For decades I have received a Mother’s Day telephone call from a fellow late-60s Peace Corps Ethiopia volunteer.

“Ding-a-ling you Mother,” was the greeting from Jim Gregory when I picked up the phone every second Sunday in the month of May.

I won’t get any more calls from Ato Jim (we used the Ethiopian honorifics when addressing each other).  His long battle with cancer ended April 27. He is survived by wife Suzanne and their daughter, Membere Gregory, who they adopted from Ethiopia as an infant.

Jim’s Mother’s Day greeting was a very loose modification of an Ethiopia word for “hello.” He had started using it among close friends almost from day one in the country.  And it wasn’t because he couldn’t handle the language.  Compared to me he was practically fluent.  It was just Jim having some fun.

The actual word is pronounced roughly Ten-ASS-ta-ling, and starts with an explosive T that we don’t even use in English.  Jim grabbed the ing sound and went from there, obviously. 

At some point after our return to the US, Jim started calling several of us every Mother’s day.

It was his way of staying in touch and the greeting had a nice ring to it, drawing me, and I suspect the other recipients also, right back to those fascinating, frustrating and constantly interesting days in the kingdom of Haile Salassie.  We’d get to not only catch up to what he was doing, but he also filled us in on each other.

I was never privy to his entire list of callees, but I know that among them were Bob Hazlett, a good friend to this day; Mimi Hanson Logan, who we lost to cancer several years ago; Frank Zahour, who was fun to travel with internationally because he was the spitting image of Omar Shariff, and Mike Roddy, who I envied because he lived in one of those great circular tukuls in Emdibir, a small village in the Gurage region. Here’s a photo of one of them, taken by Charlie Ipcar.

When I started living in Connecticut in the summers a decade or so ago, it became tradition for Sue and I to meet up with Ato Jim, who lived on Long Island; Wayzero Mimi, who lived in coastal Clinton, CT, and occasionally Ato Bob, who came up from DC, at the Lalibela restaurant in New Haven for a leisurely buffet lunch.  Daughter Jennifer and family, Mimi’s husband and daughter and the spouses of Jim and Bob were usually in attendance as well.

For any former Ethiopia volunteers reading this, I believe Charlie Sutton still plays jazz every Saturday night at the Lalibela.  Charlie was a couple of years ahead of me in his service in Ethiopia and had become a member of Orchestra Ethiopia.  He and the Peace Corps helped the Orchestra arrange a US tour in 1969 and in March of that year they appeared on the Ed Sullivan show. Below is a photo of Charlie with the orchestra.

Ato Jim was stationed in Dilla, a full day’s bus ride south of Addis Ababa, the capitol.  I was stationed in Addis. Feeling guilty about living in a place with plumbing and 24-hour electricity, I made it a point to get out into the boondocks to visit my friends from training who were living in far flung places.  Ato Bob was in Sheno, only a few hours from Addis, so I went out there several times.  Mimi was in Hosanna, which required a plane trip or a day-long bus ride and a day-long mule ride, because there was no road all the way to the village.  I visited her once. I took the plane out and she and I came back to Addis via the mule and the bus. My butt hurt after that trip.

Here are some grabs from movies I took back then.

Ato Jim, way out in Dila, a day away on a dusty uncomfortable bus, also got just one visit from me.  He was a trooper I have to say.  Gastro-intestinal issues were nearly constant, and the teaching assignment was tough, but he stuck it out for a year. He learned the language well, made a lot of friends in town and kept his sense of humor intact.

I visited him over a Western holiday, Christmas I think, and we’d been invited to dinner by an American missionary family living in a nearby village. We both had visions of a great meal, maybe not traditional turkey and all the fixings, but something fabulous, compared to our normal fare.

The main course was lentil soup, followed by chocolate pudding for dessert! Jim and I could not look each other in the eye over dinner!

Below are a couple movie grabs from when I visited him in Dilla. We had hiked a ways out of town with a few of his students. Note the roll of toilet paper in his hand! I could not fathom having to be armed with toilet paper every waking minute, but that’s what he was going through.

I remember Jim’s battle with the Peace Corps office to get stationed in Addis Ababa his second year.  As he retold it, they actually advised hm to just shut up and go back to Dilla or they’d send him home and let the draft take him.  He recounted laughing and pointing out that if they took a look at his file they’d see he only had sight in one eye (a childhood thing as I recall) and was hardly Army-bait.  They relented and he ended up at a high school in Addis his second year, much happier.   Mimi also got herself reassigned to Addis her second year.

Jim was one of the good ones and I will miss knowing he’s on the planet, his yearly ding-a-ling and the good times we had sharing memories on the too seldom occasions we saw each other. 

Here he is in a 1967 movie grab and recently.