Swahili Time

It’s scary to think that I’ve been here for less than three weeks because I already feel like I’ve been here for months.  What is even scarier is that we have out final Swahili exam in five days.  So with 20 hours of Swahili class each week, we will cram a semester’s worth knowledge into 21 days.  If you include our homestay and daily life in Zanzibar, we are constantly exposed to the language.  Because I should be studying for my final right now, I just wanted to write a quick post about “Swahili Time.” People in Zanzibar definitely live by their own time because it isn’t uncommon for our lectures to start up to 30 minutes later than scheduled. To make it even more confusing, people living in East Africa function using Swahili time.  Our teachers described it to us as subtracting 6 hours from the clock in the AM and adding 6 hours in the PM.  Therefore, 6 AM (English time) is considered to be hour zero, but is referred to as 12. Noon is considered hour 6 and six PM is called 12. HOWEVER, all the clocks are set to English time on the normal AM/PM time scale.  Not only do I have to do math in my head, I have to do math in my head in another language. It doesn’t help that all Swahili numbers 1-10 sound exactly the same.  We mzungus are still baffled by the time difference.  I guess it’s because they want the working hours between 6 AM and 6 PM to correspond with the amount of time they have been awake. What confuses me most is that they don’t switch their watches to display the time they speak.  I don’t try to comprehend why they do it, I just need to learn my numbers better so I can do mental Swahili math a little bit faster.  

Google Image Search "Swahili Time" and this is the first result.

Yes, it's a cruel joke