Shipping a laptop to a refugee camp in Uganda | Hacker News Reader

Shipping a laptop to a refugee camp in Uganda

notesbylex.com

701 pointslexandstuff255 comments

I am Ugandan.

I've shipped electronics and Laptops for Work quite a bit, and OP is right, the system is broken, it stays this way because a lot of corrupt individuals benefit from this mess. However, OP showed a degree of Hubris here, a mistake lots of us make when dealing with foreign countries, just because it works this way here, so it should work that way in XYZ.

OP would have saved themselves lots of time and money if they'd asked Django what the best way to get that laptop shipped to them was. Lots of Ugandans in Austria ship things back daily; they just do it differently, simply hand it to someone travelling back home, there are people travelling back daily, willing to help or just pay a shipping agency a small amount and they'll handle everything.

This is a good act of charity and I applaud OP for that; however, the first mistake they made was Google "How to send a laptop overseas" , a message to Django, asking the best way to get them the laptop would have saved them time and money.

We all fall into this trap of giving people in need what we think they need instead of asking them how best we can help. Local knowledge goes a long way.

All in all, I applaud OP, not many of us would have done this.

For better or worse, "person from 1st world country does what they think helps, based on their worldview - but never asks 3rd world recipient" is unfortunately a very common troupe.

(I'm from a 3rd world country and have seen it over and over again.)

It’s “trope”, not “troupe”

it's mostly actors who traffic in tropes, and also actors who travel in troupes... coincidence? i think not

Thanks! I hesitated for a moment when typing but went ahead with (apparently the wrong) spelling.

Sending things is hard, it does not help asking people in who receives the things. You need to speak with someone who has experience sending things in the way you need to do it. Getting a package from China is not the same thing as sending things from China.

I am the first to acknowledge that I know very little of how things works outside my country. The only reasons I know that is with many failures. When I lived abroad sometimes people feel talked down to when you as an rich outsider tried to understand things. I do not understand the culture or the reasons for things. It did not help asking in because I did not know how to ask the right question.

From another comment, the author did ask the recipient, who also did not know the best way to ship the laptop

I take your point - no doubt I approached this in a very naive way.

That said, we did collaborate on it - at the very least I needed to learn his address before sending.

Neither of us have ever sent or received a package in Uganda. It was a learning experience for both of us.

Crikey, the laptop actually arrived!!!

For me that is absolutely stunning. Dude I would give you a big hug if I could.

While the comments are suggesting this story is about a disaster it feels like a massive feel-good story. I don't think anyone here will understand but there are tears in my eyes right now!

I grew up in Ghana in the 80s and I can pretty much guarantee that a package that looked possibly slightly valuable would no way go more than 2 steps in the postal system then.

I know that was decades ago and Uganda might be completely different but this story is still messing with my head in a way I can't explain.

We have a customer with a business in Uganda, we just give her the laptops and she physically takes them with her next time she goes there.

> However, OP showed a degree of Hubris here, a mistake lots of us make when dealing with foreign countries, just because it works this way here, so it should work that way in XYZ.

Why would you think it's hubris? People know what they know, and extrapolate. If all you've ever known is streets with numbers for each unit being used for giving directions, you'll probably assume it's the standard. So you wouldn't even know to think "hey, do other countries use something else?". So a Costa Rican "300 meters south of where the church used to be" would be a surprise, and you'd only know it if you've been there / researched it / someone told you.

Yhere are things part of your daily life you don't even question why they're like this and if they can be another way or are indeed different in other countries.

While I mostly agree with what you say, the thing is Django was probably asked what was the best way to ship the laptop, but he probably just didn't know :

- he is from neighboring DRC, not Ugandan;

- based on his description of his travels, he lives in the overwhelmed Kyaka II camp, and was probably recently displaced due to the M23 campaign;

- he was probably already enrolled in the course before being displaced, so a young full-time student, probably not even aware of how the system work in his origin country.

My bet is that he just said to ship it to a drop location in Kampala and that he would find a way to get there to retrieve it.

In the end, the Hubris was probably not on OP's side, but on Django's side, thinking he could get a laptop shipped to him while avoiding entirely the camp's organization. Although he did manage it after all...

It sounds less like arrogance and more like both sides trying to improvise with incomplete information

Well, it was more for the overconfidence meaning than the arrogance one.

From the outside, the "official" shipping route feels like the safest and most obvious option

Just want to note that OP was in Australia, not Austria, but the broader point stands that it can be helpful to ask foreigners what they need rather than assuming your norms will translate over.

And yet, this was still a very generous gift and perhaps even greater value in sharing the experience and starting these discussions

On the other hand, sometimes the naive approach does work. I bought something from a Ukrainian via Kickstarter, and expected that some sort of difficulty would emerge, but no, it did not. From the tracking information, it appears that from his location, it was handed over to the Post, and it went through the usual steps to me in California.

In fact there was one unusual event, compared to my daily experience, which was an event that blew the windows of his shop. So he divided his works across multiple locations for geographical diversity and carried on.

Two main takeaways:

1. Never underestimate developing countries' governments' willingness to absolutely bend their people over to extract tax revenue (and then their corrupt representatives extract bribes on top of it)

2. Django's gratitude and positivity in the face of all of it is an inspiration. I suspect I and most everyone I know would be in tears and would have given up in exasperation halfway through his quest. We are so spoiled in the West.

In regard to number 1, it really is such a hard problem to get money and aid to those that need it. Autocrats and every person with power along the way is happy to pocket it.

It seems like GiveDirectly has figured it out somehow?

> 1. Never underestimate developing countries' governments' willingness to absolutely bend their people over to extract tax revenue (and then their corrupt representatives extract bribes on top of it)

As a Brazilian with a love for electronics and DIY, I feel this pain every day.

the 80% tax on electronics since the 80s was because brazil had a few chip foundries.

two of them started cloning cpus designs (8080 and 68k iirc). they sold well all over the (1st and 2nd) world (still no local market). until one company did a publicity stunt lying they had a full mac clone (it was an actual mac, but they did have something else).

then apple and others pressured the US state department, which pressured the brazilian gov with tarifs on oranges (most of the new elite created in the millitary coups were now big land owners and orange was the cash crop). They were so afraid of the tarifs that they closed both factories as requested, and added the import tax as a good will gesture on top!

and many (30%) brazilians today think another military coup will sort things out

I was going to snidely ask what Argentina's excuse was for its import tax on electronics, but it's been a decade since I lived there, and it appears they dropped the tariff to zero at the start of this year (2026). Really, talk about holding your economy back for the wrong reasons: Making it wildly expensive for people to get the tools they need to bring money into the local economy. Besides, all it did was open a black market.

Did you guys got your eletronics from Paraguay too?

I wish we replace this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_the_Duke_of_Caxias with a statue of a smuggler bringing computers from paraguay (they where sold two streets down this statue). It is much more heroic and positive outcome symbol to the country than some old military nobody on a horse.

Haha that's not a bad idea for a statue ;)

I'm a US citizen so it wasn't that bad for me unless I needed replacement parts without physically traveling to get them. We would just trade gifts of laptops with people when anyone was going to the US, but nothing in new packaging. At that time IIRC there was a $500 limit on how much Argentines could spend on a bank card outside the country for the entirety of a trip abroad, and obviously cash controls to prevent taking cash out and import controls on anything you brought in. The normal pattern for rich Argentines was to go to Miami and open a US bank account, then use that to buy stuff and bring it into the country in your suitcase. Fueling that US bank account was where things got very interesting (and also was the best use case I've seen for cryptocurrency, where someone in BsAs would take your cash, buy local Bitcoin with it, send the Bitcoin to their partner in Miami, who would change it to USD and deposit it in your bank account there). It was a clever economy.

