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.