Daylight Savings

Who knows how long it would have taken us without the Google Alert on Morocco. That’s how we learned (a week or two beforehand) that on June first, Morocco was setting the clocks ahead an hour for daylight savings. Something so part of the fabric of life in the US. Impossible to forget, with little pictures printed in newspapers reminding everyone to turn forward or turn back the clock. And of course, so much of it is automated, with computers updating the time without being asked.

But daylight savings in Morocco is new (it was tried and scrapped back in the 70s), and while it was done to conserve energy, it was not well publicized for English speaking expats. At dinner the night before six of us debated when it began, and while everyone agreed on the date, nobody knew the hour. We weren’t alone. The rapid decision meant airlines weren’t notified. Our friend Akio arrived from Los Angeles via Frankfurt that night. And while his flight from Frankfurt left on time, he was surprised to find that he was an hour late upon arrival.

Looking on the internet, we continued to see the old time listed for days, and today a search for daylight savings in Morocco produces more sites that say it doesn’t exist than say it does. We hear that at the end of September the Government will assess the experiment and decide whether or not to continue daylight savings. Until then, it continues to be a topic of interest. Prayer times are noted relative to the sun, not the clock, so the first call is now a little before 5 am instead of a little before 4 O’clock, and the last prayer isn’t till after 10pm. People are already looking ahead to Ramadan in September. While the overall daylight won’t be changed, the end of daylight will come later according to the clock. Will this make Ramadan harder? It doesn’t make sense to us, but then we won’t be fasting.

We were surprised to find that two weeks into the new time, there are holdouts. Hamoud went to a 2 O’clock meeting with a carpenter who was going to build us a few shelves for the factory, only to be told by the man’s assistant that he wasn’t there. “He’ll be here in an hour,” the assistant offered. “But our meeting is at 2 O’clock,” Hamoud countered. The assistant wiped a little sawdust off the table and laughed. “He still keeps the old time, and by the old time 2 O’clock is in one hour.”