Heh, Northern Spaniards as me would have a longass trip to Andorra to get tax-free devices. And some people in the Castilles/Galicia did the same... in Portugal.

I've never been to Andorra but it seems very strange, like a few streets shopping mall / free trade zone?? I've heard from Spaniards about going there and they said it's not a good place to go on vacation lol

It was a place to get cheap electronics, tobaco and alcohol because of being a tax haven. OFC it was forbidden to get an amount of goods over an X quantity because you could have been fined as a smuggler.

Forgive me, I'm unclear on one thing -- the import tax was added as a goodwill gesture? To whom? I mean, who was this done to placate? Not the US companies, and not the closed factories, right?

to whoever asked the foundries gone. this ensured brazil never had a chip foundry again.

“Never underestimate developing countries' governments' willingness to absolutely bend their people over to extract tax revenue” Democratic Party city and state governments in the US: “HOLD MY BEER”

Sources:

1. Virginia Democratic governor less than 24 hours after becoming governor: https://factually.co/fact-checks/politics/virginia-new-gover...

2: Seattle collectivist “my parents still pay for my cell plan since I have never had a real job” mayor: https://townhall.com/tipsheet/amy-curtis/2025/11/14/seattle-...

3: NY new socialist wannabe Palestinian liberator mayor: https://nypost.com/2026/04/10/us-news/mamdani-pushed-combine...

4: California “I hate liars” liar and “Free 10x cost Diapers for everyone” Newsom government proposals: https://nypost.com/2026/02/12/us-news/californians-have-just...

All governments.

And if you bypass their abuse, you're a "smuggler", shamed on by the press.

This is unfortunately also one of the biggest problems with donating to NGOs that operate in many foreign countries. Much of the aid money gets stolen by corrupt officials and local criminals. Donors have to check carefully that NGOs are legitimately benefiting the intended recipients.

If the implication is true…

Shouldn’t people stop helping further entrench these shady practices?

If Ugandan decision makers know the people will effectively always be underwritten to receive some bread and water… no matter what happens…

Then what exactly is stopping them from piling on more and more nonsense?

The boundary on this is kind of fuzzy. You obviously wouldn't donate if 100% of it was stolen, but also if you wait until the world is in a perfected state before helping anyone you'll never help anyone.

Better 20% of your money reaches a starving child than 0%.

You have no way to know its higher than zero though

There are many ways of knowing if you actually want to find out. Third party auditors, evaluations, reputation… just… reading reports and looking at evidence of field work.

Too many people use this as an excuse to throw up their hands and say “well I guess I have no choice but to keep all my money for myself and donate nothing, damn, darn, totally not the conclusion I was secretly hoping to reach, not at all, oh man, damn.”

The same problem applies to auditors and third parties. Unless you join a field audit ultimately you have to trust an opaque party.

If you think corruption cannot go very deep then you may be too trustful.

But you are proving the point of the parent comment:

well I guess I have no choice but to keep all my money for myself and donate nothing

You can't donate without trust. By your reckoning any trust at all is to much trust. So you are saying: Never trust anyone. And you are not wrong.

I am actually following that advice. In general, I never donate money, but, I do donate my time. That is, I rather work less, and earn less money in order to have time to volunteer. That applies double now that I live in Africa. I do support some children that can't afford to go to school. But I know all these children in person. I see how they actually live, and in most cases, I give the money directly to the schools the children go to, because I could not even trust the children or the parents. In most cases that lack of trust was unnecessary, but in at least one case it turned out to be warranted. That child is not getting help from me anymore.

Now, once I started to ask people to help me supporting the children here, it became clear that anyone helping me has no way of verifying how the money is used. They have to trust me. And not only do they have to trust that the money goes to the children's school expenses but also that these children actually need the money. It is to easy to build up a narrative on how poor everyone here is. and unfortunately the whole charity industry (or however you want to call that) is built on those narratives.

That's one reason why I came here. To find out what is the actual reality. What is the truth. And, ultimately, what is really the best way to help. I don't know the answer yet.

My interim conclusion so far is to invest, buy, bring money into the local economy, ever which way. Most of it will not go to the neediest. But, actually, I believe only helping the neediest is not going to move the needle anyways. Sending money to the neediest will allow them to buy food, but sending money to the government will allow it to build infrastructure which will also benefit the neediest because it may give them access to clean water, electricity, internet, streets, which for example make it easier for those children to go to school.

People talk about the trickle-down effect, and how it does not work. But that's not what I mean here. At least not directly. The trickle-down effect assumes that giving money to the rich automatically leads to actions that benefit the poor. That's obviously not the case. What I mean is to actively invest into things that benefit everyone, including the poor, and give money to those who are building those things. That in turn is also easier to verify than any charity that helps individuals which you can not track.

That's my theory for now. Over time I hope I will learn more get a better understanding. I am unfortunately not in the position to make any investments myself, to test if my guess here is true. But I will keep observing and and learning, and I'll share what I learn in the comments here.

Honestly, even if you join the field audit - who's to say they didn't plan everything in advance and that these aren't all crisis actors?

Who's to say they didn't drug you, and you performed the "field audit" on a psychedelic trip from within a padded cell controlled by the nefarious cabal of do-gooders?

Frankly, if you believe your own eyes and ears aren't lying to you, you may be a touch naive.

You are right, the downvotes people gave this comment are wrong, the replies to you are wrong. Feeding evil in the hopes you will also feed a little good is not only bad morally, but bad practically, bad in a utilitarian calculus, and just dumb.

I don't pretend to have all the answers, but what I've decided works for me personally is supporting a handful of hyper-focused charities that run very lean in terms of western staff and employ local skilled labour.

One example is the Canadian charity One4Another which performs surgeries to reverse some common birth defects in kids and babies in Uganda. They're not trying to feed the world, they're not interfering with the local economy; in fact they're employing doctors and nurses to perform a one-time intervention that changes the life of thousands of kids a year in the catchment area of their facility.

Obviously there are things that a group like this can't do but a massive NGO can, and that's great too, but for what I have to give, I feel very good about the impact per dollar of this.

OP is talking about corrupt officials, not charity workers, so how does "running lean" evade or obviate corruption?

Edit: my point is just that bribery and blackmail aren't the same as Global Northerners treating charities as synecures.

Yes, fair, maybe it doesn't. But I think several factors do work in favour of the smaller organization in terms of it being a smaller target, having the operation based more on local relationships and trust networks, and being accountable for an overall smaller budget— it's harder to ignore 10k in bribes of if it's only half a million or so per year coming in from the west.

Anyway as I say it's not everything but I thought it seemed relevant to the GP post talking about NGOs and charity efficiency.

Which is why, naturally, the American Red Cross is the gold standard for NGO donation efficiency.

They can’t even operate efficiently in the USA was that intended as sarcasm

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-red-cross-raised-...

Please don't be sarcastic here.

No thank you.

Do you mean the ICRC?

You're joking about this right? An old colleague did a lot of work with them and he told me how incredibly corrupt they are and to stay away.

Yeah, they were sarcastic.

