Time

Being in Kenya, it is a good advice to leave the importance of time back home. If not, it will just bring frustration.

When you make an appointment to meet somebody or you have invited somebody to your place, you should not expect that they will be there at the agreed time. While in Norway we send an sms to notify if we are 10-15 minutes late, you will hardly get any notification even when people are delayed by hours. During our stay, the worst example was a delay of 4 hours!!

Why is time not important in Kenya? Probably because time is connected to stress. Time is considered important in Kenya almost only in connection with work. But not in all work situations, though.

For us spending some weeks in Kenya during the darkest period of the year in Norway, it was important to get as much as possible out of our stay. Meeting family and relatives, seeing places, and spending time in the sun. But the time factor kept us waiting for something or somebody almost every day.

The ironic thing is that most Kenyans do not bother to keep time, not even in relations to family and friends, but when it comes to behaviour in the traffic, you should expect that they were in a hurry to keep time....! Even when walking on the pavements where some places only one person can pass at the same time, very few people are polite to wait to let the other one walk first. Why in such a hurry when time does not matter?

Rune made quite many interesting observations. One day in the centre of Eldoret, we were walking behind a man who was walking very slowly. The time was about noon. It struck Rune that this man probably was in a hurry to reach a meeting at 9am the same morning.....!