<< Rewind: Daylight Saving What!?

Who would have thought that such a simple and routine procedure (as far as most Americans are concerned) could cause me so much strife and confusion!? I couldn’t believe it; people all over the continent were knowingly changing the time on every clock in sight, setting then back by one hour, A WHOLE HOUR! I was in utter and total disbelief.
Now you have to take into consideration that I come from a country that is dissected into two roughly equal parts by the equator. Consequently, year in year out, season after season, the sun rises at roughly 7am and sets at 7pm. Its like clock work! (Pun intended). When you have lived all your life in such an environment, the time on your watch or wall clock becomes one of those universal constant that no mere mortal has the right to tamper with lest he or she run the risk of upsetting the delicate balance of the universe. Like gravity and the polar coordinates, time and its consistency becomes one of those factors that hold the world together and no one would ever dream of tampering with it on the scale of what I was soon to observe courtesy of my first encounter with ‘daylight saving time’.
You may be wondering at this point whether we don’t even have times zones in my country, and if you are, the simple answer is ‘No’, for reasons I will soon make plain. Kenya is a country situated on the east coast of the continent of Africa bordered by Ethiopia, and Sudan to the North, Uganda and the Lake Victoria (Source of the Nile to the West), Tanzania to the South and the Indian Ocean and Somalia to the East. Despite having a section of the Great Rift Valley, the Serengeti and Mt. Kilimajaro (Africa’s highest Mountain) in it, it is still quite significantly smaller than Texas! Hence the entire country is in a single time zone. This only serves to further inculcate Kenyans with the notion of time being forever constant.
It is no surprise therefore that I was utterly flabbergasted when I heard that I was required to partake in this ritual of ‘daylight saving’ along with others who seamed a whole lot more comfortable with the exercise. Thousands of questions that seem absurd, even to me these few months later, were running through my mind and my confusion seemed to grow exponentially with every new one. ‘How dare they change time?’, ‘What if we forget to change it back?’ If we are gonna change it back anyway, why not just leave it as it is?’, ‘What difference does it really make if everyone knows that it’s 9 o’clock but we are going to call it 10 o’clock for a couple of months!?’. I was at a loss and panic was quickly setting in. The library closing one hour early was the straw the broke the camels back, I had enough of this. Indignant, I mused that a terrible injustice had been done to respecters of time the world over and as I sullenly sauntered back towards my dorm room, assured myself that it would not go unpunished.
I was mildly amused when I woke up the following morning to find that the universe indeed had not collapsed in on itself as I slept, there had not been any major crashes due traffic scheduling conflicts, no one I knew had missed a plane or a first class of the day. Every thing seemed to be run just as it should. Just like clock work!