LIVING FOR TODAY

A language is often one of the most intimate windows into the values of a culture. Words and phrases are created for those things that are important to a culture and those that lack importance go without a descriptor. For example, the Inuit language has a gazillion different ways to say snow. In Honduras bananas were broken down from the two names we have in English to five names. For cultures that are exceptionally polite, language usually has more courtesies thrown in (e.g. Spanish), while other cultures have languages that get right to the point (e.g., English). In all, a culture describes how it wants to be seen through the language that it speaks.

Tetun, the primary language in Timor-Leste, is an interesting case. The language has no past or future tenses, only a present. To denote that something happened in the past you must say that it happened yesterday, one year ago, or another time descriptive. For example, a literal translation into English might sound like this, “One year ago, I go to the house of my parents.” This may just be a coincidence, but the local culture does seem to be living very much in the present with very little talk of the past, and definitely very little planning for the future. I see this in the locals that I work with. In our work, we had to scale back our weekly plan to a two day play, because we found out, the community could never plan ahead further than the day after tomorrow. Maybe I’m not being fair yet as my language skills are still pretty elementary, but for me the coincidence is striking. Then again, when you don’t have much, and there never is anything to save, would you think about the future, dwell in the past, or just try and get through the present?