A day in the life of an ECHO intern

My replacement arrived the other day. It was nice meeting her and it will be fun training her but I must say I am not eager to say goodbye to my internship here. I still have so much I want to do and learn here! I know there are a lot of you who do not really know what all is involved in the life of an intern here. I will do my best to outline for you what life here at ECHO looks like.

Mornings:
Every morning starts off with a meeting. Mondays the meeting is with all ECHO staff for worship, devotions, prayer, and announcements. All the other mornings the meeting is just with interns for a time of prayer and to go over the plan for the day. After the meeting every intern has to complete their chores before continuing on to the activities of the day. The rest of the morning on any given day I could be doing one of the following options: demo time, giving a tour, answering "tech requests", cooking intern lunch, or selling plants in the nursery. I'll explain these activities more in a moment.

Afternoons:
Afternoons are a little more consistent. Mondays and Wednesdays all the interns get together for a seminar put on by either a guest speaker, ECHO staff, or one of the interns (every intern has to give at least 2 seminars). Tuesdays and Fridays four interns work in the seed bank and four work in the nursery. I am a nursery intern so I work in the nursery on these days. Thursdays is farm work so everyone gets together to work on one large project on the farm or several small projects. At the end of each day we also have chores to complete.

MORNING ACTIVITIES:
Chores: Every intern is assigned a farm animal to care for. I take care of the ducks and the geese. In the morning I let them out of their pens and clean their cages. In the evenings I bring them back into their pens and feed them. When I got here there were about 7 ducks in the flock and I have grown that flock to over 30 now. Trying to feed 30 feeding frenzied ducks under your feet has been an interesting task. Raising most of them from eggs was quite a fun experience. I have quite a few of them trained to follow me when I whistle. Having a supply of fresh duck eggs is nice too!
Also part of the chores is taking care of my assigned nursery area. My first 6 months I was assigned to taking care of "Pre-Sale". This is a rather large area of potted trees and other plants that are basically waiting to be sold. Making sure this area is well watered is a difficult task when you have overgrown pots of bamboo that need lots of water and seedling papayas that can't take much water. I have to say I am glad I no longer have that chore since I am in my second 6 months. Now I take care of watering and caring for seedlings in the greenhouse.

Demo Time: Most morning are spent filling this task. Each intern is responsible for one of the simulated eco-regions on the farm. My area is the "Tropical Rainforest Clearing". Demo Time is time to work in our assigned areas. My area is a little over an acer in size and packed with all kinds of Rain Forest crops. Many of the plants in this area are perennial Rain Forest plants such as Cacao, Vanilla Orchids, Miracle Fruit, Bananas, Black Pepper, Passionfruit, Jackfruit, and all kinds of other stuff so my focus with these is maintaining their health and harvesting fruit. I also have garden beds scattered around the area where I grow a variety of perennial crops that could be grown in a rainforest area. Every season I am assigned a list of crops I have to grow in my area and so I have to learn how to grow crazy crops like Winged Bean, Luffa Gourd, Cassabanana, Amaranth, Purple Yams, and countless other things. Some of these things are grown just so I can gain experience with these while others are grown to harvest seeds that are then sent to our network around the world. Demo time is probably my favorite time since I have a lot of freedom to try new things but this time is also overwhelming trying to keep up on all the required growing and caring for what is already there. With all the sun and water, fighting weeds in this area is a constant battle.

Tours: Tours are a great opportunity to share what ECHO is doing to fight hunger around the world with the general public. While sometimes giving tours is frustrating to us interns because it feels like it takes away from all the million and one things we have to keep up on, tours are a great opportunity to educate others and practice teaching what we learned. Tours last about an hour and a half as we take guests through the farm giving them a quick overview of hunger and malnutrition issues around the world and some of the solutions to those problems. Through tours, awareness of what ECHO does has been spreading like wild fire and this year we were visited by a variety of news crews and reporters including a nice story done by BBC and a rather lengthy program done by PBS. One time someone showed up asking to take photos of me working on the farm, next thing I knew I was on the front of a magazine.

"Tech Requests": These are questions we get from our network around the world. People working in community development around the world can send questions to ECHO and sometimes the interns have to answer them. One of my most memorable questions was "How do I keep Elephants out of my garden. I am thinking of building an electric fence." Any guesses? Well an electric fence in Africa is not practical for several reasons; it is extremely expensive, electricity is not reliable, and Elephants will pull up trees to knock fences down. After I did some research, I found out that Elephants cannot tolerate the smell of hot Chili Peppers.

Intern Lunch: Every Monday and Wednesday one of the interns spends the morning cooking lunch for all the other interns. We usually use a lot of produce from the farm for these meals so it takes a lot of prep time to put these meals together. Sometimes we commit to what we call "Farm Challenge Week". During this week we eat only things gathered from the farm for every meal.

Nursery: We have a small nursery here where we sell some of the unusual plants we grow here. It is only open in the mornings and one intern runs the nursery every morning. The nursery is usually fairly busy with customers. We get all kind of interesting questions from customers about our plants so this is actually where I have done a lot of my learning since I have to track down answers.

AFTERNOON ACTIVITIES:
Seminar/Library Time: Every Monday and Wednesday afternoon feels more like college. We listen to various lectures on all kinds of agricultural topics from grafting to cultural challenges. Time that is left after lecture is used for personal study or catching up on paperwork.

Nursery: Afternoon nursery duty consists of taking care of all the plants in pots or propagating plants to sell. This is where I have learned all kinds of techniques for propagating seeds, grafting trees, Air Layering branches so that they become small trees, and making new plants from cuttings. Propagation is my favorite part of nursery but we spend a lot of time maintaining the thousands of plants we have in pots.

Farm Work: Once a week all the interns get together to tackle some of the big projects on the farm. Sometimes this time is also used to help an intern that has a particularly large project they need help with. I have used farm work quite a few times to get extra help on my Papaya and Sweet Potato experiments.

OTHER:
Variety Trials: Each intern is suppose to oversee one large experiment while they are here. I was "fortunate" enough to end up with two variety trials. I am testing 7 varieties of Papaya against each other and 17 varieties of Sweet Potato (you didn't know there were so many kinds of sweet potato did you?). Maintaining the plot of land I am conducting this experiment on takes a lot of work and it all has to be squeezed into morning demo time or farm work. Soon I will be harvesting all my sweet potatoes to see which varieties performed the best and which we should recommend to our world wide network.

Field Trips: Occasionally we get to get off the farm and visit other places dealing with tropical agriculture. Recently we went to a missionary training facility called HEART where they were digging a well using an old boat motor. Some of us also were able to attend an agricultural conference down in El Salvador.


Well I did my best to describe what life is like here at ECHO. I do not think I really did it justice. The only way for you to really get to know what ECHO is all about and what I do here is to COME AND VISIT! You will not be disappointed, this place is amazing (and we will put you to work too).