“He told me, ‘Wait, I’ll go find some people,’ and he walked off down the island,” said Temaei Tontaake, Buranibwe’s younger companion who also survived the ocean ordeal.
But it didn’t take long for Buranibwe to figure out that he was not on Marakei, the coral atoll they had last seen after getting in their 26-foot speedboat on Oct. 22.
When he realized it wasn’t Marakei, he came straight back to where I was with the boat,” said Tontaake of the pair’s arrival at Namdrik on Nov. 24. “He told me, ‘prepare your knife, we don’t know where we are.’ ” But it turned out Namdrik was the last place they needed to be worried about their safety.
The two cautiously walked down the path until they came to a nearby house. They knocked on the front door. “But the people inside wouldn’t open the door because they heard us speaking a different language,” Tontaake said.
“We walked a little farther and saw some ripe bananas on a tree, so we ate some,” said Tontaake, who added they had not eaten in about four days before washing into Namdrik. During their 33-day ordeal, when they saw schools of tuna, they fished to stay alive. But they frequently went days without any food, the two men said.
As they proceeded, they then came across a Namdrik man having his first smoke of the day. They couldn’t understand each other, so the two Kiribati drifters got him to walk with them back to the boat. “Then he realized that we had drifted in,” Tontaake said. By this time the Namdrik man and the two Kiribati drifters had managed to communicate by using a few English words they both understood, Tontaake said.
The Namdrik man walked them to the one person on Namdrik who speaks their language, a resident named Neinikeu. She was the wife of another Marakei drifter who floated into Namdrik more than 50 years ago and stayed. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, there was no runway on Namdrik, radio communication was largely non-existent and ship service sporadic.
The previous drifter, Bairo, died some time back. He was the uncle of Tontaake, which made the two present day drifters feel right at home: not only did Neinikeu speak their language, she is their relative.
Buranibwe and Tontaake stayed on Namdrik for 17 days until a ship visited last weekend and brought them to Majuro, the capital of the Marshall Islands. The local Kiribati community has put the men up, bought them clothes and fed them.
When asked if people from Marakei Atoll get lost at sea very often, Temaei Tontaake replied without a pause: “Lots have been lost and never found.”
“But some get lucky,” he added. The arrival of Buranibwe and Tontaake at Namdrik Atoll and the family reunion of sorts proved his comment.
