When I landed in San Pedro Sula, Honduras
I was under the impression that I was prepared. I had been coached by my family
on what the living conditions would be like, the safety of the town we would be
staying in, how the food would differ; I was young and naïve enough to think
that I would handle the transition to living in a third world country for two
weeks well. The culture shock that ended up jarring me was the Hondurans’
treatment of time. Time for me has always been a limited measurement. I create
my day based on hours and minutes; twenty-four hours in a day, eight spent
sleeping, two spent studying, I should do well on the hour long test, and so it
goes until all my time is used up. Time is a system of numbers to live by and
often times something to compete against. This idea of time simply does not
exist in rural Honduras and I was forced to abandon it nearly as soon as I
stepped off of the plane.
The passage of time in Honduras is not
measured by hours or minutes, but rather progress. “How long” it takes to do
something in the American sense of the word is unimportant. There isn’t a rush
to accomplish things more quickly for the sake of saving time. Nor is there a
scale of quality and time that means the Hondurans accomplish something of
higher quality in ten hours than they would have in five. The pressure of
breaking the day into neat boxes of time where certain things MUST be
accomplished in/by/on is one that I was absolutely and forcibly liberated of when
in Honduras and it drastically altered my experience there. I was rarely aware
of what time of day it was exactly; I did not know what time I ate, how long we
worked for, how long I slept, etc. It was painful for the first few days I was
there, but after I embraced the new lens of time thrust upon me, I was able to
view all of the Honduran culture in a new way.
The characters in Tales of the Tikongs that do not abandon their preconceptions of
time before they land on the island of Tiko suffer as much as I did at first
when I landed in San Pedro Sula. A system of one day working and six days resting
is almost certainly going to differ from one’s own experience of time and
attempting to view this system through one’s own experience is actually
limiting in this instance. In Tales of
the Tikongs, Mr. Dolittle turned an entire population deaf with his attempts
to force the Protestant work ethic upon it. In his time on Tiko he never
allowed himself to view time as anything other than what he had already preconceived
and therefore was unable to impact the society in a meaningful way. In much the
same way, had I attempted to force my views of time upon the construction crew
of Honduran natives instead of embracing the culture, I would have failed just
as miserably and missed out on widening my understanding of an entire culture
and of myself.
That
being said, the new lens that I ended up viewing Honduras through was not one I
put upon myself. It was a lens that I was essentially forced to look through as
I could not maintain my previous conception of time. While it was not a
situation that I would have chosen for myself had I been offered the choice, I
cannot say that seeing time through the eyes of the natives of Honduras was
detrimental to my experience. The bounds of forced liberation can only be
pressed so far though, as seen through the interaction of Mr. Lowe and Ika Levu
in Tales of the Tikongs. Mr. Lowe
forces Ika into taking out a loan to buy top-of-the-line fishing equipment and
Ika ends up happy only after his new boat is deliberately sunk to the bottom of
the ocean. Their interactions point out again the misunderstanding that occurs
when a person neglects to view the culture they are entrenched in through that
cultures’ lens.
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