Halloween and Harmattan

I know halloween is a very American "holiday", but it provides a good excuse to do something different. So we did. We bought a huge pumpkin from the market - the smallest they had, but still enormous! - and Simon carried it home, crammed into his rucksack, on the back of an okada. 


We spent a long time scooping out the flesh, and trying to think of ways to use it up. A couple of batches of pumpkin muffins weren't bad, and I even iced them (although a combination of slightly-too-wet icing and Nigerian heat meant they were just sort of swimming in a gooey mess on the plate). We roasted some of it, to have with our roast dinner on Sunday and the remainder sits accusingly in the fridge. God there's a lot of flesh in a pumpkin!


A volunteer from Akwanga (Lucy, with whom we stayed for a few days in our first couple of weeks in Nigeria) was staying with us for the weekend, and carved a beautiful Pob-like face into the hollowed-out pumpkin - next door's children were slightly confused by the practice - and we lit a candle in it on a NEPA-less night (we still only get electricity for some of every second day). Lots of fun!


The season seems to have changed overnight. At the end of last week, it was still definitely rainy season. Ok, there were slightly longer pauses between rain storms, but it was definitely very wet and thundery. Then, we left the house on Saturday evening, and suddenly the ground was much drier and the sky incredibly hazy - almost like fog. There was no huge storm to round off the rainy season, no warning - just in the blink of an eye, it now seems to be harmattan, and the haze in the sky is the dust that it brings with it.


So far I'm liking it: it can be quite cool at times, the haze should make for some beautiful sunsets and I'm just so happy that I can now go out and not worry about whether I'm going to be able to get home before it rains!