Yes, but it's important to note that just because a lot of aid is ineffective doesn't mean it all is. If you want to give to very poor people and be confident most (85%+) actually gets to them I encourage you to take a look at https://www.givedirectly.org/. Full disclosure, I'm an unpaid trustee of the UK sister charity

"much" is an unqualified and unjustified word here. It definitely happens but this would at most affect a tiny fraction of donor money.

Many of the NGOs have strict no-bribery policies, else they would not receive support from bodies like the EU (which is the biggest humanitarian donor on the planet).

In some cases the choice may be between "letting people starve" and "feeding people but the local warlord extracts some benefits" but these are rare and only the worst crisis contexts (think South Sudan, DRC).

>a tiny fraction of donor money.

that is not what happened for example in Gaza. UNRWA sent billions to Gaza where that aid was hijacked by HAMAS, and even when the aid was distributed to people outside of HAMAS, HAMAS directly controlled the distribution of that aid. And i don't see UN operating any different at the other places too.

Or like Rubio said:

https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2025/10/24/unrwa-is-subsidiary-...

"U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio accused the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) of being “a subsidiary of Hamas” "

UNRWA sustains life in Gaza.

HAMAS mostly exists in Gaza.

Therefore UNRWA perhaps sustains HAMAS by delaying the indiscriminate mass murder of Gazans through manmade famine.

I don't really see how this would make UNRWA a subsidiary of HAMAS even if it happened to be true that the existence of HAMAS was predicated on the existence of UNRWA.

In practice, the only way to prevent this aid from reaching HAMAS is to prevent it from reaching anyone in Gaza.

Even if we go with your logic, what you described is HAMAS using Gazans as hostage - HAMAS threatening "the indiscriminate mass murder of Gazans through manmade famine" until the aid is given to and through HAMAS (and by using civilian population that way HAMAS does commit a crime against humanity). In such a case UNRWA at least should have publicly stated the issue and let the UN as a whole to decide. Quietly sending the aid to HAMAS makes UNRWA at minimum an accomplice. Financing a terrorist organization in response to its blackmail is pretty much a crime almost everywhere. And given the number of UNRWA employees being HAMAS members, some even openly participated in Oct 7 attack, it is definitely more than just an accomplice.

>UNRWA sustains life in Gaza.

and that doesn't seem true to me. Looking at pre-war Gaza - it seems that the regular Gazans have existed on their own, not much affected by UNRWA. There were businesses, trade, construction, some worked in Israel. Look at pre-war satellite photos - how much solar panels were on roofs there. I remember some Gazans even started to appear here on HN. And there was HAMAS fed by UNRWA. Removing HAMAS from the equation, there pretty much wouldn't be a need for UNRWA.

Imagine if Putin's war made ordinary Russians (not the top elites) go hungry, and Putin said that any humanitarian aid must go to Kremlin and they'll distribute it. How many people will say "yeah, it's a manmade murder of Russians and we need to give Putin what he wants".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_support_for_Hamas#Use_... (Revision https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Israeli_support_f...)

Debates

Use of Hamas to undermine the Palestinian Authority

In an interview with Israeli journalist, Dan Margalit in December 2012, Netanyahu told Margalit that it was important to keep Hamas strong, as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Netanyahu also added that having two strong rivals, this would lessen pressure on him to negotiate towards a Palestinian state.[10] In an interview with the Israeli Army Radio in August 2019, Ehud Barak, the former Prime Minister of Israel from 1999 to 2001, said that Netanyahu's main strategy is to keep Hamas "alive and kicking" in order to weaken the Palestinian Authority, even at the expense of "abandoning the citizens [of the south]."[41] In an interview with Politico in 2023, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said, "In the last 15 years, Israel did everything to downgrade the Palestinian Authority and to boost Hamas", before adding that "Gaza was on the brink of collapse because they had no resources, they had no money, and the PA refused to give Hamas any money. Bibi saved them. Bibi made a deal with Qatar and they started to move millions and millions of dollars to Gaza."[42]

At a Likud party conference in 2019, Netanyahu said: "Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas ... This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank."[43][44] Netanyahu responded to the accusations of funding and strengthening Hamas by calling them "ridiculous".[45] In an interview with Time in 2024, he denied of giving support to Hamas and said that it was one of "many misquotes" attributed to him.[46]

Gershon Hacohen, former commander of the 7th Armored Brigade and an associate of Netanyahu, said in 2019 in an interview: "Netanyahu's strategy is to prevent the option of two states, so he is turning Hamas into his closest partner. Openly Hamas is an enemy. Covertly, it's an ally."[47][48] Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right lawmaker and finance minister under the Netanyahu government, called the Palestinian Authority a "burden" and Hamas an "asset".[49][50] Allegations of Israeli support for the creation of Hamas

Yuval Diskin, former director of Shin Bet from 2005 to 2011, told Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth in 2013, that "if we look at it over the years, one of the main people contributing to Hamas's strengthening has been Bibi (Benjamin) Netanyahu, since his first term as prime minister."[41][51] In October 2023, former Intelligence Chief of Saudi Arabia, Prince Turki Al-Faisal, accused Israel of "funnelling Qatari money" to Hamas.[52]

On 19 January 2024, Reuters reported that Josep Borrell, the EU foreign policy chief, said while receiving an honorary doctorate from the University of Valladolid that "Israel had financed the creation of Palestinian militant group Hamas, publicly contradicting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who has denied such allegations." and that "Borrell added the only peaceful solution included the creation of a Palestinian state. 'We only believe a two-state solution imposed from the outside would bring peace even though Israel insists on the negative,' he said."[53][54][55] Borrell also described Israel as having "created Hamas", but immediately continued saying that "yes, Hamas was financed by Israel to weaken the Palestinian Authority".[b]

Professor Avner Cohen, publicly acknowledged that "Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel's creation" and that Israel had "encouraged them as a counterweight to ... Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat's Fatah."[61] David Hacham, who worked in Gaza as an Arab affairs expert in the Israeli military in the late 1980s and early 1990s stated, "When I look back at the chain of events, I think we made a mistake. But at the time, nobody thought about the possible results."[62] Similar statements have been made by Yasser Arafat. For example, in an interview with Italian newspaper, Corriere della Sera in December 2001, he referred to Hamas as a "creature of Israel".[63][64] Use of Hamas as a tool to disengage from peace talks

Shlomo Brom [he], retired general and former deputy to Israel's national security adviser, believes that an empowered Hamas helps Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu avoid negotiating over a Palestinian state, suggesting that there is no viable partner for peace talks.[10]

Israeli strategy of splitting the enemy into smaller pieces is a classic military strategy well known for millennia.

The question here is who made Gazans prefer HAMAS over PA? And why would HAMAS and PA be enemies to each other instead of allies?

A polished website and audited reports don't always tell you whether aid is reaching people effectively on the ground

I do some work in Africa and that's not what i've seen. The NGOs have their own separate supply chains and are quite resistant to corrupt officials and local criminals. The problem with NGOs is that they're mostly regular business masquerading as 'aid' and out competing local businesses who dont have access to their infrastructure and subsidies. There's actually much more demand for NGOs from the West than from their recipients. African governments are trying to clamp down on NGOs, but there's a lot of pressure from the west for the status quo.

> We are so spoiled in the West.

This can happen in the West too.

I volunteered at a homeless shelter, and we helped those who had lost everything get important documents like their Social Security card and s state ID, and the bureaucracy was atrocious. Sometimes we literally had to beg a senator's office to help.

