~Time Warp~

Gecko Time

Zone activity at the Cropper's just before BBQ'd hamburgers

Sister Schmutz, our mission president's wife, made the observation that our lives here feel like the movie, Groundhog Day. It’s true!

There is no pattern to the days of our weeks.  Since we are not held to the strict schedule of the young missionaries, we do P-day stuff (P stands for preparation—it’s the day missionaries get “off” to do all their household and personal stuff, and to play, sight see or explore if they can fit it in) on days other than P-day if we are in town (change the oil, buy groceries, buy a printer cartridge).  Then on P-day we usually fill at least some of  it with our regular work.  Plus our Sundays are workdays, our p-days are mid-week, and we are likely to be in long, gospel-related meetings on any given day, not just Sunday, so normal weekly patterns, even those that young missionaries come to cycle into are not dependable to us for telling time.  The word “rest” has a different meaning in scripture than in common usage, and has nothing to do with sitting around, so we “rest” all the time, and we throw in a tiny bit of sitting around on occasion too (reading a few pages of a novel, watching the news, watching a movie, emailing, writing a blog) but not on any particular day. 

Mmmmmm, tuod mangos

Ten Tons of sugar cane all hand cut and hand loaded

Second factor in our time warp: there are no seasons that we can recognize.  The slight differences in temperature and rainfall are unpredictable and indiscernible to us.  I’m sure if you are a sugar cane farmer you can tell variations in rainfall and temperature, but to us it’s all just hot and wet. We have clued in to some of the harvest patterns, but they are so different from home.  Mangos can be forced (by spraying a hormone on the tree we are told) to produce two or even three times a year, but if left untreated, they produce in a yearly pattern, but with a long season, since different varieties come on at different times.  Basically there has never been a time of year when we could not get a lovely mango, but March through June they are truly astonishing.  As for sugar cane; it is yearly, but the harvest takes months—November till April. SO cane trucks, loaded with their minimum of 10 ton of cane, are rumbling by and holding us up on the road all day and all night for fully half the year.   

Rice paddies with coconut and mango trees

And rice; I think they get 3 harvests a year, but that’s hard to tell because they rotate the paddies and they are always in a state of harvest, fallow, planting or growing, all in fields next to each other.   

Bananas have no season that we can detect.  They are always growing, always getting harvested, each variety is always available.  It just seems to have to do with when you plant the tree—you plant it and in 11 months you harvest. Then of course coconut—also no season we have seen, though they tend to harvest 3or 4 times a year.   So, all those things that feel like seasons to local people, are not part of our seasonal cues—no fall, no winter, no spring, no pear farm harvest.   

Endless supply of coconuts and coconut water

Bananas grow to maturity in 11 months!

Rambutans...very sweet once you are inside

West side of the island: sunset over the ocean

East side: incredible sunset over the mountains

Wow! what a sunset

Then there is the equator effect.  We live only 8 degrees north of it, so every day is virtually the same length. If you wake at 4:15 am it is pitch dark; by 4:45, there is light appearing over Cebu Island across the strait; and the sun is up and hot by 6:00 am.  In the evening, sun set is about 5:30, and it’s fully dark by 6:30. The total change in length of days for the year is only 1 hour and 45 minutes— that’s on average about 20 seconds difference in a day—not a perceivable change on a daily basis. No cues there as to what month it might be. And if we are on the other side of the island, the sun comes up and goes down opposite from what we normally see!

Plus the school year here is different from ours.  School kids, including colleges get out in March and start in June.  So there are tons of kids and young adults in uniforms at certain parts of the day during certain parts of the year, but if you are unconsciously linking the back-to-school sign you saw in the store to Aug, then you are a whole quarter off.

Musn’t forget the six-week pattern of mission life that keeps us unaware of months and locked into the six-week  “transfer.”  The missionary planners and most (but not all) the missionary-related meetings are on this transfer schedule—zone conferences, zone interviews, transfer days, etc.  The result is that a transfer, a month and a half, seems mentally comparable to a month, so months are gobbled up half again as fast as normal

Lecheon Baboy--the skin is the delicacy

And of course holidays and fiestas—so key to keeping track of time—are all different.  Christmas décor goes up in September, Thanksgiving and Halloween are non-existant, and there is always a fiesta going on somewhere—full on celebrations on the magnitude of Christmas— that are different days in every barangay and every municipal and every city. Amlan fiesta is on November 29 and 30, so today pigs by the hundreds are getting slaughtered.  Think of turkeys at Thanksgiving, only these are killed in the back yard where they were raised in prep for today.  Every household serves a spit-roasted pig or sometimes many.  And the killing begins days ahead.  The music throbs all night for days from houses and venues all around us, and the pigs squeal high and loud also all day and night. Last year this was disturbing, but this year we know it is only for a few days and all will be peaceful again.  We are invited to several homes to celebrate Amlan fiesta, so it must be the end of November of course.

Anyway, on any given day, I can tell you exactly what time it is based on the sun, but I have no idea what day of the week, what week of the month, or what month of the year.  Some days seem long, others hardly happen, weeks don’t really exist, months are careening by without our really knowing they came and went, and the 6-week transfers are obscenely short. Whether you reckon time by Chronos—chronologically—or by Kyros—through patterns, cycles and seasons—we are ALL messed up.

 A great ZL. We miss them all when they leave, but time is up.