The Hunt for the Cup

With Edmonton winning Game 6, and one member of our group coming from that city, our efforts on Sunday were devoted to trying to find a way to see the seventh game on Tuesday morning. We even went to the super-swanky Sheraton Hotel to see if their satellite TV coverage would include a station showing the game – it does not. The game is on from 3 AM to 6 AM Tuesday here in Addis so we have been trying things like asking a sports bar to open early for us or getting the business centre at the Sheraton to let us log in to a webcast and show it on the wall. We will keep trying but it looks unlikely at this point. Anyone want to hold the phone up to their TV for three hours tomorrow night?

In complete contrast, the early part of the day was spent at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission Cemetery (CWGC) in Addis. There was a yearlong campaign to liberate Ethiopia from the Italians in 1941during which 4,000 Commonwealth service personnel were killed. I knew very little about the campaign save that it was Field-Marshall Slim’s first, commanding an Indian Army division. The cemetery, where 400 now rest, is beautifully kept, as are all 20,000 cemeteries around the world by the CWGC. I already knew from web research that there were no Canadian soldiers in the cemetery, but we did find two Canadian civilians. I guess the Commonwealth community in Addis used the cemetery up until the mid 1990’s. Anyway there are two civilian graves: Robert Murphy from Edmonton and Charles Collier from Saint John, NB.

It is a fascinating cemetery with units you will never see anywhere else represented. The picture included is the grave of Bimbashi C.L. MacDonald of the Sudan Defence Force. I like that rank: Bimbashi. Great badge too. We plan to come back here on Remembrance Day for a little ceremony.

Next door to the CWGC cemetery is an Italian military cemetery. In my tours of Italy I had never seen a military cemetery as I gather all the war dead in Italy were returned to the hometown for burial. The cemetery in Addis is big, covering as it does the whole period of Italian occupation, 1936-1941. There several mass graves containing the remains of unknown war dead; the battles in which they were killed are listed on the large granite stones that rest on the ground.

We sent one member of our group off to the Sudan on Saturday night. He will be there for about three weeks. I am waiting for a visa at which time I will make a brief trip there to see meet the members of the team who work there. Their living conditions are a lot more austere than mine, as can be imagined. The typical wait for a Sudanese visa is about three weeks, so I am optimistic that I might get mine this week.