A handful of teenagers piles out of a white van pulled up next to a gas station pump. The group of boys and girls all start complaining about the heat. As they make their way down to Florida, they suffer through the transition from the cooler Midwestern temperatures to the rising humidity of a Southern summer. The group won’t get relief for the next two weeks. Instead, they’ll spend ten of the next fifteen days sweating through their sunscreen on a small demonstration farm in Fort Myers, Fla. Early the next afternoon, the van and its accompanying trailer pull through a small gate and drive past a cow pasture, volleyball court, and a few houses. The van pulls up next to a huge pole barn, and the somewhat groggy kids unload into the blinding sunlight. They’ve reached their destination: ECHO’s Global Farm.

The History

Starting in the late 1980s, many summers have seen groups of youth spend their Junes at ECHO (formerly Educational Concerns for Hunger Organization). The first few trips didn’t quite happen annually, and some years saw more than one trip. But in 2019 the “Indiana Team” celebrated 25 years of ECHO trips. Throughout those years, my mother went on one, her cousin on another, and some of her sisters, one brother, her husband, and her unborn baby (me) on others.

This ministry has been faithfully led by John Hanson. Mr. Hanson tells me that, after returning from a trip to Nepal, he felt “God wanted me to do something for missions.” At the time, Brad Johnston was a member of the Great Lakes–Gulf Presbytery’s youth leadership team and wanted the presbytery to send a team down to ECHO. “I didn’t know what else to do; so I said I would put together a team, and we would go down to ECHO. And so that’s how it got started,” says Mr. Hanson.

One of my favorite ECHO experiences is getting to hear some of Mr. Hanson’s stories. The ways God has worked in his life and through this trip are incredible. We have seen God’s hand in the ECHO trip by His faithful supplying of all needs. One year, Mr. Hanson had a truck with him and suspected it needed mechanical attention, but he decided to drive it home anyway. After pulling a trailer 1,099 miles home, it was finally taken to a mechanic. Lifting the hood and inspecting the engine, the mechanic was astonished! The truck’s engine was broken and shouldn’t have even been able to operate—and yet, it had just hauled a loaded trailer over 1,000 miles!

Mr. Hanson found a church in Atlanta, Ga., to stay at overnight in an equally miraculous way. His wife once had shared the gospel with an unbelieving love interest who later became a pastor. Fifteen years ago, he called her to express his thanks and offer his assistance should it ever prove helpful. Mrs. Hanson told him about the trip her husband led and their need for accommodation near Atlanta. He immediately volunteered his church building, and we have slept there every trip since. These two stories from ECHO, and many others, plainly present God’s abundant grace as their sole explanation.

As I further contemplated the evidence of God’s work at ECHO, I talked to Danny Blank. Formerly a farm manager for 16 years, Danny told me about the necessity of the work we do for the farm’s success. “We calculated that you guys were easily the savings of one to two employees for ECHO for the whole year.…So it saved ECHO a lot of money in those early years when we didn’t have the farm. You guys did incredible work, and you were a real source of encouragement to many of the staff, including myself.”

The expansion and developmental work done by past teams enabled the Global Farm (and, more recently, Danny’s own 12 Seasons Farm) to gain a solid start. Personally, working with the team kick-started Danny’s career at ECHO. It was assigned as his first management task after deciding to stay on the farm following his 14 months as an intern. “It was really encouraging working with your group. And, as a result, my employer at ECHO saw how I interacted with the team and extended my time at ECHO as well, so I ended up working there 16 years.”

Because the farm relies heavily on volunteer work, our efforts enable the Fort Myers farm to be the living textbook it is designed to be. The Indiana Team is known as the best of their work teams and is received each year with open arms and smiling faces. Danny related that the ECHO staff always look forward to our visits, and no one ever takes vacation time while the team is scheduled to be there! Without hands to do the work, the farm couldn’t exemplify and aid small farms globally.

What is ECHO?