At least they didn't ask for bribes, but I wonder if that would've made things easier.

I was once asked to look at some letters by a reasonably fresh immigrant coworker. (He learned the language and found a job in a few months which to me should be all we needed from him) He brought a 1980 style stack of paper 30cm thick and it was all in legalese mixed with gibberish. Apparently some entities missed their deadline, triggered an investigation and a fine in a process that also missed it's deadline which triggered a different process looking for someone to blame. Other stuff was going on too, like a half finished immigration process in a different EU country.

I asked another Dutch co-worker to help look at it. We pretty much couldn't make sense of the last letters. No idea what he had to do next. We joked that if we got that much corospondence we would flee the country.

A few months later he moved to Canada.

> Never underestimate developing countries' governments' willingness to absolutely bend their people over to extract tax revenue (and then their corrupt representatives extract bribes on top of it)

being a developing country or not is orthogonal to what you have described. The top developed nations have one or more of these issues.

Man, I am a native Spaniard and even with Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Bilbao and industrial powerhouses we can't compete with furthern North Italy/Germany/Netherlands in some areas, but I've heard horror stories from Latin America that wouldn't happen in Spain without making the news.

Developed countries may have exorbitant taxes and fees, but generally not bribes.

Someone may say "a tax or fee is just a legalized bribe to the state!"

Which, sure, you could look at it that way, but it's codified and predictable and that lack of surprise is extremely valuable.

It’s crazy that it’s magnitudes cheaper for me from the EU to go to a poor country with non existing administration, than the people from there to come to the EU. And magnitudes more convenient. Just to get a passport; for me, it’s a nuance and it basically costs nothing; for a lot of people in those countries, it’s impossible to get one legally, and one costs 100s or 1000s of dollars illegally. And that’s just the passport, not the traveling itself.

To me that doesn't sound crazy, it's just about the fact that even being homeless in Amsterdam or something is a much easier life than what's available to a commoner in a good portion of sub-Saharan Africa. If it was incredibly simple to get a "tourist visa" for people from developing countries, Europe would have even more people just showing up and never leaving than they already do today.

Whatever one thinks about the overall subject of migrants, I think one can at least agree with these two things:

1. We won't fix poverty and corruption in the developing world by everyone there just jumping to the nearest 'rich' country.

2. Once migrants are in the 'rich' country, it's more controversial and difficult to force them to go back home than it is to not enable them to come in the first place.

I agree with the second point especially. What stood out to me was not just that Django endured the bureaucracy, but that he remained grateful and composed through it

>Never underestimate developing countries' governments' willingness to absolutely bend their people over to extract tax revenue

If there is anything characteristic of developing countries’ taxing systems, it would be how short reaching and inadequate it is. Many of these countries’ governments are corrupt, sure, but these small revenue extracting schemes are about the only way they can collect “taxes” at all.

This is not how it works. My partner is Ugandan, we live in France - I'm used to ship to various countries in Africa. Never use the "regular" post - it is just as OP described. Don't use high-end couriers (DHL, Fedex etc.) either - very expensive for scant value added. Do what every local does: use one of the innumerable grey market freight forwarders. One way or the other (for a typical "line haul" example, they entrust extra carry-on luggage to airline passengers remunerated for the service), they get packages to their destination, and they are not even expensive.

They know the thicket of rules and petty fiefdoms, what rules apply and which don't, what to pay and to whom... Regular post just acts as if everything works by the book - and that doesn't fly. Use word-of-mouth to find the good couriers, trawl through your local community of people from the destination country - it is a very common service, so you'll soon find a good provider. Test it with a couple of low-stakes deliveries and you'll have a solid channel.

Meet your guy in a metro station, or find the shop in Barbès that smells like a marketplace across the Mediterranean, hand over your package with the recipient's name, destination city (Addresses ? Where we're going we don't need addresses !), your phone number and the recipient's phone number scrawled on it with a felt-tip marker (make sure they are Whatsapp numbers), pay in cash, don't get a receipt (lol) - and there you go !

Operating in Africa will soon tire you if you attempt to force European ways. Going with the flow (with appropriate caution - a nose for issues, borne from experience, is invaluable) works and makes the experience enjoyable !

I've done some military charity work in Ukraine, getting donations from people in my community and ensuring that money gets turned into vehicles and equipment reaching soldiers that I personally know in Eastern Ukraine. Just a small "hobby" really, not on a big scale; I'm certainly not a charity professional.

On multiple occasions I've shipped things with the Nova Poshta service to units very close to the front line. In some cases they're getting picked up at Nova Poshta shipping outlets so close to the front lines that FPV drones are a genuine risk.

It just works. Nova Poshta has a nice app. There's complete and accurate tracking, you can easily redirect shipments on the fly to different locations and even different people, and they have package lockers everywhere. The staff are very friendly and go above and beyond to help out. I once showed up at a Kyiv branch with four used truck tires covered with mud, without any packaging, and said I needed to get them to a unit in Sloviansk, a town 20kms from the front lines. They handled everything for me for the equivalent of ~$30 and they showed up the next day.

If Ukraine can manage shipping at scale in the middle of a war, WTF is Africa doing? Why do you have to rely on sketchy shit like trusting random airline passengers getting some extra cash on the side? You can't have a modern economy without good shipping services.

I'm reminded of the time I visited both Kyiv and South Africa in Febuary 2024... Cape Town and Johannesburg had more scheduled blackouts than Kyiv, even with Russia actively trying to destroy the electricity grid. The GDP/capita of South Africa is higher than Ukraine!

Technology isn't the problem - African developers produce apps just fine. It isn't even local logistics - addresses are being deployed in major cities, and alternative processes work fine elsewhere. The problem is rule of law, or lack thereof.

Rule of law is critical infrastructure.

Also, South Africa isn't sub-Saharan Africa.

> The problem is rule of law, or lack thereof. Rule of law is critical infrastructure.

I agree 100%

> Also, South Africa isn't sub-Saharan Africa.

Indeed. Which made me even less impressed by my example of power outages. South Africa clearly has a massive political problem with corruption; they have the money and technology to keep the power on.

The details are interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskom#Corruption

South Africa is in Africa and south of the Sahara and usually qualifies.

Culturally it's a mix. There are a bunch of people from black African areas who are culturally African and then a bunch originating from Holland and England who are culturally European. It's changed a bit as to which lot run different things.

Ukraine has put a lot of effort into combating corruption, ans a war going on does tend to focus things. But it is generally true that a situation where 'by the book' doesn't work is corrosive and should generally result in some effort to bring the book and reality back into sync (Generally I think the book should be what's changed, but if bring reality into the light by putting it into the book reveals something unacceptable then that should also be changed).

Nova Poshta is a logistical provider for the gray economy, not exactly an example of doing things by the book. They grew big on internal market in a niche where you aren't exposed to much of the bribing (no customs clearance) and expanded to international shipping when they already had a reputation.

Thank you for your help, I think you already know how much people in Ukraine appreciate it.

But comparing Ukraine and African countries is more like apple and oranges.

Ukraine is by large a European country which culturally is much more similar to Poland or even UK.

Because it was always portrayed in the west as corrupt or insignificant was just more caused by living under soviet or russian shadow than a reality.

