New Years?

Only the faranjis (foreigners) in Addis Ababa are celebrating the New Year now. Ethiopia’s New Year starts on September 11th. It is currently the year 2002 according to this calendar, hence one local tourism company’s slogan: “Visit Ethiopia and feel 7 years younger.”

Time in Ethiopia offers a variety of challenges for faranjis. Aside from the different calendar year, there is the unique system for noting the time of day. Hours in the day are counted sequentially with daylight hours. Being so close to the equator, Ethiopia sees very little variation in daylight hours from season to season. 6am, when the sun is about to rise, is considered 12 o’clock. 7am, the end of the first hour of sunlight, is 1 o’clock, and so forth through to the next 12 o’clock, or 6pm faranji time, when the sun sets. To convert between faranji time and Ethiopian time, just look to the opposite number on the face of an analog clock. Luckily, most Ethiopians assume I’m working from faranji time when I make plans with them. I only had a few botched attempts at scheduling meetings due to confusion about what system of time we were using.

But this isn’t what faranjis are complaining about when they bemoan habesha time.¹ Habesha time refers to an Ethiopian style of living in the present, which comes into conflict with the tendency of most American and European to live in the future. Anticipating, premeditating, planning, all deeply ingrained activities that characterize how Americans like me get things done, do not mesh easily with how most Ethiopians get things done. While I assess my effectiveness based on my ability to carry out plans, Ethiopians measure their effectiveness based on… well, I’m not sure exactly yet, but whatever it is, it seems designed to foil mine! Hopefully after another 8 months here, I’ll have a better understanding of the perpetual present that my Ethiopian colleagues live in. It’s markedly different from the siesta-inflected cyclical time of Mexico/Central America or the monumental bureaucratic time of India.

If time and making plans didn’t already sound complicated enough, here’s another twist. The Amharic language doesn’t have a future tense. The future is implied contextually with certain uses of the present continuous tense. This means that only Ethiopians who are completely fluent in English will use the future tense when they speak in English. In my conversations with Ethiopians, I often struggle to understand what has already happened, what is happening and what will happen.

Is my new year’s resolution in keeping with Ethiopian conceptions of time, or just a faranji’s attempt to maintain sanity in spite of it? I’m resolving to enjoy procrastination.