The organization—ECHO is an agricultural mission committed to developing sustainable farming techniques that they then share with underdeveloped countries around the world. The Global Farm in Florida contains over 50 acres of farmland divided between the research team and the interns. Each of the 80 yearly interns receives a plot of land dedicated to a specific ecosystem—tropics, mountains, lowlands, etc. The Global Farm and Research Center, reference library, seed bank, tropical fruit nursery, global bookstore, and staff offices in Fort Myers are oriented to serve the Regional Impact Centers located in Tanzania, Thailand, and Burkina Faso. Our team mission each year is to help the interns, the managers, the farm, and propagation—but now I’m getting into the trip itself.

The trip—The trip always takes place in mid-June, the hottest days of ECHO’s summer schedule (after we leave, the farm hours are divided between early morning and late night, leaving the staff free during the sweltering afternoon heat). Consequently, not many people are eager to volunteer at the farm during this time, making our team especially helpful to the staff at ECHO.

The first year a team went to ECHO, Danny had made a list of tasks for them—a list they completed in just two days. By the end of the trip, the team had weeded the entire farm (it was only five acres at that point)! Since then, the teams have dug trenches and rice paddies, built and rebuilt the mountain, cleaned the pond, constructed earth-bag and clay huts, thatched roofs, and completed hundreds of other tasks around the farm.

After one and half days of driving and a half day of orientation, we begin work early Thursday morning. Each of the eight or nine workdays spent on the farm starts with waking up at six to drive over to the farm, eat breakfast, and meet with Andy (the current farm manager) and the interns for morning devotions. We then split up for the morning chores. Around noon, we take an hour to sit in the air conditioning and enjoy lunch with the staff. Then it’s back to work, this time getting new jobs for the afternoon. The most important part of the day comes after we have finished—when we shower, cleaning ourselves from all 37 layers of dirt, sweat, and sunscreen (which we all hopefully remembered to reapply after lunch!). Each evening, we have a Bible study with Mr. Hanson, who picks a new book yearly for us to study. On the weekends, we usually do some extra farm work and then spend the afternoon at the mall or the beach. Sundays, we enjoy refreshing fellowship with the members of the small United Reformed Church congregation that hosts us.

How could I have forgotten? We also sing through the whole psalter. In four days. Every hour or so of driving, we sing psalms for a few minutes, eventually singing through the entirety of our psalter. Our host church also loves to sing alongside us, especially with the URC’s new psalter-hymnal, which includes selections from The Book of Psalms for Worship.

Honestly, I’m not sure why the trip sounds fun, but something keeps bringing us back over and over again. For me, when I first decided to go to ECHO, I wasn’t super thrilled about the idea of spending two weeks of my summer break paying to work in the Florida heat. I could work hard when I put my mind to it, and I had done my fair share of yardwork at home; but how could this summer mission be that great? Besides the recommendations from my family, several of my youth group leaders also encouraged me to go. I am so grateful that God pushed me along because I will never regret going that first time.

Although I’m not sure I can pinpoint what has made so many people love their stay at ECHO, I can identify a few contributing factors. Spending two weeks with the same small number of people fosters strong friendships as we sweat, eat, pray, work, and interact together. The work—though hard—is intriguing and amazingly fun. Where else do you get to spend the morning raking and stomping mud to “muck” a rice paddy? Seriously, I think the joy of the trip comes from marinating in the gospel lived out through hard, dirty labor and the God-given pleasure of getting to rejoice in the fruit of our efforts. Working alongside missionaries and missionaries-to-be, hearing their testimonies, studying and being in the Word frequently makes for a rich spiritual experience. It is one that I honestly believe is now part of my testimony, just as it has been part of many others’, and—Lord willing—will be part of many more.

Lily Larson is a sophomore in high school. She attends Immanuel RPC in West Lafayette, Ind. Between school, social activities, piano, work, and theater, Lily is proficient at maintaining a packed schedule. If she does have an hour to herself, you will most likely find her reading some work of fiction.