Page 26 - Dark Matter Women Witnessing

connection they once enjoyed. The Mandingo elders wept openly and peace was

restored. A few weeks later, Karmah Jallah died.

In the village of Barkedu, we met a man whose elephant dreams had flowed into daytime

reality. Other villagers corroborated that when the elephants told him, for example, Meet

me at the pond on Thursday at noon, he would go there at the appointed time and find

an elephant waiting for him. Soon, the elephants instructed him where to plant his crops.

He did as he was told. The elephants ate the other farmers’ harvest, but left the

dreamer’s plot undisturbed. When he asked them why, they replied, The others have

forgotten their manners. They are cutting down too many trees, and killing too many

animals for no reason.

One of the elders there told us that, before the war, the people and the animals used to

speak freely with each other and communicated well. He remembered when, as a young

boy, there had been trouble in the river nearby. Crocodiles were attacking humans, and

humans were killing the crocodiles in self-defense. The head elder of the village

summoned the crocodile elder. The man telling us the story said he remembered seeing

the old croc walking slowly up to the old man’s hut. There, the two leaders sat together

all afternoon, discussing their shared dilemma. They came to an agreement that each

group would have its own special bend in the river where they would each be safe. The

agreement was still in force at the time we were told the story. People said they bathed,

washed their clothes and swam freely in their designated area, without a crocodile in

sight. A short distance away, the crocodiles basked in the mud undisturbed.

At the end of our meeting, an ex-combatant recounted a dream: He is pounding on his

neighbor’s door and shouting, Is there Mercy enough for me? A question like that

burrows deep in our soul and lays its eggs. It feeds on our unshed tears.

Intuition, dreams, and synchronicities are the language of the liminal world where human

and non-human meet. Logic cannot take us there. This past January (2016), inspired by

a mysterious dream that had come to Deena, we returned to the site of our previous

meeting with the Elephant Ambassador, and visited two other preserves where we

hoped to find elephants whose communities were relatively intact. Everywhere we went

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