Glimpse - Your Stories from Abroad

There is nothing like the sound of a machete being sharpened. 

It was 3:30 a.m. I was sleeping soundly in the Amazonian village of Pano, Ecuador, when the scraping of metal on rock outside my window snapped me awake. You might think there is a lot of noise at night in the jungle, but without the buzz of electricity, air conditioning, or vehicles, the sound of a machete being sharpened cuts through the humid night air.

And since machetes don’t sharpen themselves, well…

I lay wide awake, terrified for my life. My host family had frequently voiced their fear that Colombian militants, who were known to storm villages from time to time, would find out about me, the foreigner, and hold me for ransom. Knowing that these rebels were usually armed with machine guns, not machetes, didn’t bring relief for long. Every time I convinced myself I was dreaming, there it was again: a quick, loud scratching noise, repeated several times. The noise of a two-foot-long metal blade becoming ever sharper.

I heard whispering. It sounded like the machete-wielder was trying to wake up someone in the house. “Oh no,” I thought. I envisioned a man inebriated from cane-sugar alcohol coming to pick a fight with my host brother or father. But I seemed to be the only one awake and listening. Or were the rest of the people in the house also too terrified to move?

I heard the man walk past my bedroom window, toward the entrance of the house. My window had no glass, so only a thin shutter separated me from the man and the jungle air outside. He tried to open the front door. Even if I screamed, he’d probably get to me before my family could stop him.

The locked door blocked his entrance, and I breathed a momentary sigh of relief. I heard movement from within the house. My host father, German (pronounced hair-MAHN), spoke quietly but urgently with the man in Kichwa, a language I could barely comprehend. Then I heard German put on his boots and walk to the back of the house. There was a clanking noise. I surmised that German was fetching his own machete.

Now I really had no idea what was going on. Was the man outside German’s brother? Did he need help fighting some guys he’d pissed off in a neighboring community? Were they coming for him? It all seemed far-fetched, but why else would a man be sharpening his machete outside our house at 3:30 in the morning?

German and his mysterious companion walked off. The house stayed silent. Not knowing what else to do, I focused on my breaths and let the exhaustion take over. Eventually I fell back to sleep.

When I awoke, I was dying to know what had happened. I greeted my host family, waiting to hear the dramatic story. Instead, they were cheerily performing their usual morning routines—boiling water for coffee, washing the baby, fetching bread and eggs.

“Ummm… what’s going on?” I asked. “Why did someone come for German in the middle of the night, and why did they leave with freshly sharpened machetes???”

“Oh,” my host mother said, “they killed a cow.”

They killed a cow.

I was then informed that when killing an animal in Amazonian Ecuador, you must do it very early in the morning so there is time to butcher it before the afternoon heat arrives.

In my seven weeks in the Amazon, not only had I never seen or heard about an animal being butchered, but I had never even seen any animals available for butchering. A few families had chickens, but not many, and I’d never seen people eating them. But apparently there had been two cows, somewhere behind someone’s house, that belonged in one way or another to my host father’s brother. And that morning, he decided it was time to butcher one.

German and his brother may have butchered the cow, but eating it was a village-wide affair. At 9 a.m., I arrived at a dirt playing field just up the road that served as the village gathering spot. A serving area was set up on one end of the field, and the villagers formed a loose line. As each person approached the front, one man grabbed a palm leaf from a stack and held it out while German's brother carved a small piece of the animal and placed it on a leaf. It was the same process by which wedding party hosts might cut and serve cake.

As a vegetarian from an early age, I certainly felt the loss of life, but I was far from repulsed. The whole village, whose 200 residents normally subsisted on boiled yucca and plantains, ate cow and cow-flavored soup for a week. Families exchanged dinner invitations and stayed around chatting for most of the day and night.

It was all a far cry from the terror I had envisioned alone in my bed at 3:30 a.m.