Kising'a Time

Kising'a is 8 or 9 hours ahead of us depending on where we are with daylight savings time. Near the equator every day is about 12 hours long all year with the sun setting around 6 PM so they do not need to shift their clocks. In a village with no electricity, this means the only light in the evening is a dim and smelly kerosene lamp which is very hard to study or even eat by. Because the sun always rises around 6 in the morning and sets around 6 in the evening, Swahili time starts the day at our 6 AM and calls that 12. If you ask a Tanzanian what time the store opens, they might say moja, one in Swahili, meaning that the store opens at 1 AM which is 7 AM to us (This really happened to me). This kind of makes sense since the daylight counts hours from 1 to 12. Their clocks are positioned like ours but they read the opposite end of the hour hand to get the current hour. Generally, if they tell you the time in English, it will be our time and in Swahili, it will be Tanzania time. It definitely makes you pause sometimes, but fortunately, they know how we count time and usually use that for us.