Yesterday was a day off and Charles, Fani from Zimbabawe  and I joined English Sandy on a trip to the rift valley – Kuti Wildlife Reserve, Salima and a quick peek at Lake Malawi.  It was great fun and a nice break; now we are ready to dive deeper in to permaculture design.

Sandy meets a Zebra

We move on and Luwayo introduces further concepts : planting guilds, animal management, agro-forestry and much much more. We spend some time on my favorite staple inter-crop systems and everyone is very excited by them. Yesterday we passed by Charles’ brothers house outside Salima and saw his Maize field – the so-called traditional ridges and furrows where baked rock-hard in the sun. Today we check out the mulched permanent contour beds in Kusamala’s staple field: the soil is soft and crumbly, full of organic matter. The amount of labour spent every year shifting the ridges in millions of fields across Africa is heart-breaking: this is a method introduced by European settlers who came from lands where water-logging due to long rainy seasons and high water tables was a problem – you can hardly imagine a system less suited to conditions in the tropics.

Luwayo and friends/sustainable  protein source

We are all charmed by Luwayo’s rabbits and excited by his lively composting worms and hurry to add similar features to our evolving designs ; we have only a couple of days before we will have to present these as a sort of final exam.

Ellen and Remy are big worm fans

The day before presentations we have a break: field trip! We visit two permaculture sites. First is the house of one of Kristoff’s former students, an American lady of evangelical zeal who takes in orphans and has created an extraordinary abundance of fruits, vegetables and animals on a small plot around her house , all without seeming to regard it as anything very special at all.

Later is the long-awaited trip to Never Ending Food  , Kristoff’s home and demonstration site. It is a delightful oasis, every leaf, bean and butterfly is enthusiastically demonstrating at least three permaculture principles at once (with hand painted signs for emphasis).

But it is much more than a pedagogical instrument. It is a lovely place to be. The neighborhood kids play happily in the cool shade surrounding the compound; our little group finds nourishment here, not only for our bodies. This place is extremely functional and productive ( I think more than 200 food plants grow here) but at the same time it is beautiful and fun . People tend to think the sustainability vision means a life of hardship, of sacrifice – sitting in some mud hovel eating bitter roots while knitting socks out of some scratchy natural fibers. But this place is about abundance and happiness and , dare I say it – goodness.

Fani gets inspired…

…while the children play

Next morning everyone arrives early, and the classroom is busy with  big sheets of paper being hastily added to for the big day: design presentations. Charles, Remi and myself have all been creating designs for the same piece of land in M’ndaka village on the border of Kasungu National Park. After the course we are going out there to work with the villagers in making this a reality, so these designs will be a tool, a guide-line for our project. As I expected/hoped our designs are radically different, reflecting our very different personalities, skills, approaches and roles in the project. Rather than contradicting each other, the designs compliment – areas neglected in one design are central in the other and vice-versa. Permaculture is not a recipe ; we make a good team and in any case this is just a start: next week we will be in M’ndaka and discuss the whole thing with the villageers, chiefs – everyone involved and see what they want to do – these designs will be sort of a menu of possibilities, suggestions.

Diverse ideas

The last day and a half  are  about moving ahead: next steps, implementation – very relevant, just what we need to start thinking about. By now all of us are exhausted. It has been incredibly intense and it is a relief when the final graduation ceremony takes place and we are awarded our Permaculture Design Certificates. It is quite an emotional moment. We have all, I think, discovered far more than we expected in these two weeks. Now the little community we formed will disperse, and like seeds or birds, carry this information far and wide.