Daylight Savings Time Annulled

6-5-2008

No matter what anybody says, let it be known that I single-handedly brought daylight savings time to Morocco.

About a month ago, I taught an English lesson on telling time and had a few minutes left at the end of class. I decided to do a bit of cultural exchange and teach them about Daylight Savings Time, which Morocco did not have. One would think it would be fairly straightforward to explain, but it kind of comes out as “So in the spring, everyone sets all of their clocks to the wrong time, causing mass confusion, but we purportedly save electricity and allow small children to play longer. Then, in the fall, we set the clocks back to the original time, which is now the wrong time cus we got used to it the other way.” It should be pointed out that the preceding explanation doesn’t translate well into Arabic.

Therefore, I ended up with a room full of baffled Moroccan students, which is how I like to leave them, as it makes me feel I am doing my duty as a teacher and instilling in them the desire to figure out what the heck I was talking about, causing them to go home to pursue the knowledge for themselves. Oh, the gift of learning! I asked the students what they though about the DST, and they unanimously agreed that it was a really weird idea, and that it would never happen in Morocco.

Lo and behold, no less than three weeks later, an announcement came out from the Ministry (I’m not sure which one, possibly the Ministry of Time and Clock Setting), that Morocco would officially go on daylight savings time the following month. Now let’s put the pieces together:

1. Chris does a lesson on daylight savings time.

2. General confusion ensues, causing people all over town to gossip about this strange phenomenon.

3. A few days later, the King of Morocco comes on a visit to the town to meet with citizens and local officials (See previous blog entry).

4. All of the sudden Morocco—without warning—decides to go on daylight savings time!

The evidence is indisputable!

The day came, watches were reset, and a young Peace Corps Volunteer swelled with hubris (obviously nonsensical and undeserved, but don’t ruin his day). The most interesting part of the transition, however, was that I never in my life expected to see daylight savings have no impact whatsoever. Nothing changed, therefore everything changed. The rhythm of life went on, unconcerned about what time the clock said it ways, everything just got pushed an hour later.

In small cities in Morocco the non-business sectors of life (anything that’s not governmentally controlled or a western-model company), the day is measured by the 5-a-day prayer calls, which are solar based. Folks know it’s about time to get up with the first call, time for lunch following the afternoon call, time to close up shops after the evening call, and time for kids to stop playing in the streets at the sunset call. Therefore, all of these events went unfazed by DST, and (if one measures by clock-time) every single part of the day happened an hour later, which REALLY throws off those of us watch-wearers who are used to a bit of regularity.

Instead of the whole town adjusting to the clock for daylight savings time, the town forced the clock-time of everything to adjust. This essentially nullified the all-consuming power of daylight savings time. Imagine the chaos in the US if, when we went on DST, everything just happened an hour later: The standard workday went from 10:00am-6:00pm, lunch was served at 1:00pm, your favorite show was now on at 8:00pm instead of 7:00pm, the kids, who were formerly in bed at 9:00pm are still running around at 10:00pm. We’d go insane!

Maybe this is why my students thought DST would be a bad idea. Maybe I should have been a little bit less inspiring with my immensely impactful English lesson. Or maybe I just need to realize that time really is relative, Einstein must have vacationed in Morocco, that my English lesson’s proximity to the announcement was probably coincidental, and that I really need to get over wearing a watch.