Nova Poshta was already an established business well before 2022 war started, but even without it, government-owned Ukrposhta was always rock solid going decades back. Theft was happening ocasionally by workers but at a rate comparable to any other western country. DHL, FedEx was operating also for a very long time and the biggest problem with them was the need to pay the import duty tax on expensive items, which you can avoid when shipping with Ukrposhta.

Nova Poshta is a perfect example of free market doing what it is supposed to do and they even forced the actual state owned post company to get their shit together to compete.

Delivering to frontline towns is on brand for them as much as delivering from Amazon with a proxy address in US. They make things happen

> WTF is Africa doing?

Exactly what Ukraine was doing before the war, only more of it. A mixture of low level corruption, kleptocracy and outright feudalism.

But this process, including sending smaller items first etc sounds like it would have taken longer than what the OP did? And the OP was trying to do it quickly to tie in with the beginning of the semester?

Forwarders work with batches: small batches (consolidate packages in a suitcase to travel as airline luggage) or large batches (up to a whole 40 feet container)... So, delay is a matter of luck - ask around if a batch is due to depart and available slots remain. Express remains the province of traditional players - though I've managed to find a forwarder to urgently ship a small blister of drugs, but such service isn't guaranteed.

It’s funny to me that this is increasingly how packages are delivered in the US, too.

Asking someone who’s going that way already to drop it on their way is inherently efficient in some circumstances.

Once there’s remuneration, it’s not a big jump to making the trip just for that. Add an app and the gig economy is born.

The first day of this new app... half the workers will be arrested after they ended up drugs mules.

Doesn't USPS ship a lot of drugs

This all sounds like really good reasons not to have anything to do with the place.

The best part is how, as per the comment, they are bringing this to the first world.

I help a good friend run a small business in Africa, and this story is exactly why, every time I go visit, I fill my luggage with stuff she needs. Laptops, car engine turbos, espresso machines, fryers, bottles of shampoo, printers, anything. The cheapest and most reliable way to deliver things there is to take a plane yourself and carry the things with you. This whole mess is why, despite being a poor continent, the price of goods is actually much higher than in rich developed countries, which puts a huge brake on the development of the countries.

It is also quite sad that the western NGOs, which all have their own very functional and heavily subsidised delivery channels, keep it to themselves, instead of making it available to the general public and businesses of the countries. Their monopolies on efficient import is weird and counter productive.

> It is also quite sad that the western NGOs, which all have their own very functional and heavily subsidised delivery channels, keep it to themselves

For every dozen people mailing in a laptop, there'll be someone mailing in guns. They don't want that liability. It would damage their ability to do what they do.

On the plus side that kind of thing is getting more and more "printable"

The NGO delivery channels are privileged because they are charitable. That's why they get to bypass the country's restrictions. You can't open that channel up, the country would object at humanitarian exemptions being used as a backdoor for commercial imports.

What I mean is that they should use the standard commercial channels and use their economical and political channels to make sure they work well so that everyone would profit from having working import systems.

The result of this might be NGO money being used to fund inefficiency or even corruption. By maintaining their own channels, the NGOs can be more certain their funds are being used responsibly. It's possible otherwise local government would take it upon themselves to try to bleed these western NGOs.

If you read the article you would know that the problem wasn't finding the money to pay import duties (or the delivermen), the problem was not being allowed to give them the money in the first place and the sheer informality of the logistics infrastructure.

Car engine turbo? Can I get a photo of that packing?

Turbos for typical car engines aren't huge - roughly the size of a medium melon, give or take.

I just find the picture of turbo tucked between shirts and pants in a holiday suitcase hilarious

My question, does Uganda not have used laptops available for sale? At the point where you're about to spend $200 on shipping, why not consider just doing a money order so the guy can find one locally.

Shipping things overseas is such a convoluted process. My wife wanted to send a company Christmas gift bundle (literally just company merch and some candy) to two Filipino employees. One of the workers says that only DHL reliability delivers to her so I help my wife with getting a shipping label. Holy shit, I'm just sending a tshirt, mug, and some pens. Why do I need to list out the contents and their international categories like I'm trying to send a shipping container full of rifles? Also addresses for people living in villages in PI are weird, the address was relative to the town hall. Luckily the other person lived in a gated community with a more familiar address formatting. Finally I figure everything out and she buys the label and pays the tariffs (more expensive than the gifts but it's too late now). Luckily there's a DHL near my work so I go to drop off the two very carefully wrapped packages. Of course she wraps both like an actual gift with cute tissue paper and of course the DHL agent has to open it and inspect it, ruining the care my wife put into the wrapping. Overall the experience was mind boggling bureaucratic. Sending via USPS would likely have been a bit easier but the warning of unreliable local mail was concerning. The next year, she just had the CEO send them an extra bonus instead.

~$200 doesn't go as far as you'd expect for good used laptop, even in Uganda. We did look into our options.

However, there's definitely a sunk cost aspect to the operation. After the first failure to send it through Australia Post, I became determined that Django was going to have that MacBook.

Wait, how the hell can Australia Post charge you the full AUD 111.60 for a failed shipment when it seems to be the fault of the clerk who approved the shipment against their own rules? And sounds like the package didn’t even leave Australia so even if you should pay for the full mileage it would be 20% at most?

Nah, it's the fault of the sender, all the ruled for what you can send are listed and it's up to you to check and respect them.

Seems like it's the fault of the author for blindly trusting AI...

Not really, it this is too be believed

> At the post office, a friendly staff member confirmed it could be sent, helped me package it up securely

It's actually at least half a case of not blindly trusting AI, and pressing until a positive answer is given:

> I asked ChatGPT how to send the laptop, and it gave me a spiel about finding a reliable freight service or courier.

> (Later) I should have listened to ChatGPT.

I couldn't tell if the screenshot was from an LLM or the post office's website. It sure looks like what a post office would say so I'm inclined to think that's not autogenerated. A total ban on anything containing lithium batteries, as the company claimed when returning the shipment, seems wrong as well. We receive laptops from customers for doing pentests all the time, for example. Australians could never order a phone or earbuds that didn't already make it into Australia via another shipping company. Etc. Why'd they forego all that custom? How many electronics nowadays don't have such a battery? This doesn't sound to me like it was only GPT spewing nonsense

But yeah I had the same question: OP said that ChatGPT initially produced words that turned out to be sensible, but not where that later screenshot came from

I am Ugandan, that $200 could have gone a long way buying used locally , case in point https://jiji.ug/central-division/computers-and-laptops/lapto... , a used Macbook pro with some change to spare.

Very interesting, thanks for sharing!

Is that representative of the pricing? 550 000 USh is the equivalent of 145 USD, which is a lot for a 2011 13" MBP with a HD drive! That will be quite slow...

1.5 years ago I sold a 13" 2012 MBP with 500 GB SSD and 8 GB RAM on the used market here in Norway, and I couldn't fetch more than 90 USD... Half the value in the SSD itself?

And a 13" 2015 MBP with 256 GB and 16 GB RAM and new battery(!) I only managed to get 200 USD for, even though I'd tried for months for higher prices

So it seems like there's some market inefficiency here :/

Right, I figured there had to be at least something reliable in the $200AUD. That's about $140USD which won't get you a lot of laptop for that price here in the US but you'll definitely be able to find old MacBooks and Thinkpads that are plenty capable of web browsing, watching HD videos, and completing assignments for an undergrad in Computer Science. In college, that's exactly what I did. I'd buy $100-200USD Thinkpad X-series that were about 5 years old, use them until I couldn't, and then buy another. I'd just swap the SSD to the new Thinkpad and sell the old one, that at least paid for a fresh battery for the new one.

