Staying cool: Nutrition educator Christina Garnenez stands near a mountain spring at sheep camp in the Chuska Mountains. Without refrigeration, the spring-cooled container keeps food chilled and safe from animals.

Nutrition educator Christina Garnenez has made countless bone-jarring trips from Shiprock over rutted dirt roads to reach her students in the 1,000-square-mile classroom of the Navajo Nation.

Garnenez, who works with the Navajo Nation Food Distribution program, demonstrates how to prepare Navajo dishes like kneel down bread and how to use commodity foods like vegetarian beans to make cookies and fiesta cake. Over the last 25 years, her demonstrations have become so popular that invitations come in from remote corners of the reservation, as well as from Flagstaff and Albuquerque.

But in 1991, her voice hoarse from presentations in both Navajo and English, Garnenez reached a roadblock. "I was working over here, over there, to a point where I was exhausted," she remembers. "I told Agnes Palmer at the Extension office that I was tired and asked if there was a way to videotape the information I would give in person."

Palmer called Jeanne Gleason, leader of video and multimedia with NMSU's agricultural communications department, paving the way for a partnership of Navajo educators and NMSU communicators.

With funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the group created educational materials that can travel to remote locations. Their projects include touch-screen kiosks that give food safety information in Navajo and English, the "Eat Right for Life" video series, a "Traditional Navajo Cooking" video and a CD-ROM called FoodSmart that was distributed to Navajo schools this fall.

The projects have taken the team on an educational journey with many twists and turns. Along the way, they have shared work and laughter, meals and time.

To reflect the varied settings in which Navajos live, the team taped in both modern kitchens with blenders and bread machines and traditional hogans without electricity or running water. They made expeditions to sheep camp and trips to the grocery store.

In one month, well-known weaver Evelyn George, who demonstrated traditional sheep butchering for the projects, can move from using a microwave to baking in an outdoor clay oven. She may cool meat in a mountain spring or flash-freeze produce in her kitchen.

Getting milk?: Patrick Holian and Christina Garnenez tape a segment about low-fat dairy products at a grocery store on the Navajo Nation.

"We work with the Navajo to develop educational materials they need," Gleason says. "We do not think of them as a tourist attraction. They are the audience who tell us what they need, then we create the media tools to respond to their needs."

Combining communications technology with an ancient culture and language created some interesting challenges. For their first project, a touch-screen kiosk, designers used the Navajo concept of harmony in life-"Walk in Beauty"-to describe safe food handling. They created a "Walk in Danger" section to show risky practices.

"When we tested it, our Navajo sample audience did not relate to the idea of walking in danger," Gleason recalls. Instead, they incorporated "Grandmother's Words of Wisdom" and "The People's Way" as sources of trusted advice.

To attract children, who often bring the whole family to the kiosk, two educational games were added, Dinè Matchmaker and Dinè Squares. Dinè, pronounced di-NAY, means "the people," as the Navajo refer to themselves. Instead of a "You Win" message, the games have a "You Walk in Beauty" screen with animated horned lizards in a Four Corners landscape.

Designing the interface for the kiosk opened the communicators' eyes to other cultural differences. Navajo evaluators didn't feel comfortable touching the on-screen faces of realistic- looking people. Giving the faces an impressionist artistic style led some testers to ask what was wrong with the people on screen. But cartoon-like icons, including a grandmother in traditional dress and tennis shoes, drew smiles and favorable reviews.

"It does seem that Navajos relate to iconic images better than either Anglos or Hispanics do, and quickly understand how to navigate the touch-screen system," Gleason says. "It was a delight to see 70- to 80-year-old men operate the touch-screen computer with confidence."

The FoodSmart CD-ROM contains nutrition and food safety information in Navajo, English and Spanish, for use with Macintosh or Windows platforms.

In fact, master's thesis research by videographer Patrick Holian found that video and touch-screen technologies are a good fit with Navajo communication styles. Kiosk users liked having a choice of language and controlling the order and pace of information. Among those who used the system, comprehension about transporting, selecting canned or packaged food, and keeping foods cold increased by 18, 19 and 28 percent, respectively.

Material from the touch-screen project was used in "Eat Right for Life," a series of educational videos in Navajo, English and Spanish.

Translating educational materials is not a simple process. A 10-second sentence in English can take 40 seconds in Navajo. Because there is no Navajo word for "blender," the appliance must be described. "It takes eight seconds to explain the word 'pretzel' in Navajo," notes Tomilee Turner, project editor.

As some of the few culturally appropriate materials available in Navajo and English, they have been widely used. "They've been really helpful," Garnenez says. "They've been used in chapter houses, hospitals, dental clinics and the WIC (Women, Infants and Children) program."

This fall, material from the kiosks was updated and incorporated into the FoodSmart CD-ROM. Team members expect it to travel many more miles with ease.