The Passing of Time

Looking back on the first six weeks of being at my site I am shocked that it has been a whole six weeks already. Somedays I feel like I just got here, am still feeling it out, and thinking holy crap its November! While I still am meeting new people and figuring out where things are, I definitely have my bases covered and am comfortable here though. On the other hand there are some days where I think that I have been away from home for so long and feel like my training was so long ago and that I haven’t seen my other Peace Corps friends in forever. More often than not it is the former and I was trying to figure out why time was moving so fast it seemed. I then realized, there is very little concept of time here. Not in a sense that nothing is planned or people don’t attend to their business when they need to but more that days, weeks just fly by.

            When I first started at school I was trying to get down the time schedule of when classes and breaks start and end. My library unfortunately did not have a clock, probably because it was hardly used in a few years. So I had my watch and my phone on me at all times. However, as I have heard is a common Peace Corps experience, things happen at school that you have no idea about. For example, skipping break because there is an assembly at the end of the day, or going home early because it is hostel out weekend. More often than not the kids are more in the know than you so I began to turn to them to ask if it was break time or if classes were shortened and they needed to move on. Now none of the kid have cell phones at school, it is strictly forbidden but none of them had any watches on either (of course aside from the one I confiscated.) Not too unusual I thought, alright. 

            Over the course of the next few weeks I found myself in various classrooms, working with kids, supervising them, talking about where I am from, and I soon noticed that like the library, not one of the class rooms had a clock either. Apparently the only clock in the school is the one behind the secretary’s desk that she goes off of to ring the bells. All the teachers keep track of time using their cell phone. Different but I thought maybe clocks was just the one thing this school couldn’t afford.  Even at my host families house there was no clock aside from the personal cell phone. If you think about it, a majority of the time keepers in our life in the Western world are on appliances: cable boxes, stoves, microwaves. Even if a family is fortunate enough to have these things, they do not come with clocks. They are all older versions, just the simplest stove and oven combination to get the job done.

            This observation of time was not solely based on no one having watches or clocks though. I have forgotten how I found this out or the conversation that surrounded it, but there is no newspaper in the village. There is no one who drives between here and the nearest town getting news of the rest of the world, continent, nation, or local region. To add to this, there are no radio signals that reach this far either. This village truly is isolated. There is no news coming in or going out except with the people’s word.

            I once asked a few kids how they felt about being so cut off and their answer both did and did not surprise me. Both the girls told me they didn’t care what happened outside of here. Not “didn’t care” in a bad way but “didn’t care” as in they had no reason to. What happened in the next town, up in the north, or in a neighboring country did not matter to them as much as what was going on here. In some aspects it truly doesn’t. Schlip is pretty sufficient. Most basic needs can be attended to here and if not, the next closest town is the country’s second largest, the capital only two hours away. More importantly, why would they need to spend time learning about worldly or national happenings when their main concern currently is burying a loved one, or getting water, or having enough food for their family? I am a huge proponent of being a global citizen, we are one human race in one world so we shouldn’t shut our minds off to anything how do you justify to them the importance of that? You almost can’t.

            So with this, aside from the small events and happenings of the village, there is no sense of passing time. All you have is the school week and church on Sundays to judge what day it is. It’s weird, different. Something that is going to take a while to get used to.