Christians colonized Africa and destroyed their cultures and tribes for not converting and now you send them a Christmas gift to them.

Hope Africans see these Europeans true colors

Egypt, Ethiopia and Eritrea were Christian before most of Europe was. The entire Maghreb was once majority Christian.

The most amazing thing about my travels in Africa, specifically Uganda, is that things I would never expect to work, work. The people are so innovative and resourceful that I think things that would be scams (handing a laptop to a stranger to hold) are pretty common and work.

Also makes me grateful to live in a developed nation where we can take shipping for granted.

> things that would be scams (handing a laptop to a stranger to hold) are pretty common and work.

You don't think the "friend" of this hardware shop owner wanted to see if someone manages to track it down to that holding place before nicking the parcel? Plausible deniability at every step: the shop owner didn't know (might get a cut but you don't know that), the deliverer can say they just didn't have time to come for it and deliver it yet, and only by Django tracking it down, did it make it to him

When laws and contract don’t work well, it’s all about reputation. After a while, everything becomes a network of friends and businesses with reputation to lose.

Long-distance shipping is even a pain in the (so-called) developed world, for instance from Europe to the US. As soon as your shipping value exceeds a treshold (IIRC about 1000€), you have to electronically declare the customs. There are agencies specialized to do this for sth like 20€ per shipping just because it is not reasonable to get all the accounts if you do it only once in a while.

However, in my experience, "ordinary" parcel shipping (like DHL) won't do this shipping either any more: You have to switch to the express ones (like DHL express, UPS, FedEx) even if you don't intend to do any express. The difference is easily 40€ vs 400€ for shipping a shoe box!

If you ship anything slightly larger then a shoe box and slightly more expensive then a notebook, think twice whether you don't want to accompany the freight with a seat in the commodity class in some airplane. It can easily be cheaper.

No kidding. My old company needed to replace an aircraft engine part for a customer in Japan, and it ended up being something like a third of the cost and time to give one of our mechanics essentially a weeklong vacation rather than ship it (as a bonus, he was able to hand carry the broken part back for failure analysis, rather than having to deal with equally expensive and slow return shipping).

An airline pilot told me his only ever engine-failure event was on a flight from Dubai to Beijing, they were over half-way when one of the four engines failed. Company told them to return back to Dubai, logistically they were never going to get a new engine to Beijing

> As soon as your shipping value exceeds a treshold (IIRC about 1000€), you have to electronically declare the customs.

The threshold is zero in my experience. I volunteer with a small non-profit publisher, and last year we shipped a few hundred magazines to Europe but with the wrong customs labels. These are black-and-white technical journals shipped in clear plastic, so even with missing labels, they very obviously have almost zero value.

But because we had the wrong customs labels, about half of them were held at the border and our members had to pay the duties themselves, since it was too late for us to pay them. I think that one member had to pay almost 20€: 0.20€ in VAT, plus 19€ in "fees". We sell the issues for $4.50 each (plus shipping), so it was quite a surprise when we started hearing about how high the fees were.

This isn't due to inexperience either, since we've shipped ~1k copies to Europe every year for over 40 years. But we had just switched shipping providers, and our new provider had just written "magazine" as the label without any further details. For the next shipment, we added a proper customs code and prepaid the duties where possible, and that seems to have solved the problem.

So many characters worthy of an epic story. The last one would be the Good Samaritan, or some sort of elderly sage...

> Before leaving, I asked him whether he even knew what was inside the package.

> He answered very casually that he had no idea and that he did not need to know.

> I then asked whether he at least knew which company had entrusted him with the delivery. He replied that it was simply "a friend" who had asked him to temporarily keep the box until someone came to collect it.

> I switched it on briefly, and that was actually the moment when the hardware shop owner himself suddenly became excited[...] Seeing the Apple logo appear on the screen, he immediately smiled and said something along the lines of, "Ah… a MacBook is a MacBook. Apple is still Apple."

The goodness of the people in the chain make me think that the rider would have had a much greater than 50% chance of following through properly. But it's good that Django decided to further increase the odds by taking matters into his own hands.

I learned the hard way that I couldn't just ship a laptop to myself from the USA to Mexico. I had a nice, new-ish Macbook Pro that I wanted to use sitting in the USA, and the laptop I was using in Mexico was getting old. What I should have done was just fly to the USA to get the nice laptop and then hand carry it back. What I did instead was ship the laptop via Fedex to my address in Mexico. Big mistake.

Fedex informed me that my laptop was stuck in customs. This wasn't a pay-a-fee-and-get-your-stuff kind of stuck. I couldn't pay any amount of money to get the laptop out. I had to find a local import partner which could take weeks or months to do just to get this stupid computer out of customs. And that's assuming they didn't destroy the laptop before I could claim it. There was literally no way for me to just pay some big ol' tax to get the computer.

Eventually I asked if I could have the laptop shipped back to the USA, and they were happy to do this. So I shipped the laptop from the USA to Mexico, from Mexico to a friend's place, and then I bought my frienbd a roundtrip ticket to Mexico to enjoy a vacation on the condition that he brought my damn computer with him.

That's pretty cool. I've also realized that even a small amount of money can solve a lot of problems for someone. I've been helping people in the SF Bay who are fighting cancer by giving them laptops. So far, I've assembled and donated three using parts I already had, and I bought a few more online specifically for this purpose. One more (the fourth) hasn't been given away yet.

It reminded me of when I was a student. I used to repair laptops and resell them. Going through cancer in my family these days, I understand how important it is to help people when you can. It makes you a slightly better person, at least in your own eyes.

I tried to do the same from USA to Turkey. Can't ship lithium. So my brother took the laptop to Germany, and then shipped it to Ankara.

The laptop was never released from the customs. The Turkish reps were rude and expected bribe and pretended they don't understand english. After few months it was returned back to Germany. My cousins' laptop had a keyboard issue and local shops would not replace it and the HP agents on the ground also didn't want to help.

I've once had the displeasure of having to interact Turkish customs because I got a merch kit from Intel, since it was under 30 Euros (nowadays simplified customs declaration isn't even a thing you have to go the same way as a commercial importer does,which you appear to have gone through, bribery seems to be expected) I didn't deal with Turkish customs directly but the fact that that I had to pay 60% of its value still annoys me to this day. I've also had to decline a second merch kit later because they removed the entire simplified customs declaration thing. I'm also currently trying to obtain SDR which it's market seems to be practically nuked, because of this customs shenanigans

It's pretty much like trying to get something shipped to Argentina, a royal pain in the ass.

The laptop would pay a 50% fee over the (declared value + shipping cost). Couriers will mostly deal with that on send, but if sent through regular mail you need to declare and pay before you get it.

If you didn't include your tax number as part of the address (doesn't matter in which field), there's a non-zero chance that the package will be lost, held indefinitely or returned to sender.

It's great that there are people willing to help even in these conditions.

I admire people that just get shit done: especially in an environment of misdirection.

There's a lot of luck and bad luck in the story.

I’m glad it basically worked out but damn do we take free next-day delivery for granted.

We have a couple co-op members in Uganda and their billing addresses are always distinct. Along the lines of "Behind the Gas Station, SomeCity, Uganda."

