Congratulations are in order for Stacia Nordin, who has just made Today’s Dietitian annual list of ’10 RDs [Registered Dietitians]  Who Are Making A Difference’ for 2013.  The magazine writes: “In honor of National Nutrition Month and Registered Dietitian Day, we asked readers to nominate colleagues and mentors who exhibit these traits and do exceptional work that’s making a positive impact. Of the more than 100 nominations we received, we selected 10 deserving RDs to be recognized for their incredible accomplishments and dedication to the field.”    The following is the brief write-up that the magazine ran in honor of Stacia’s work:

Stacia Nordin, RD
Sustainable Nutrition, Never Ending Food 
In 1997, Stacia Nordin and her husband, Kristof, headed to Malawi for two years to work with HIV patients. She was a dietitian in the field of HIV and nutrition, while her husband was working in community development promoting HIV awareness and prevention. Nordin says it didn’t take long for them to realize they needed to stay much longer than two years to make the impact they desired.

The Nordins have lived in Malawi for 16 years, and their efforts, known as Never Ending Food, focus on permaculture (the development of agricultural ecosystems intended to be sustainable and self-sufficient) and nutrition. Permaculture’s purpose is to “create abundance” for people while also taking care of the earth, Nordin explains. Even the couple’s daughter helps with the effort.

“When we asked what the problems were, in unison people would say, ‘Food,’” Nordin says. “Common health problems reported included malaria, pneumonia, diarrhea, and undernourished children.”

Nordin says she and her husband recognized that a connection between the problems and the solution kept coming back to the health of the environment. “When our environment is healthy and systems are well designed, the environment can provide us with an abundance of healthful food, water, air, medicines, building supplies, seeds, and natural fertility—on short, all that we need,” she says.

Nordin says the biggest success has been a change in thinking. “In policy and program meetings, people are thinking differently about food—realizing we can’t depend on one food—and welcoming diversity,” she says. “Most people also realize that synthetic fertilizers aren’t helping in the long run. This is not just our success, but we have been a part of it.”

Keep up the great work Stacia, your family is more proud of you than words can express!

A few updates for you.  We’ve now made a dropdown list under donations so that we can populate it with pages on funds that you’ve provided to NEF over the years.  We’ve put blog posts up in the past, but now you have to go scroll down to never never land to get to the updates.  We thought it would be good to bring them back up to the top.  If you are one of the donors to the project you’ve also gotten more detailed personal updates to your e-mail box, but this area is for the world to know what the support has done.

WESM Permaculture Schools, Blantyre City

Stacia visited the Blantyre WESM Schools Coordinator this week and added pictures and a short update here: http://www.neverendingfood.org/donations/school-permaculture-wesm-blantyre/ 

March 2013:  We  raised enough to send Ausward to the course in Nkhata Bay!   He is there now.

AODA Kahelere School Nutrition, Mzimba

The support for this is coming from an award from the American Overseas Dietetic Association.  Right now we are having a lot of discsusion between the Board of the other organization also supporting the school, the school management and ourselves as the new Nutrition support coming in.  We hope to get nutrition activities integrated into what they are already doing by May.  Uupdates are at:  http://www.neverendingfood.org/donations/international-project-award-kahelere-primary/

We just had a wonderful visit from Brock Dolman and Lisa Mekis of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center (OAEC) in California.  Brock is the Director of the the OAEC’s Water Institute as well as the Center’s Permaculture Design Program.  He also Co-Directs their Wildllands Biodiversity Program.  Lisa has been hired on by OAEC, and has come to Africa together with Brock, to work in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in conjunction with the ‘City of Joy‘–a rehabilitation and resource center for women who are survivors of the country’s tragic sexual violence.   This year, on February 14th, the V-Day Organization (a global movement to end violence against women and girls) will be celebrating ‘One Billion Rising‘, an effort to get people to “Strike, Dance, Rise” in their communities to demand an end to gender-based violence.  Brock and Lisa will be participating in the V-Day events in the DRC as well as assessing the potential for Permaculture Design applications on a large area of land that has recently been purchased to support the activities and efforts of the City of Joy.

Before arriving in Malawi, Brock and Lisa had a chance to visit some of the Permaculture sites in Zimbabwe–including the Fambizanai Permaculture Center (one of the oldest Permaculture Centers in Africa).  They also visited several school Permaculture projects in the Southern part of the Malawi and spent time with Walter Mugove, the Director of the Regional Schools and College Permaculture Programme (ReScope).  And of course, no tour of Malawi Permaculture would be complete without a visit to the home of the  ’Agogo’ (Grandmother) of the Permaculture movement in Malawi, June Walker.  They then spent two nights at Never Ending Food where we tried to squeeze every last drop of Permaculture advice and knowledge out of them and they have now boarded a plane for the DRC.  We wish them the very best in their endeavors and want to send them a HUGE thank you for their encouragement, advice, great conversation, and wisdom that they so freely shared.  You are welcome back any time!

