extreme dust

Here's a sattelite image from just a bit west of us, you can see how massive the cloud of dust is - covering West Africa and out on to the ocean.

As if we didn't already get enough dust blowing around and into my house making my shelves needing to be dusted and my floors needing to be cleaned almost constantly, we have just experienced a dust "storm". The dust blows down because of the yearly Harmattan winds off the Sahara desert, just north of us. We are used to it being dusty this time of year, but this week was extreme. The dust blocked out the sun giving the sky an erie other-worldly glow. It looked like there was a thick fog everywhere, visability was very low. Even in my house I felt like my eyes were blurry as I couldn't clearly see across the room - this dust is so fine it just hovers in the air (and eventually comes to rest in a filthy layer on every surface.)
Airports had to cancel flights here in Mali and in neighboring countries. Because of the sun being blocked and the wind coming from the north we had some very chilly weather along with the dust. It was so bad that it was referred to as a "public health risk" in an aritcle I read. I have a friend who had to spend a couple days in the hospital hooked up to oxygen because the dust storm caused her to have some severe problems with asthma.

Here we are, all ready to travel through the dust a mile or two on the motorcycle. This was the day that the dust started really settling, I don't have any photos that show how dusty the air was. My sunglasses were not for the sun since it wasn't bright, they were just to protect my eyes from the dust. JP is wearing a sleeping eye mask (they give these out on long flights sometimes) to cover his nose and mouth. We see a lot of people wearing these like this driving on motorcycles, even when its only mildly dusty. Kind of silly and kind of resourceful.