They're also extraordinarily good engineers so idk wtf is going on in Uganda. A lot of folks from there come work in Taiwan, I guess the pay and quality of life is better here.

> They're also extraordinarily good engineers so idk wtf is going on in Uganda.

Uganda has no respect for talent. When I was there it looked like most people are just trying to survive the next day, tbh. Because there is no platform to develop their talent. Also Uganda seems to be more focused on agriculture so it gets more incentives than other industries.

But you're right about the talented part, there are a lot of good engineers there but lack the opportunity. Remember meeting one who worked at Boeing in Missouri and he even had a few patents in the aerospace domain.

“Every real dwelling has a distinct address” is very much something you take for granted until you come across counter cases. My Dad had a real, modern, Western house in Kathmandu with no unique address in the early 2000s.

I can think of counter-examples in Europe. The old posties used to understand local addresses, now half of these parcel delivery firms either use Google slop for inaccurate returns or refuse to deliver them.

We tried to ship company-provided laptop from Poland to somewhere in India. After long time the parcel was just simply labelled "gone". And we paid very similar amounts for all the shipping/taxes/clearances. Nice to hear that such stories end well sometimes.

What did you use to ship the laptop?

I wish governments would realize that the more barriers and friction they put between their citizens and good tools, the worse their economy will probably be.

but how would that benefit those in government?

More to steal?

You're right, of course, but "those in government" aren't a single entity. There's always an incentive for one corrupt part of government to take more than their fair share of the loot, and then for the next part to take more, and so on... until their combined cut is over the revenue-maximizing percentage, and they make less than they could have if they had coordinated better.

(I want to call this "the tragedy of the commons," but that phrase doesn't sound quite dark enough.)

its usually those with financial interests and objectives simply corrupt politicians to legislate their way into reality. politicians serve the highest bidder

It's much easier to steal from a small, weak, and inefficient economy. Therefore, the incentives are usually exactly the opposite: to make the economy worse so that it would be easier and safer to engage in corruption.

The average citizen does not have the income to even afford stuff like that. Anyone who is able buy a laptop like that is wealthy by local standards. And in particular anyone importing stuff from outside. And that wealth is being taxed. If they didn't do that then there wouldn't be may people left to tax at all.

Sure, Django here is the exception, but not taxing imports would generally not benefit people like him, but the actually wealthy people who can otherwise afford the tax.

Most economists think that tariffs are not a good way to collect tax, because it distorts incentives far more than e.g. a tax on wealth or property.

> Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi have adopted a three-tiered duty structure for imports from outside the East Africa Customs Union under the terms of the Protocol on the Establishment of the East Africa Customs Union, which became fully operational in January 2010. Most finished products are subject to a 25% duty, while intermediate products face a 10% levy. Raw materials (excluding foodstuffs) and capital goods may still enter duty free. Imported goods are charged a value added tax (VAT) of 18% and a 15% withholding tax, which is not reclaimable. Combined, these taxes effectively charge a 33% tax on all foreign goods and services. Imports are also charged a 1.5% infrastructure tax to finance railway infrastructure development. [0]

"Effectively charge a 33% tax on all foreign goods and services." Not just Macbooks. I don't know if this is the final definitive tally of the tariffs but I believe almost everything has a high tariff, so people effectively pay 33% more for the same goods plus shipping. Fair, can't really get rid of shipping, but a 33% or even a 15% penalty on tools means people get worse tools. Computers, mobile phones, cars, motorcycle helmets, medicines (if imported perhaps?), hammers, fans, showers, whatever tool you might use that is a finished good coming from another country, you pay 15-33% or whatever more, so you get a lower quality product for the money you have. I just would prefer my people get the best deal on the best tools (that we as a country don't think we need to make for security reasons) so people can improve faster. Less smog, better roads, fewer things that break...would be quite nice at all levels.

[0]: www.trade.gov/country-commercial-guides/uganda-import-tariffs

Yes, but it has nothing to do with tax in this case, but bribe. I guess you could say it's still a good thing because if it wasn't for the bribe you simply have no option of getting your goods. But maybe if the bribe didn't exist the network wasn't down for so long in the first place

Really makes you appreciate infrastructure. Great story. Maybe one day everyone will have Zipline style drones that can drop off stuff anywhere.

What a wild story. I hope they can meet one day! This is one of many reasons why these countries stay poor -- it is so hard to follow the byzantine set of rules to do business.

Years ago, during the COVID-19 crisis, I wanted to send a laptop to my domestic helper's son who lived in the countryside of Mindanao (island), the Philippines. It was very difficult. It tooks weeks to find a willing shipper (denied by many!) and find/fill the correct paperwork (many shippers didn't know the correct process and Philippines customs agency was zero help). I still have no idea how he paid the customs fees and received the laptop, as he lived hours away from the only FedEx office on the whole island. I just heard from his mother: "Oh, he got the laptop." As a point of comparison, Mindanao is roughly the twice the size of the Netherlands. At the time, FedEx (the only carrier willing to attempt the delivery) only had a single internal postal code for the whole island. Incredible.

Really like how Django writes his response. Well written and very polite. Feels like I only see that sort of genuine writing from penpals

I worked on an OSS project and we had a volunteer working from Tobago. His computer wasn't working properly so we sent him a new one.

It got smashed by customs. Literally.

I recommend the documentary "Empire of Dust" if you would like learn more about the difficulties of doing business in africa.

I just started watching this after seeing your comment. Great recommendation, extremely interesting.

Where did you find it?

Wikipedia only links IMDB and they have everything from plot info to production company to revenue to screenshots but not the obvious question anyone would have: how to actually watch it

Full thing is on youtube.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=kOkrYW3vF0o

Alas, I read your comment only now that Youtube is shoring up its gatekeeping once again and they require signing up for a Google account to "prove" I'm not a bot :/

Thanks for the link anyhow! I'll store it for when a workaround becomes available, it sounded very interesting

try yt-dlp, it apparently has some workarounds. when i get blocked in the browser, yt-dlp usually still works unless the video requires age verification or is geoblocked.

Lots of complaints about corruption. It’s worth imagining how you would run a very low income developing country. Remittances and tariffs are the easiest items to tax for revenue. I’d love suggestions for better alternatives…

There's an important difference between tax (predictable, evenly applied) and corruption (uneven, unpredictable, and doesn't go to the government but individuals)

This was a great read, and a bit of a break from the noise. Kept me engaged the whole time. You’re a good guy.

> Finally, on May 13th, after ~36,000 km across 12 countries over 42 days, the laptop had arrived.

This is by all means amazing. Kudos.

I know a lady with four children who’s in a refugee camp in Jordan and could really use a laptop. It would allow her to teach language online and maybe get some side jobs and I think it could help her get out of the camp. If anybody has any ideas or wants to send her one please let me know.

I have a really really old laptop (1gb ram intel atom dell inspiron mini which my father had bought back many years ago) which can run tinycorelinux and I also have run modern firefox on it.

Its really small and I am more than happy to ship it to her, please do note that it can't run youtube or the likes but can run python and firefox and pdf browsers.

The battery is interchangable so it can be fixed.

