Ndume : the story of an elephant

Mark Deeble

It reads like environmental pulp fiction:

A tribal family’s ancestral forest home is surrounded and cutoff from the main forest by illegal loggers and slash-and-burn farmers. When they eventually break out to try to rejoin the main tribe, they are discovered at dawn and set upon by a violent mob – the family is split, some run for the safety of the trees, others are hacked to death with machetes. In the fighting, one infant receives such a blow to the head that he’s knocked unconscious. On the verge of being killed, he is rescued from the mob by forest guards, and flown to a distant city. He wakes up in an orphanage, and screams for his mother. Ripped from his friends, his family, his mother, he has nightmares for months. 

As the years pass, he slowly makes new friends, and with them he is moved to a ‘halfway’ house…

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Dear Mom in the Waiting Room.

Dear Mom in the Waiting Room,

I didn’t see you at first. What I noticed as we walked in was a young, laughing girl spinning around with a stuffed animal at the end of her outstretched arms. She had that kind of pure laugh that made me smile just hearing it.

We were there for an ultrasound. Not a major procedure, but my son had major stress. My son is autistic, and has a boatload of medical trauma from his years in an orphanage. Add those together, and hospitals don’t end up high on our list. My son didn’t even notice the spinning, laughing girl.

I sat my nervous son down on the couch, gave him his iPad, and went to fill up his water bottle. (“Have him drink lots of water for an hour, and don’t let him pee,” they told us.  Yeah, okay. We had peed 4 times since the parking garage.)

The waiting room…

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