Our Founders
Antoine Bernardeau
CO-FOUNDER
Antoine is a permaculture consultant and teacher. In 2012, accompanied by his wife at the time, he left Paris and the humanitarian community for a plane-free world tour in more than 35 countries, working on organic farms and permaculture to learn their methods and study local communities.
Since 2016, he lives and works in Jordan as well as in the MENA (Middle East - North Africa) region, specializing in training, as well as the design and implementation of projects respecting the 3 ethics of permaculture: Earth care, People care, and fair share.
Adeeba Nabulsi
Co-Founder
After moving to Jordan from Australia in 2009 as a Post Graduate in Communication Design, Adeeba graduated from Permaculture Research Institute - Greening the Desert site with Massi Miatton in 2015. From there she has been working with Inaya Permaculture.
Her hope is that, with her current studies in Masters of Design Futures, she will be able to add to the progress of Permaculture practice in Jordan focussing on co-collaboration and Human Centered Design.
Our Instructors
Basia Dworak-Bahan
Senior Instructor
Basia has a background in industrial Design as well as Teaching specialising in Early Childhood Education. She has been teaching sustainable practices in all her professional teaching positions. She was a gardening mentor to many Australian kindergartens and primary schools where she shared her knowledge of establishing and maintaining kitchen gardens, community gardens and food is free projects.
She was trained in Eco-Smart, Education for Sustainability by Mt Lofty Ranges Natural Resources Management Board (required for the National Quality Standards in Australian Education).
In her personal life she has maintained a zero-waste lifestyle for many years, long before the term was popular, gaining a wealth of practical ideas which she was keen to continue and pass on to others after her move to Jordan. She has been in Jordan for two years, where she joined the team of Inaya Permaculture as the lead instructor for zero waste, sustainable living and urban gardening workshops.
Abdur-Rahman McCausland
Senior Instructor
Abdur-Rahman is a graduate in Biology from Merton College, Oxford University and in Economics from SOAS, London. He travelled extensively before settling in Ethiopia, where he established Strawberry Fields Eco-Lodge, the country’s first Permaculture training and demonstration site.
In 2014, he became a registered Permaculture Trainer and Consultant with the Permaculture Research Institute (Australia) and since then has conducted training and project designs in Ethiopia, Jordan, Morocco, Australia, Turkey and Malaysia.
Abla Abu Elhajj
Abla Abu Elhajj
composting expert
Abla Abu Elhajj is a Composting expert and a true Permaculture enthusiast. Originally a Palestinian refugee who grew up in al-Baqaa, the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan, Abla used to work as a teacher in Amman until she found out about permaculture. She quit her job and the city life in 2017 and bought a small piece of land in the Dead Sea valley where she now lives and grows her own produce. She trained herself in the various subjects of permaculture, got hands-on experience by implementing those strategies in her farm, and has now successfully converted her 600 square metres of rocky arid land into an increasingly fertile garden that stands as an exemplary model for all permaculture students.
She is producing her own food, collecting eggs from her chickens, making compost, planting nitrogen-fixers to build up the soil. She’s got sugarcane, olives, mangoes, spinach, tomato, potato and what not! Abla is now heavily involved in teaching permaculture and her mission in life is to green the deserts in Jordan through the strategies she’s learnt. Watch her story.