdle is a retired FSO and the author of the novel Farishta (Riverside Hardcover, 2011), winner of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. Sudanese women in the Iridimi refugee camp in eastern Chad have been constructing simple solar cookers like the one shown here for distribution to refugee families for years. COURTESYOFPATRICIAMCARDLE