During their trip to Siuna, Nicaragua, students in the Sustainable Development class got to experience something they had never expected: wielding a machete.
"It was just such a confidence booster," sophomore Dan Katzman said of the machete. "All the weeds - I mean, they look like they're tough weeds, but everything falls under one swing, and you're able to clear so much brush away in such a little period of time that you actually feel like you're getting stuff accomplished."
Using a machete seemed to come naturally to some students.
"Everyone tried to avoid me because I seemed a little dangerous, but it was actually pretty easy to use," Katzman said.
Senior Doug Glandon even received praise from a local. "I was just clearing away, clearing away, and at some point everyone had stopped and was looking over at me," Glandon said. "The head farmer there was saying something to me. He said 'You were a campesino [peasant farmer] in your former life. You're really good with the machete; you'd be really good with a sword too."
"I just said thank you," Glandon added. "I had a huge smile on my face."
Junior Alex Pileggi also enjoyed using the machete, although sometimes he worried about those around him, due to his height. "My wingspan with the machete was often times kind of a dangerous thing," Pileggi said. "At one point one of the students said to me, 'Alex, you're my new friend, but I'm going to need you to stand at least a kilometer away when we're chopping with machetes.'"
Other students weren't quite as natural with the huge weapon. "I was awful at it; it was really embarrassing," sophomore Bruni Hirsch said. "If anything, I probably cut down things I wasn't supposed to cut down."
