Morning of the last day in Mukteshwar - Wednesday, March 14

Last day in Mukteshwar- we will go to visit some households outside of the TERI orbit and also do one more focus group testing some of our questions and instruments. Yesterday was really bizarre in terms of weather. There was a huge night time storm, with massive thunder strikes all around, rain and hail. That turned to snow in the early morning, and covered everything with several inches of really wet snow. It was a stunning scene to wake up to. By the time we headed to a small village called Supi to do a focus group, the snow had stopped falling, and we climbed muddy narrow trails to reach it surrounded by whiteness. We huddled in a small room with a dozen women discussing cookstoves and playing games of various sorts to elicit their preferences related to cooking, heated by small metal containers holding coal and wood embers from their cooking fires. In the midst of that, another storm passed through, raining down chunks of sleet and hail. Several women ran out to get their cattle into shelter for fear that it would perish. It was quite a scence; I got the feeling that this really does not happen often in Mukteshwar in March...

Back from the day's work now; today was really useful. We piloted a worksheet with two households that would guide them through a calculation of the true costs of their cooking activities, in terms of fuel consumption, time spent collecting fuel and cooking, and health impacts from breathing particulate matter. It seemed to work well, despite our fears that it might turn out to be too complicated. More importantly, the men we interviewed with that seemed to genuinely grasp something they had not imagined before, and to gain awareness of things that might influence their decision making in the future.

We also walked around and had informal chats with other villagers, conducted a focus group with 7 women on their preferences for different stove attributes, and had a long talk with a friend of my colleague's at Duke, who is keen to collaborate on various resource management problems involving forest conservation as well as water supply and quality management. He runs a great local grassroots organization called Chirag, which means "light" or "trace" in Hindi, both images suggestive of how the organization aims to operate. We will likely collaborate both on our current cook stove study, and on other future projects, if all goes well.

Tonight some 40+ kids have also arrived at the TERI mountain retreat center where we are staying, coming from various places across India. They are here to participate in an environmental education program about energy, forests and climate change. Having come from much warmer parts of the country, they are a bit in shock at the cooler climate up here in the mountains. They are currently enjoying a cultural show with singing and dancing down in the conference hall, which I also briefly watched (it was not terribly interesting).

We leave in the morning, very early, to return to Delhi. I'll have three days to gather my thoughts, enter focus group data, meet with USAID and counterparts in the TERI office, and finally to prepare for my return to the classroom at Duke next week, with two lectures for my course and a third for a colleague who covered me while I was on this trip. I'll be back on Monday afternoon!