One of the main principles in Permaculture is to ‘Observe, Learn, and Share’.  Our observations are based on the interactions within natural systems, our learning is based on application of these systems to our own lives, and our sharing of these solutions is inherent within Permaculture’s second ethic: ‘Care for People’.

We were just out ‘observing and learning’ from our garden this morning and we came across a great example of nature at work  (see picture).  It is a picture of the top of one of our rainwater catchment tanks.  This simple brick-and-cement tank holds approximately 3000 liters and collects water from the front half of our roof.  When we actually did the water runoff calculations (1 meter squared x 1 mm of rain = 1 liter of water) we realized that we could fill 12-15 tanks this size during one of our rainy seasons where we live in Malawi.  This, in essence, means that we could probably meet all of our dry season water needs (for bathing, washing, building, and drinking (if boiled and filtered)), just from half of our roof if we had built enough tanks.

Beans Germinating on Top of Water Tank

We covered the top of this tank with a mesh shade-cloth to act as a filter for large leaves and other organic matter that might fall into the tank.  In this picture you can see that as the organic matter has built up on the mesh, it has begun to break down into soil and has even collected seeds that have germinated.  These seeds are a type of local lima bean known as ‘chimbamba’ or ‘kamumpanda’.  These seeds have dropped off the vines from last year’s crop and are self-seeding all over the yard.  I think that it has been 4-5 years since we have actually gone out and ‘planted’ beans, nature now does the majority of the work for us.  These beans produce continually throughout the dry season without irrigation, offer a delicious source of protein, fix nitrogen in the soil, and even produce edible leaves that can be used as a vegetable.   As we observed these beans growing from the top of our water tank–a process that occurred without any human interference–we wondered why it has become so difficult in our modern world for people to see the advantage of using resources to their fullest potential.  In this era of ‘monocropped’ thinking, we seem to have convinced ourselves that diversity is a ‘bad word’ and that nature can no longer function without artificial intervention.  The powers-that-be have done a wonderful job of telling us that plants can no longer grow without the application of synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides.  This has become the driving force behind the genetic engineering of Monsanto’s ‘Roundup Ready’ crops, as well as the demand for fossil fuels to power our ‘industrialized agriculture’ and our over-reliance on only a handful of staple crops to try to feed an ever-growing population (Ironically, all of these things have purportedly been done to ‘alleviate’ world hunger, when in fact these practices have been making it harder to feed ourselves).

School Children Visiting Never Ending Food

Never Ending Food has become a study in contrasts:  We are feasting on daily abundance while others are starving because they try to get all of their food in April; we have access to incredible nutritional diversity while 48% of Malawi’s children are ‘nutritionally stunted’; we minimize labor by utilizing seasonal harvests while others are putting a great deal of energy into high-input one-season systems with resulting low-yields…and the list goes on.  Thousands of people have come to Never Ending Food over the years to learn about sustainable designs for living, but not all of these people have returned home to implement these ideas in their own lives.  Many of Permaculture’s designs are based on practical, low-input, and common-sense approaches, yet throughout the world many Permaculture practitioners are finding that it is not the designs themselves that pose a stumbling block to implementation but rather it is human behavior change.  If we start teaching our children that the world has everything it needs to feed itself, perhaps we will usher in a future of food security and sustainability the likes of which we can now only dream!

Dec 15 update:    We’ve ordered 6 of these packs that we’ll pick up this week.  3 we’ve paid for with our own money, 3 with donations.  If anyone else is interested, we have plenty of people that would love your gift!  (the gift packs were for the holiday, but the stoves are always available)

November 2012:  Here is an idea for a holiday gift related to food and our environment.

If you would like to sponsor a home in our community to receive this gift, we are

happy to take care of the logistics, take a picture of the family and introduce you to their home virtually.  We’ll have our apprentice teams do education along with the gift on food diversification and energy efficiency.

The full gift pack set is about 40 USD with the commercial bank exchange rate that I get through pay pal (about 300 MK:USD).  Just click on the donate button above and indicate Stove. This group (Area 55) has also helped many schools in Malawi to put in institutional stoves, helping to reduce the number of trees used for fuel.   All of the fuel wood energy efficient stoves work great with just trimmings from trees and shrubs – we’ve had several of these stoves for many many years.  We also use recycled paper briquettes that we make at home.

If you want more information, the direct contacts for the organization are:
Area 55 Consulting|Area 14/126|P.O Box 1306| Lilongwe| Malawi
Mbumba Chigalu, Marketing Manager (265) 888 846 262| mbumbz@gmail.com http://area55consulting.com/