As a bio-engineer in agriculture / agronomist, I started my professional career with research in practical applications for upgrading biogas to biomethane and its practical applications in the Flanders (North-Belgium) region. Due to my strong interest, I soon started working in development cooperation with a first 2,5 year mission to Rwanda, where I supported a bilateral (Belgo-Rwandan) development project for Rwanda's horticulture sector development. After, I worked for 3 years for the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) as food security analyst in the occupied Palestinian territories. Now I am still working for FAO in the same location, but as a Disaster Risk Reduction consultant.

Working in the development and humanitarian sector constantly pulls your attention to questions like how to ensure that new situation that we create are resilient and sustainable. This crucial question drives me, since I have seen many strange, and to my opinion, unsustainable situations being created by the development and humanitarian sector, even causing decrease in resilience. Permaculture for me has emerged as an answer to some important problems that I encounter. I have been on and off informing myself about permaculture since a few years until a year ago. Since then, I started to inform myself more about it, mainly through reading. I also want to shift lifestyle to have a more diverse set of activities that I bundle around a main theme (which could be permaculture).

Nonetheless, I still have a few questions that remain unanswered.

I am planning to dedicate the coming (at the moment not so definite) period of my life to gain expertise in permaculture and to discover how people manage to lead fulfilling, contributing lives and set up their life in a permaculture way. Pointless to mention my vague ideas / dreams of setting up projects myself, since the unresolved questions and the upcoming path of discovery may hopefully still lead to many new insights.