Time…

In Papua New Guinea we talk about ‘PNG time.’ By this we mean that things will happen when they happen, and that clocks and schedules are not the driving force, but relationships and other matters are. For me, who comes into this from a sailing background where five minutes early to watch (duty) was considered on time, it can be quite challenging. Often, I find life has become a case of hurry-up-and-wait, especially when something is happening ‘soon’.

Now that we have started drafting Scripture in Kope, I will have a language learning session with one of the village ladies in the morning, then return to my house and get ready for the translation team to arrive ‘soon’. I will get everything ready for a stated time, and then wait for people to actually arrive. Sometimes they dribble in over the next hour or so, our start point being that once there are three translators, we can start. Other times everyone arrives at once and we get straight to work. Occasionally no one comes at all and I eventually receive a message that they’re all busy with something else. On one occasion I turned up and they’d arrived before me and were waiting for me!

Part of living with PNG time is that I always have a back up or interim plan. While I wait for translators, transport and other such things, I usually have with some reading material, a letter to write, my language learning recordings to listen to or my vocabulary flashcards to go over. If a plan is cancelled, I have back up options in place, which usually means catching up on typing up notes into my computer or preparing for a text we’ll be working on soon.

Interestingly, while I am learning patience for PNG time, some PNGns have learnt impatience with whiteskins not keeping to whiteskin time. While waiting for locals to arrive is normal, there was one episode of are-they-here-yet when waiting for whiteskins to arrive at an appointed time that they did not keep. I guess when my culture has spent so long emphasising the important of being on time, I should not be surprised that we are then expected to be on time.

Being home in Australia at the moment, I realise that I have absorbed more of the PNG time frame than I thought. I am now more likely to be five minutes late than five minutes early, as was my habit before. I make meeting times with an ‘–ish’ at the end to emphasise that I might not be as exact as before. When I have a more important meeting, I’ve been turning up extra early, as in recognising the importance, I’ve become over cautious with timing.

The timing of things in PNG can require the flexibility of a gymnast, as plans are made, remade and dropped. How to read the timing of events, and when I need to be somewhere, is a skill I’m very much still working on, and one that is undergoing some readjustments now that I am back in the land of clocks and schedules.