SAMOANS WILL never get to see December 30th, 2011, as the country is going straight from the 29th to the 31st. The Pacific island nation is crossing the International Date Line and moving its time zone forward 24 hours to boost trade with its neighbours in Australia and New Zealand.
Currently Samoa is the last country to see the sun set each day, but crossing the dateline will make it the first to see the sun rise.
At the moment, Samoa is 10 hours behind Irish time. Tomorrow it will be 14 hours ahead of Ireland. Of more importance, though, it will be one hour ahead of New Zealand and three ahead of the east coast of Australia.
“In doing business with New Zealand and Australia, we’re losing out on two working days a week,” prime minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi has said.
“While it’s Friday here, it’s Saturday in New Zealand and when we’re at church Sunday, theyre already conducting business in Sydney and Brisbane.”
There will be a speech by Mr Malielegaoi, as well as carols and prayers in the deeply religious country, as it moves from Thursday straight into Saturday.
Some Seventh Day Adventists, who make up 3.5 per cent of Samoa’s population of 179,000, are not happy there will only be six days in this week. “God won’t accept that we simply erase a day out of the calendar,” one Adventist, Noeline Cutts, wrote in the Samoa Observer newspaper.
The switch reverses a decision made in 1892 to move to the east of the international dateline because most of Samoa’s trade then was with America and Europe.
The government has told employers they must pay staff for this week’s non-existent Friday, although guests staying in Samoa’s hotels have been assured they will not be expected to pay for the day. Tourism operators are taking advantage of the changeover by offering visitors two New Year’s Eves – on Samoa and on American Samoa, an hour’s flight away.
Travel agent Velma Stambolis told ABC radio most Samoans were coming round to the idea. “I think it should be a big celebration out there when it comes to the wake-up on Saturday morning,” she said.
In 2009 Mr Malielegaoi oversaw the country switching driving from the right side of the road to the left to bring it in line with Australia and New Zealand. His next plan is reportedly to change Samoa’s flag.