Au Sable Students Complete Course

The Au Sable Institute coordinates more than 35 field courses each summer for students from about 80 Christian colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada. One of these courses, 'Tropical Agriculture and Missions', is offered for three weeks in May/June each year at ECHO.

This year, 10 students from nine schools took the class. Besides the professor of record, Dave Unander from the Department of Biology at Eastern University in Philadelphia, ECHO technical staff, including Danny Blank, Angela Boss, Stan and Beth Doerr, Bob Hargrave, Tim Motis, Martin Price and Larry Yarger taught units in their expertise. For example, Angela introduced fruit tree grafting and Larry had the students work through a typical slope stabilization problem.

Assignments included the choice of a term paper or formal lecture. About half the class chose the lecture format, including Larissa Malik, a senior at Cedarville University in Ohio, who presented her seminar on edible insects.

Edible insects are a nutritious food source that 80% of the world's population sometimes eats. She looked to the Bible for inspiration, quoting from Leviticus 11:22, Even these of them ye may eat; the locust after his kind, and the bald locust after his kind, and the beetle after his kind, and the grasshopper after his kind.

Larissa herself has experienced dining on the many-legged critters: she once ate a June bug at band camp for $5. She said it tasted like 'gooey grass' and wasn't all that bad. She reminded the assembled students, many who plan a career in the missions field, to remember bugs when thinking about available food sources.

-- Article by David Unander & Artis Henderson
-- Photos by David Unander