Time

Time is something here that’s taken me a bit of getting used to. The Cameroonian (dare I saw “African”? I’m not sure it’s similar continent-wide) way of looking at time is incredibly different than my western, American way. I’ll try to describe some of the differences.

Well, for starters, people here are almost always late. I don’t mean like a number of people are consistently showing up 5 minutes late to meetings, I mean people don’t even start showing up most of the time until 45 minutes after it was supposed to start. I’m usually about 10-15 minutes late every Saturday for soccer practice and most of the time I’m one of the first five people to arrive. Another time, I was trying to hold a food security workshop for local women in community groups. It was supposed to be at a conference room at the mayor’s office and was also supposed to start at 8:30. Well, we told everyone to get there at 8 o’clock sharp and, sure enough, by 8:30 there was only 3 people there. (That turned out lucky, though, because my collaborator couldn’t show up until much later.) Finally around 10 we started, though most people had shown up by around 9:30.

I have a running joke with the doctor at the hospital about time. When he tells me a time to meet him somewhere I always immediately ask him, “Is that WMT or BMT?” Those acronyms stand for White Man Time and Black Man Time. White man time invariably means that if you show up one minute late: you’re late. Black man time means that you can show up sometime in the general vicinity of the given time, usually about 30 minutes late. (Side note: Those two phrases aren’t nearly as racist as everyone in the US ais probably thinking. Nope. In Cameroonian English and culture they don’t refer to Americans or Europeans as foreigners that often, instead we become “white man”—even the women—and any African is “black man.”)

The doctor frequently asks me if we can make our time “more elastic” when he’s running late, which is something I got a bit frustrated with at first. “Why tell me to be here at 7:30 if we won’t leave until 9?” I’d think. Eventually, though, I just learned to be patient. I’d shrug my shoulders, sit down, and people watch while waiting for him. I mean, most of the time I had nothing else to do, so why should I be rushed?

When I first arrived here, I didn’t really understand why people are so habitually late. Is it because of laziness? Is it because nobody wants to waste their time when everyone else is going to be late as well? Is it because nobody respects other people’s time? I think all of these reasons have potentially some degree of validity, but I also think it goes deeper than that. I believe now that Cameroonians just have a vastly different outlook on time and, consequently, life than most Americans.

In our western worldview, we tend to look at time as something fixed, as something that exists and, to a large extent, we follow. We tell people we’ll see them at a certain time, we want to watch a particular TV show at another time, we have to be at work no later than yet another time. In doing this, we kind of let time control us. Sure, we can make a decision to do something at a specific time, but then we pretty much have to plan everything else around it and be held captive or simply blow it off with the full knowledge that we missed out on something or inconvenienced somebody else.

Cameroonians look at time in a different way. Instead of being controlled by time, they look at it as something that you control, or something to disregard. Meeting at 4? Well, I’m not going to drop everything to go to it. I’ll finish what I’m doing, take care of myself and then show up when I show up. Will it be a bother to somebody if I’m not there at the time we agreed upon? Probably not, he’s probably doing the same thing. Instead of living by the clock like many Americans do, Cameroonians just live and act how they want to and often look at the time as an afterthought.