Carmatan!

Queridos y queridas, welcome back to Accra, for a new post.

Today is - to the best of my understanding - the stereotype of the Harmatan day. In this season, wind from the north brings carries over large clouds of desert sand, which make the sky of a murky colour between yellow and grey and will make your eyes and throat feel a little weird.
Sure enough it doesn't kill, but is not the most pleasent weather I have seen.

A couple of themes have been running separately through my week, and eventually met in a really odd way. Give me a second and you'll understand why.
The first is a data request which i have been working onpretty much since my second week in Ghana, and the second is my car hunt, which just started.

What? well... I told you it was odd.

Let's start with the easy bit: I finally have the money - which the bank took only 3 months to transfer - and so I started to look for a car. Not easy, because I would like a 4WD and my budget is pretty limited, but nevermind. Car hunting here in Ghana means driving around with Thomas (my "loyal" taxi driver) from dealer to dealer on dusty roadsides in the oustskirts of Accra. While Thomas tries to convince me to spend twice my budget on shining range rovers I look at rusty old jeeps - all hopelessly outside my budget. The only option on which me and Thomas (whose judgment I trust more than mine) agreed has so far been a KIA Sportage from 1997, but the game is far from done.

Now, the officer that deals in data has the reputation to be quite a slippery person who seems to enjoy the power he gains from allowing or denying access to the ministry's dataset. He will promise stuff, and than forget, or disappear on the day your meeting was scheduled and so on. If putting through a request for some country level statistics is by itself a nightmare immagine what requesting raw data covering several years could be.

For this reason I decided to invest a good amount of time in building a good relationship with him. And in doing so I told him about my so far unsuccesful car-hunt.
Long story short - I don't know if out of genuine interest or if in the effort to diverge my data requests to a different topic - he my car quest very seriously, so seriously that instead of talking about the data we spent seral meeting talking about cars, looking up ads and calling friends.

I though it was all getting too wird when he said he found a car for me and that he would have the owner bring it to the ministry on the following day.
The following day - a couple of days from now - he rushed into my office all excited. We went to the parking lot to check it out, and in all fairness he had done an incredible job.
A 1994 Hyunday Gallopper in amazing conditions - and for an affordable price!

Game in not over yet... there's a little bargaining and a thorough check up to be done, but it looks like I found my wheels - screw the data!

By the way, tonight Cami gets back, which puts an end to my solitary existence ;-) Last weekend I was so bored I watched the second and third Godfather in one go, and then watched it all over again in a really weird and scarily vivid lariam induced dream.