Home Comforts -- The B-Sides: Punctuality

“Ahoringa, amigo, ahoringa.”

The above term (pronounced ‘hour-een-ga’) is by some distance the most misused word round these here parts. It means “right now” and is the Benian rendering of the Spanish word “ahorita”.

In the West, we are often guilty of reflecting on Latino-Caribbean culture and thinking to ourselves, “Gosh, wouldn’t it be lovely to live in a society where everyone’s just so darned chilled out!” The chief culprit for the proliferation of such lazy thinking is obvious: Lilt adverts. Yes, there is no doubt that things are somewhat relaxed down here. But you only have to live here for a week or two to work out that a stress-free existence is the last thing that such a culture yields.

By some distance, the worst ‘ahoringa’ offenders are workmen. Here, you have to be very careful who you let into your house, and so, earlier this year, when we’d just moved in the new house and the expected new-home teething problems were surfacing, we lost whole Mondays (our only real day off work here) to the ‘ahoringa’ merchants. The day’s proceedings would go something like this:

8.30am

“Hi there, Javier. Mind I was telling you yesterday that we haven’t had running water in the house for three weeks. You’re still coming this morning, right?” “Ahoringa!”

10.30am

“Hello again. Just wondering if you’re going to come at all today?” “Ahoringa, amigo, ahoringa!”

5pm

“Javier, have you at any point today lost the ability to use your legs?” “Ahoringa!”

Indeed, one of my favourite ‘ahoringa’ buddies, who was meant to come and finish the work on the windows here, never even turned up. If I called him today, I have a funny feeling I know what he’d say.

Alas, this attitude – which, let’s face it, is a point-blank violation of the ninth commandment – is not uncommon in the church. We had a friend who needed a brother in Christ to help them with a motorbike issue and all they got all day long was the ‘ahoringa’ runaround.

To an extent, you get used to it and learn how to work within the lax attitude towards punctuality. The other night, for example, we turned up at a girl’s 15^th birthday party (a big deal in Latin America) three hours later than stated on the invitation, and many guests had still not arrived – took us a few years, and a fair few headache-inducing parties, to work that one out! If you’re a teacher like me, you learn not to turn up to school on the ‘first day of class’ – nay, during the first month – as nothing will have been organised. Instead of waiting for home and car malfunctions, you start anticipating them and calling the relevant people some years beforehand, thus increasing their chances of dealing with the problem on the day they occur.

But one can only hope to work around the chaos, not avoid it altogether. And so, once again living in a culture where people’s clocks perform more of a function than simply having a picture of Jesus in the house is an exciting prospect. Here’s hoping that flight-times, unlike 15^th birthday party invitations, are as advertised.