Is it that time already?

I wrote this article about time a while ago, but never put it on my blog because I hoped it would be published somewhere else. It never was, so here it is. We still don't have WiFi. 

We were arguing about time. “You’re three hours late!” I yelled. “You said you’d be home at six, I was worried!” My Egyptian husband looked at me blankly. “What do you mean I’m late? I’ve arrived, so how can I be late?” I must admit this ended the argument, because I couldn’t help laughing at the ridiculousness of this remark. The problem is that it was only ridiculous to me. To my husband, it made perfect sense. Our life together over the last two years has been littered with many similar exchanges.

I expected to encounter many cultural differences when I moved from the UK to Cairo to be with my husband, but I was totally unprepared for the completely different way we think about time. I have had a lot of difficulty adjusting to the cultural differences, so to help with this I have a counselor who specializes in expats. I was moaning to her during one of my sessions about the time thing, and feeling that my husband didn’t care enough about me to get home when he said he would. She pointed out that it was nothing to do with caring or respect, just a different way of thinking about time. What? You mean there’s more than one way of thinking about time? Well yes, it turns out there is, and they’re called monochronic and polychronic cultures.

No idea what I’m talking about? Well, let me explain. Northern Europe, the United States and Canada are monochronic cultures. The Arab countries of the Middle East, Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa are polychronic cultures. A monochronic culture sees time as linear and divided into fixed elements; lateness and interruptions are frowned upon. In polychronic cultures, time is seen as flexible and nobody worries too much about lateness and interruptions.

Some cultures are more monochronic than others, and of course the same applies to polychronic cultures. Switzerland, the land of super accurate, high-quality timepieces, is at one end of the monochronic scale, whereas the UK – not so much. One only has to look at the definition of a train being late. In Switzerland, if a train arrives one second after its scheduled arrival time, it’s late. In Britain, a train has to be more than 10 minutes late before it appears in any statistics about the number of trains that were late that month. Unfortunately for me, Britain might be less monochronic than Switzerland, but Egypt is about as polychronic as you can get. But what does all this mean? I’m pretty sure you already know if, like me, you’re from a monochronic culture and you're living in a polychronic culture.

I’ve lived in Egypt for two years. We still don’t have WiFi. This is because our apartment is a new build, and there are “not enough lines in the box” for us to have a landline, so Egypt Telecom has to make a new box. When my sister, brother and I were children, we frequently went with our parents to one or other of our grandparents’ houses. It always seemed like we were driving for an unbelievably boring eternity, with the three of us on the back seat and the dog on the parcel shelf.

Inevitably, we were constantly asking “…are we nearly there yet? Are we nearly there yet? Are we nearly theeeeeeeeeere yeeeeeeeeeeeet?”, getting increasingly whiny as the journey progressed. I have no idea how my parents coped. This WiFi situation is causing me to regress back to that time. I keep asking my husband, “When will we get WiFi? When will we get WiFi? When will we get WiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiFiiiiiiiiiiiiiii………?” And the truth is, he has no idea. But instead of this situation driving him mad, as it does me, he just accepts it because “…that’s how things work here.” I have absolutely no idea what “making a new box” entails, but I suspect that if this was British Telecom, it wouldn’t take two years (and counting), and I would know exactly what date and time (give or take a few hours) it would be fixed.

So, back to my husband. I love him dearly, and frankly, given that he’s from a seriously polychronic culture, it’s just as well. We’ve had so many arguments about what time he’ll be home that I’ve given up asking, because whatever time he says, it definitely won’t be then. To begin with, I actually took him at his word because he was so convincing, but of course, this is because he genuinely believes that he will be home at that time. Sometimes he surprises me by coming home earlier than he said he would, but this is massively outweighed by the times he has come home hours later, or on a few occasions, not at all. The funny thing about this is that I’m not in the least concerned about what he might have been up to because I know, broadly speaking, what he’s been up to – talking, smoking and drinking tea. And maybe conducting a little bit of business. Things happen during his working day and he has to call this person, go to meet that person, and drop into that place before he comes home.

By complete coincidence, I was invited to a talk by Rana Nejem, a Jordanian who has written a book called When in the Arab World, which is about how to deal with Arab cultures for non-Arabs. The talk was fascinating, and I thought, here is my opportunity to get to the bottom of this mysterious time issue, because it has become clear to me that it’s more than punctuality or lateness or interrupting people. She answered that polychronic cultures care more about relationships than they do about time. I’m paraphrasing here I admit, but I have to confess that this answer took me aback somewhat, as it probably would anybody from a monochronic culture. In fact, the monochronic friend who came with me commented that she had bristled at that point.

I have two issues with this. Firstly,

the implication that monochronic cultures care more about time than relationships. For me and most of my monochronic friends, this is absolutely not true. Secondly, I would hope that my husband’s relationship with me is pretty high up on his list of important relationships – second only to his children in fact. So how come I’m the one who loses out most when the day gets extended and extended and extended by more tea, cigarettes and talking, and our time together is constantly interrupted by phone calls because he can't not answer the phone? He asked me recently if I wanted to go out for dinner. I said no, and he was offended. "Why not?" He asked. "Will you put your phones on silent and only talk to me?" "You know I can't do that". “Well, in that case, I'd rather stay at home and get a takeaway. At least I can watch a film or read my book while you spend the entire time on the phone, instead of me sitting there like a lemon eating my dinner whilst listening to one side of a conversation in a language I mostly don't understand.” We got a takeaway.

I’m pretty certain that the answer is much more complex than time versus relationships, and yet whenever I read about this subject I come across this concept that polychronic cultures care more about relationships than monochronic cultures. This simplistic explanation of a complicated cultural difference does a disservice to all cultures, and results in judgmental behavior from both cultures. I have heard many expats from monochronic cultures criticize Egyptians for their timekeeping; if living with my husband has taught me anything, it is that neither is better than the other. It’s a different way of thinking, and taking a bit of time to understand that goes a long way to avoiding insanity.

In the meantime, my husband asked me to wake him up at 8.00pm. I’ll do that on the dot of 8.00pm (or maybe 8.07 because I’m British and not Swiss), then he’ll go back to sleep for another couple of hours because the person he wanted to speak to at 8.00pm won’t mind if he’s a couple of hours late, because he's Egyptian too.