An Insightful Conversation on High School Island Life with Two Palauan Girls I Gave a Ride Home Last Night from a Church Youth Activity
Palauan Girl 1: Brother Eli? Did you know that in Japan you have to be looking at the clock all of the time?
Eli: What do you mean?
Palauan Girl 1: Like when they say that school will start at 7:00 you have to be always looking at the clock or else if you go after 7:00, like at 10:00 or something, you will be LATE!
Eli: That sounds . . . reasonable.
Palauan Girl 2: But what if you just go at like 7:35?
Palauan Girl 1: LATE!
Palauan Girl 2: What about if it is 7:08 and you had to help your grandma cook rice or something?
Palauan Girl 1: You will be LATE! It does not even matter why! They will NOT wait for you!
Eli: So does school not start at the same time every day in Palau?
Palauan Girl 1: Well it starts at like 8:00 or something or just when everyone is ready.
Eli: Do you not look at the clock in the morning to try to get to school by a certain time?
Palauan Girl 1: I just go out of the door when the bus is waiting down the street.
Eli: And that doesn't happen at the same time every day?
[Shrugs her shoulders]
Palauan Girl 2: Brother Eli? When you were in high school could you have a cell phone on the bus and in the class?
Eli: Well, actually, when I was in high school kids didn't really have cell phones so this wasn't something anybody thought about.
Palauan Girl 1: Oh. You must be older than I thought.
Eli: How old did you think I was?
Palauan Girl 1: Like 45 or something.
Palauan Girl 2: No! I thought you were like 47.
Eli: Only in my heart, kids. Only in my heart.
~It Just Gets Stranger
I ran a summer camp with kids aged 13 to 17. I'm only 24, but when I told them that cell phones weren't as common when I was in high school, and those of us who had them didn't text as much, they were convinced that I'm ancient.
ReplyDeleteEli, this post is why I tell people to read Stranger.
ReplyDeleteThis cracked me up! I have a friend from India who views time differently. I have to try to adjust MY thinking of time for her and also try to get her moving for the culture we are in...that way we are only 30-60 minutes late instead of 3 hours! She just got married, here in the states, last month and she was only 30 minutes late walking down the aisle...I was so proud!
ReplyDeleteUh maybe I was lucky or something but I'm 28 and most of the kids in my highschool had cell phones and we all texted all the time.
ReplyDeletei am 28 and i didnt have a cell phone until the summer after my 1st yr of college
DeleteI am ancient. My first husband had one of those brick phones in a bag with the three-foot antenna so that he could do his field service job. He used it less than his pager, which he wore ALL THE TIME. And he was in field service (on call to fix people's computers, which usually meant calling them on his bag/brick and asking if it was plugged in and turned on).
DeleteI did not have a cell phone until I joined the entertainment industry in California in 2002.
I'm 26 and didn't even get texting until my senior year of college.
DeleteI love the fact that there are cultures where clocks and time don't matter as much. Why should they be stressed out all the time like us crazy Americans? Good for them. I bet they are happier for it.
ReplyDeleteGrowing up in America where it is rude to be late, and reading this post hurts my brain. It's like I want want to be more 'lax, but my OCD won't let me even think about it!
ReplyDeletewe didn't have cellphones, and those rich kids had pagers (but I thought pagers were only for drug dealers)... do you know how many dealers were in my class?
ReplyDeleteI lived in rural Hawaii for high school, and when you take Mormon Standard Time + Hawaii Standard Time, sacrament meeting (church for you non-lds folks) starts 45 minutes late. For reals. But school started on time.
ReplyDeleteThen I was in grad school in the US and my professor felt the best way to get the students on time was to verbally abuse those who were late. Now I'm 10 minutes early to everything, twitchy and OCD about it.
There are times I really miss Hawaii... I'd like to hang out cooking rice and be late for work and have it be okay :-).
45?! *gasp* Like a dagger in the heart. Ouch. Does sound kind of nice, though, to just show up to school when you're ready. Ah, island life...
ReplyDeleteLOL! Kids... My Sunday School classes would always try and guess my age. It ranged from 14 to 50. I was 21 at the time. ;-)
ReplyDeleteAnd Palau time sounds like Ecuador time. Nothing starts until everyone gets there.
Last February, we went to Riviera Maya, Mexico for our honeymoon, when we went somewhere on a tour bus returning vacationers would ask how much longer until we got somewhere. When they did, they would follow that question up with, is that in our time or Mexican time, we quickly learned to add about 20 minutes to every hour when asking how long something would take there. Loved it, such a relaxed culture when it came to getting to where you were going or doing something. Can't wait to get back there again this winter.
ReplyDeleteWe had a vice principal who stood in the quad and shouted out how many more minutes until the bell rang. They locked us out if we were late. And not only did we not have cell phones, but we had PAY PHONES on our campus. Two of them. And the line was long during lunch.
ReplyDeleteHow about this for all you youngins'? When I was in high school, cell phones did not even exist yet!
ReplyDeleteOh and to add further, if you exceeded three tardies, you got detention.
DeleteI totally remember using the payphone at the high school to call home for a ride. But we never had quarters so we would call collect and when the machine records your name we would just hurry and yell, "Can you come pick me up! I'm at the school!"
ReplyDeleteOh my gosh, I forgot about this - that was what we did too. Just "pick me up" after practice ended or something, I never said my name and we never paid for the call. thanks - this made me laugh, one of those memories I'd forgotten! No cell phones in HS for me either - I think maybe my sophmore year in college I got one.
DeleteMy husband's family must have ancestral ties to Palau.
ReplyDeleteI went to Puerto Rico for two weeks for a missions trip with my church, and we would start around two hours late each day and end work before lunch. Everyone was calling it "Island Time" which at first seemed great. But we got so little done. And then they would tell us that we would go to the beach around four, but thanks to the "wonderful" island time we wouldn't get to the beach until it was dark. Which was awful and no fun.
ReplyDeleteSo now I have a much greater appreciation for being on-time.
HILARIOUS! Absolutely hilarious.
ReplyDeleteI'm 29. I remember when both my parents had car phones installed in their cars. Then they got me a cell phone when I got my driver's license. It was pretty huge considering all it did was make phone calls. I don't remember texting until I was in college, and then I got a cool flip phone. It even had a color screen! And then I remember my first phone with a camera, which took such blurry pictures that nobody really knew what the pictures were of, but they were PHOTOS from a PHONE so they were AWESOME!
ReplyDelete... Thanks for inadvertently sending me on a trip down memory lane!
Oh my word... So Palauan time must be like what we always called "Mexico Time." Also, I did get a cell phone my freshman or sophomore year of high school. But there was no texting. And I think my mom got it for me mostly because she forgot me all the time and wanted me to be able to call her and say I'd been waiting for like 30 minutes and could she please come pick me up from school. My dad had a bag phone in his car with a huge antenna magnet-ed to the roof. I used to call him on his bag phone when I couldn't remember the command prompts...
ReplyDelete