Someone ran away with my baby. One Saturday as I approached the dock, I noticed that my canoe was not where it should have been. This had happened once before, when someone without a boat had needed to go somewhere. After a few hours, it had not been returned, however, I went searching for it around both sides of the island. After combing Diitabiki without success, I called friends in four villages to look for it and even sent out a radio message to the whole river that my canoe had been taken. Alas, several days went by with no news. I feared an elopement.
Sometimes people really need to get somewhere but do not have their own way off the island, and they become desperate. Ba Jotie told me a story about an old chief who had a canoe that people would borrow all the time. No matter what he said or did, the boat would disappear whenever he wanted to go somewhere. Eventually, he bought a chain and locked up the boat. One day, however, he found that someone had hacked the chain out of the canoe with a machete and had borrowed the boat yet again.
On Tuesday I had nearly given up. Ba Agasi, a basia, or chief’s assistant, told me that he had also lost a canoe, and we decided to take a motorized boat out together to search for our missing watercraft. As we were leaving, a woman yelled for us to keep an eye out for yet another borrowed boat. Boats are often taken without permission. One of my fellow volunteers painted his boat electric orange, so “no self-respecting Saramacan would be found in it.” By the time Ba Agasi and I reached Mooitaki, twenty minutes by motorboat downriver, we found all three of the missing boats. The Endurance had been stowed in the reeds out of sight from the shore. Before I even arrived back at the dock, I stopped at the local store and bought a chain for my boat. Now, as long as no one takes a machete to the Endurance, she should be secure. We spent a lot of time together in the next few days.
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