La Hora Nueva (by Todd)
On Sunday, May 7, Honduras jumped ahead an hour, switching to Daylight Savings Time. This is the second attempt to do so ever made by Honduras.
The last attempt, made several years ago, met with overwhelming public opposition, criticism, and strikes, and was revoked.
This year, the hour change brought a good deal of confusion (witness: we had arranged a meeting in Los Izotes to which everyone showed up an hour late). However, as far as I can see, the Hondurans seem to be taking it a little better this time. Still, a lot of the people I know are quite bent out of shape over it. There seem to be several different responses people make:
OPTION #1: Ignore the time change completely. In the aldea of Terrero Colorado, everyone just pretends the time change doesn't exist. "Mel (the president) can keep his hour"
OPTION #2: Accomodate the time change but refer to it by the old time. This is my personal favorite. For example, at a school, the principal announced, "School now starts at 6am instead of 7." Did this mean that school was starting at 6am by the new time? Nope. It meant that school would be starting at 7am new time, but that we would just refer to it by the old time.
Similarly, a friend of ours complained to the girls that she had to leave for school in Tegucigalpa at "4am!!!!" When pressed, however, we discovered that, well, ok, it was 5am with the time change :)
OPTION #3: Complete acceptance. It seems to me that the farther you get from major cities, the less likely this option is. Most of Talanga is now on board, though not without some grumbling :)
The most common reaction, however (at least for the first week or two) has been to maintain BOTH time frames, using the terms hora nueva (new hour) and hora vieja (old hour). If we state both, we can avoid any possible confusion. For example, "We will meet at 7pm hora nueva, 6pm hora vieja."
As for us volunteers, being seasoned gringos already accustomed to bi-yearly obfuscations of the clock, we're taking it in stride. We are laughing quite a bit, though.
The last attempt, made several years ago, met with overwhelming public opposition, criticism, and strikes, and was revoked.
This year, the hour change brought a good deal of confusion (witness: we had arranged a meeting in Los Izotes to which everyone showed up an hour late). However, as far as I can see, the Hondurans seem to be taking it a little better this time. Still, a lot of the people I know are quite bent out of shape over it. There seem to be several different responses people make:
OPTION #1: Ignore the time change completely. In the aldea of Terrero Colorado, everyone just pretends the time change doesn't exist. "Mel (the president) can keep his hour"
OPTION #2: Accomodate the time change but refer to it by the old time. This is my personal favorite. For example, at a school, the principal announced, "School now starts at 6am instead of 7." Did this mean that school was starting at 6am by the new time? Nope. It meant that school would be starting at 7am new time, but that we would just refer to it by the old time.
Similarly, a friend of ours complained to the girls that she had to leave for school in Tegucigalpa at "4am!!!!" When pressed, however, we discovered that, well, ok, it was 5am with the time change :)
OPTION #3: Complete acceptance. It seems to me that the farther you get from major cities, the less likely this option is. Most of Talanga is now on board, though not without some grumbling :)
The most common reaction, however (at least for the first week or two) has been to maintain BOTH time frames, using the terms hora nueva (new hour) and hora vieja (old hour). If we state both, we can avoid any possible confusion. For example, "We will meet at 7pm hora nueva, 6pm hora vieja."
As for us volunteers, being seasoned gringos already accustomed to bi-yearly obfuscations of the clock, we're taking it in stride. We are laughing quite a bit, though.
posted by at 5/22/2006 12:48:00 PM
1 Comments:
I found it pretty funny, too. What I don't understand is that, in our case, nobody said anything about actually setting any clocks. It's like they'd rather compute the new hour in their heads. Baffling. The way it was told to us was that Mel was changing the official business hours, and nobody wanted to get up early. At the time this plan didn't make much sense to me, until I realized they weren't working earlier, they were just moving the clock ahead one hour. We do it in North America all the time, right? What a great country!
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