By eleven o'clock I was ready to leave Bati. I had made my courtesy calls, and I even stopped to see the Irish missionaries. The couple were not in town. I left my card and a note saying I was sorry to have missed them and that I would stop by on my next trip to Bati. Now, I was actually curious to see what their reaction was to Jack marrying the Muslim girl.
It was getting warm in Bati and I was anxious to get out of the desert heat and into the highlands. Two hours of steady driving up the road would have me in Dessie, at an altitude of 6,500 feet, and in among forests of eucalyptus that made this town green, wet, but not lovely.
The road winds through sharp curves all the way up the face of the escarpment. It is an Italian road built during the occupation. The drive is scenic, lined as it is with clumps of eucalyptus trees and cactus. The town of Dessie (meaning "My Joy" in Amharic) is not seen until the last few turns and then only glimpses of tin roofs flash through the thick eucalyptus. At the very crest of the rise, the road bursts into the piazza and into a small valley at the foot of Mt. Tassa.
I arrived during the midday lull and was able to cruise through the normally crowded piazza. Dessie has the feel and atmosphere of a western frontier town. There are wooden buildings, wooden porches, a steady flow of cattle, horses and riders, but more often, mules ridden by tilik sews (important men) wearing the traditional white shammas and jodhpurs of the Ethiopian national dress and, depending on the weather, heavy woolen burnooses.
The men on horseback are always shoeless. The large toe of each foot hooks into metal stirrups. Their shoes are carried by a small boy, a young son or relatives, or in some sections of Ethiopia, an indentured servant, who runs along side the trotting mule.
These tilik sews are often carrying money to the bank and they have hired men from their villages to guide them across the plateaus, which even today are as wild and dangerous as once was our own frontier.
Depending on how important the tilik sew is, or from how far a distance he has come, there'd be one or two and sometimes as many as a dozen armed guides, all carrying heavy old rifles left over from the Italian occupation of the early forties.
I stopped at the Telecommunications Office in the center of the piazza. At that time in the mid-Sixties phoning anywhere in Ethiopia was difficult. Telephoning Addis Ababa, I always made "lightning" calls, as they were called. They were more expensive, but also the only fast service and I had only to wait a half hour before a line was free and I dialed the Peace Corps Office.
Or the drive up the escarpment, I had phrased how I would break the news to Dave Berlew, the Peace Corps Director, and when he got on the line, he was buoyant and seemingly happy to hear from me, wanting to know what was the word from the boys in Bati. I let a moment pass before saying I had just come from Bati and told him matter-of-factly that one of the PCVs in Bati had over the summer married a thirteen or fourteen year old Galla girl in a Muslim ceremony.
The silence from Addis Ababa at the other end of the line was priceless.
Part Eleven



