My enemy - the machete

I have two toes that have scars on them from machetes. Once while we lived in Tonga - We had gone with Dad to a tar pit, and were cutting out tar to melt down and put on the bottom of our car, "the Mini-moke," because it's bottom was rusting out. (Dad was really good at making things last much longer than usual, and with the humidity there, vehicles' bottoms always rusted out before their time, so he decided to tar the bottom of ours - smart guy, huh?) I was probably around ten, and we were at the tar pit. I guess I got careless with the machete I was using, and hit my left middle toe instead of the tar. Sigh. The other time was in Kiribati - I believe we must not have yet moved to the new house in Eita, but I was there. I believe I was about twelve. There was in a corner of the house a bunch of machetes (like 15-20!) for distribution at the boarding school, and somehow I ran into them, and cut my second toe on the right foot. No one was home, but I knew where Mom was. I rode bus (that's always an adventure itself) to Bikenebeu to find Mom at a RS Presidency Meeting. It just so happened that the house where the meeting was was around the corner from the hospital. So once there, help was quick in coming. But let me explain something. The machete is an important tool in the islands. This story came to my mind today as I was describing to my family my often watching people open coconuts using machetes. They were probably the most important tools used there. They were used for harvesting everything from taro to pandanus fruit, (foods) to pandanus or coconut fronds for making baskets or thatch out of, to stripping the leaves from the coconut frond midrib for wall-building materials. They were ESSENTIAL tools. So to have a bunch of that many machetes for the school to use was not morose, but like having computers that need distributing to the various classrooms.