Fitche Hailstorm

-Donovan

Time, What Is Time?

Hello, and Happy New Year!  I started writing this post at about 9:30 AM on the first day of the first month of the year 2008.  How is this possible?  It’s not time travel or time zones, my friends.  It’s Ethiopian time!

I know that I spoke to many of you about this when I was home, but I still feel that the very unique way that time works here should be chronicled here for the sake of posterity and confusion that it inevitably creates.

Let’s start with the hour of the day, and I’m not talking about time zone differences when I say this.  If I said it was 12:00 AM, I assume that you would assume that I meant midnight.  Well, here that means our 6:00 AM.  That is when the day starts.  If a local say that they want to meet you at 1:00, that means 7:00 AM.  2:00=8:00, 3:00=9:00 and so on. 

Where this gets complicated is when people try to be accommodating to your “strange” sense of time by telling you the time in “ferenji time” (otherwise known as “foreigner time” or “the same time that literally everyone else on the planet uses.”)  It is always good to check if someone wants to meet you at 2:00 local time or 2:00 ferenji time.  If you assume that they meant 2:00 local time, then you could wind up heading to your meeting at 8:00 AM when they actually meant 2:00 PM, all because they were trying to make your life easier by using your strange clock! 

Confused yet?  Well, now we’re going to talk about the calendar.  The calendar that we use in the West is the Gregorian calendar.  The calendar that they use here is based on the Julian calendar, which is actually older and was widely used until a few centuries ago.   The Ethiopian derivative of this calendar is 7 years behind the rest of the world.  In addition to this, there are 13 months in a year, 12 of which are 30 days long and one of which is 5 days long, 6 days long if there is a leap year.  At the end of this truncated month is the start of the next year, which generally falls around the first part of September according to our calendar.

If you’re interested in reading about this in more depth, here’s the Wikipedia page explaining it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_calendar

~Jessie