Talofa,
As I am proctoring midterms I thought I could write a post to you all. (Don’t worry, my desk is arranged so I can see all the students plus they are afraid of me confiscating their test and giving them a 0 for cheating because, for this class, all but one would fail the quarter. So it’s good.)
Time is a funny thing here. Some call it Samoan time, but I find it a bit crass, like the pelagi’s (white people) who when encountering something unusual will say TIS (This Is Samoa: It is apparently a reference to Sahara or some film like that when they say TIA – This is Africa. It is a way to shrug off the difference or strangeness of the event.) We prefer to call it island time because it is a feature that seems to occur on most islands.
The people are not very concerned about being on time. We have had meetings that are suppose to start at 10am but the presenter did not arrive until 10:45am and most of the audience did not arrive until 11:15am. We never expect a meeting to start on time. Likewise if we are told that the meeting is going to be 90 minutes we expect it to run for either 30 minutes or a few hours. Sometimes they will just show up and pass out flyers and that is our training. Other times the meeting will start with gossip about how the family/clan is, then we talk go through everything in painstaking detail with a lot of redundant questions. Throughout the meeting they will digress and make jokes. It can be painful at times to sit in a one-hour meeting for several hours. The bell at our school is rung manually and the same thing occurs. Classes will start and end at the listed time +/- 15 minutes. It’s wonderful when your 45 minute period suddenly turned into a 35 minute period without warning…
At first we were trying to figure out what was up with this, especially being over an hour late to a meeting/appointment. Slowly we began to realize that the clocks on Ta’u are slow too. Our stove will lose 10-15 minutes a week. Where does it place those minutes we don’t know. The radio/alarm clock we plugged in, same thing happens. When the internet goes down, the time on the computer slows down too. Interestingly our watches and cell phones do not lose time.
We have determined it is not caused from the frequent power outages because when the power goes out the time will blink, yearning to be reset. We hypothesize that the electricity runs on island time, or more sinisterly perhaps it causes island time. When you visit other islands for a prolonged duration please investigate this phenomenon. We need more data to verify the causality. (Be careful when you investigate though in case the electricity is causing the island time phenomenon as part of the machines attempts to overthrow the world).
I will post this when the internet comes back on. Until then.
W e L o v e Y o u
– E & L