Harmattan is coming!

At this time of year at home, I know Coke should be rolling out the ever-so-traditional Santa Claus commercials.  I remember the old days when the hushed, excited choir would murmur, "Santa packs are coming!  Saaanta packs are coming!"  Santa Packs were, of course, the limited-edition printed boxes of Coke cans that came out at Christmastime.  Then, a good few years ago, it changed to "Holidays are coming!  Hooolidays are coming!"  Part of me appreciated Coke's acknowledgement that December didn't only mean Santa (and therefore Christmas), but a bigger part of me always knew the hat-tip was hollow.  Where in any of the Coke commercials have you seen a Solstice celebration, a single hanukiyah in the gleaming windows, or the Kwanzaa colors of red, black and green?

Anyway, Coke's little earworm is the tune I'm imagining when I read the title of this post.

Harmattan is the dusty season.  It's caused by sandstorms in the Sahara and lasts from December to February.  Harmattan is a time which brings a bit of cool relief from the hot season (it has been sweaaaa-tee around here lately).  It also brings low humidity, hazy days and thus bad photography conditions and cancelled flights, and I've heard it is the time when most locals catch their colds.

For the past couple of weeks, sunrises and sets have been getting ever pinker, oranger and hazier.  I've started to see mist high in the skies along with the sparse clouds.  Streetlights (when they work) have been illuminating columns of particles in the air above the roads.  And then, this morning, I looked out from my balcony towards the city, and realized I couldn't see any of the farther-away landmarks I'm used to spotting. 

Yes, harmattan is definitely coming.  I'll be away for two weeks of it over Christmas time, and I'm looking forward to seeing what it's like with the enthusiasm of someone who's never seen it before!

Work's been crazy - we had a hardware issue last week and were disconnected from the internet until Friday.  There's a huge project HQ wants us to complete which is above and beyond the annual targets HQ themselves set for us, and means we'll need to process about 1000 extra files, and the system we use to deal with those files was the only one that still functioned.  So we used the outage time for a lot of people to do preliminary work on a handful of those files to help me with my impending case load. 

It's like my colleague explained to my seamstress (working hard on my choir uniform, which looks gorgeous!): imagine you have no power; you can do a bit of work sewing by hand, and during daylight hours, but a lot of your bigger capacity is gone.  It was a four-day blow in a very busy office, and now we are totally backlogged.

We've got a choir show coming up on Thursday; any readers who are in Accra should come see.  Goethe Institut, 7 PM, entrance 5 cedis to benefit Street Girls Aid (check them out at www.said-ghana.com).  It won't last more than an hour.  We've been working very hard on these songs and it will really be a treat.

Last but not least, I took my German exam last week... we'll know this week how I did.  Although I definitely made a few mistakes, I also think I did a pretty good job.  Which would mean that next year (if I choose to continue) I'd be starting an advanced German course.  Advanced!  I feel like I could do with a repeat of the past level or two just to solidify my knowledge... I haven't been a very good student when it comes to doing homework, learning new verb tenses or studying at all outside of class time.  Though I can read magazine texts, children's stories and comic books with little assistance, I don't have the confidence to speak.  Hoping that two weeks in Germany will help with that - knowing that people will understand me if I just open my mouth, no matter if the pronoun ending doesn't agree with the number or whatever my worry may be.