Honestly I would be more than happy to help with these things, wishing nothing but good for her & hope she finds a decent laptop that she needs and hopefully others might chime in too but let me know if you are interested, more than happy to help :-D

I don't want to sound too noble (because I am not) but I was also thinking of going to any nearby orphanage and giving it to them. It can let them play retro games or programming and i was thinking of spending time with them teaching them terminals but I doubt the usefulness of the teaching part as I certainly have so much to learn and I am unsure if it might be the best use case of their time too or something and (this was just a thought which had come, I haven't given too much thought about it but I might have some spare time recently)

Anyways, let me know if there is any help needed, Also I am more than happy to share my servers/vps's that I have with the lady, I have two small vps's of 0.5 gb ram (each for 7$~ish per year)

Anyways this message got long but waiting for your response and have a nice day dude and feel free to mail me if you might need (any) help in (anything)

Edit-1: thinking of just making a small video to showcase to ya what my old laptop is but I think that programming is possible on it. and perhaps it might even help given its tiny and battery upgradable and something which can help her more perhaps

https://archive.org/details/img-20260523060043 (catbox seems to be down for me for some reason so I have uploaded it to archive.org) but I have installed tinycorelinux on my laptop, installed firefox,gnumeric,abiword,micro-editor,python and others but its a fully functioning laptop.

Also, I read other discussions, I am more than happy to help out sending this laptop but I hope somebody looks at the shipping costs as the shipping costs might be magnitude more than the cost of this laptop. Looking forward for discussion if anybody from Africa might need it but yeah, waiting for GP's response and gonna show the laptop to my dad now who had also on one occassion asked me to fix that laptop and uh, I might as well write a blog post about it too running all these apps on it. This laptop can run youtube!! but it does get quite heated tho but I find it incredible that this laptop can run youtube albeit very very slowly, I didn't expect it. It does crash the browser sometimes tho in my testing, I am gonna test it more and share it with my dad! :-D

OK, that’s great, I don’t know the logistics part real well either but I think if we talk to her, we could work everything out. I also don’t know how to contact you but you’ll see if there is a domain name listed in my profile, and if you go to the info address for email on that domain, you can message me there and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. I was just talking to her just now and she said she would love to show her kids and teach them how to use it. She’s been here for I believe 12 years in the camp and came from Syria.

If you're asking about logistics, try reaching out to your country's embassy in Jordan and see if you can get in touch with an aid/development worker. They know how to make things happen.

While spending a year in southern african countries (Uganda included), and befriend few locals and lots of people from UN and pieces of EU bureaucracy (and EU bank GMs), I learned two interesting things:

- even the UN (which pays 1/4 of what the EU pays) cannot ship work laptops to these countries. The either vanish or have to be shipped to very central DHL offices.

- Informal remittance from family members to their communities is exactly the same amount of all the money the country gets from external sources as Aid. e.g. Angola had USD$2bi given by EU and UN. Remitances where the same 2Bi. I don't know if there are mechanisms to keep that this way, but that was the case for all the countries i could get the number that year and the year before.

42 days sound like a long time, but I'm living in Senegal, cassamance. Me also need to wait mostly 5-6 weeks (regular priority, no express). Also, Transport here is via regular public (but private) busses, and to be honest, I never missed a parcel.

In other words, African governments are even more corrupt shitholes.

(Please note: im explicitly saying this about the governments. Not the people. The people, in most/all situations, have little to no power to remove this corruption, other than civil war.)

I really think its the mixture of the Global North, and along with the worst of the worst people is why there isnt an African Union, with African single currency.

Its also the reason im not (cant) buy African products locally. The supply chain is nearly non-existant. I couldnt buy even if I wanted to.

>In other words, African governments are even more corrupt shitholes.

>(Please note: im explicitly saying this about the governments. Not the people. The people, in most/all situations, have little to no power to remove this corruption, other than civil war.)

Often (but not always), even common people are corrupt.

The best part of this story is that every 'official; system failed, but random people kept helping anyway, somehow the human network was more reliable than the shipping network

Looks like he could have bought a used laptop locally for the price you paid for shipping alone.

There are charities that move used electronics to developing countries in bulk somehow.

Bram Moolenaar tips his hat

reading this article while listening to billie eilish made me feel something i've never felt before, what a blogpost

Django has strong honey badger energy!

Western way of problem solving . Still remember OLPC (ONE LAPTOP LER CHILD).

China would have 50$ laptops for all.

Mail and shipping is tedious to begin with. Recently I've sent some hoodies and shirts to colleagues.

Everything is within the EU.

For sending few shirts I ended up paying about EUR20 each just for shipping! (I've wanted to ensure it gets to their house and not a pickup point).

Initially I've went with regular post office, but they've wanted so many documents I've used a 3rd party shipping company.

It always ends with compliance and regulations which shipping companies are being (and charging you) for.

It's crazy that things from china can come at ridiculous price or Amazon in specific region/countries and they 'hacked the system'.

We also had similar headache when my wife forgot her bag (with her work laptop!) on a train to the airport back home while visiting my parents in our home country. The bag was found and my parents took it. but sending it ended up being so complex we eventually found someone kind enough to travel with it. (or you need to have so complex procedures just to explain why it shouldn't be taxed as it's YOUR equipment).

TL;DR - personal shipping is broken. it might be cheaper to visit a friend in Uganda and give him the laptop in person.

I tried to send an SD card loaded with free data (Wikipedia, dictionaries, books, etc.) to a refugee camp in Bangladesh that had no good internet connection. Tried twice with USPS. Neither letter was received.

It’s a great writeup, thank you. I wish there was a better way to send the laptop or source a new one. I wonder, how far does $400AUD go in Uganda? Is that like enough for him to bribe his way out of the refugee camp?

You can pay the customs fees and local taxes yourself if you're shipping with Fedex/UPS, it's just a checkbox if you have an actual account with them.

Also you can certainly ship batteries via UPU network (Australian Post) but there are strict packaging rules you need to follow[1].

You don't really go into any detail as to why they didn't accept your package. Did you attach properly filled out CN23 label?

[1] https://auspost.com.au/content/dam/auspost_corp/media/docume...

remarkable that even without what we would think of as basic infrastructure they can still produce an impoverishing level of bureaucracy. it's like an emergent force of its own.

What is appropriate compensation for someone handling a bar of gold?

Some could argue corruption is an attempt to equalise on that.

Might as well ask how to equalise the cost of letting someone live instead of taking their possessions

The price should be whatever it costs you when including all cost factors¹. A competitive market is an attempt at a system (no central control) to approach that lower bound value. It's really hard to incorporate the million dependencies in a true cost price, so people are instead free to set a price and consumers are free to choose a vendor that's cheaper, and so there's competition. Markets are said to not be working well (lack of competition, usually) if the price of a good or service does not remotely approach the cost price

Bribes are usually to people in power because otherwise you'd just go with the non-corrupt option. That's not a functioning market. I wouldn't say that this type of monopoly is an attempt at determining the fair price for transporting an item of a given mass and dimensions

¹ this really includes everything: to be able to walk across the street and deliver packages, you needed to eat the night before; you needed to learn to read; you need to put money to the side for when you're of age; etc.

Crime is a fundamental part of the free market. Costs for it are currently passed to the collective instead of the individual.

Corruption (tolling, rent seeking, bribery) is part of the free market.

If the sender doesn't like the risk profile of the route to market they should pay a premium and route around it at certain cost or get insurance, else pay up if it is the financially optimal path.

when it comes to shipping to another country ot always becomes unnecesseraliy complicated, agreed in that particular case it went to another level regarding battery and the recipient's status as refugee but if your parcel crosses borderlines you basically always have to deal with bureaucracy

I have old electronics, including macbook that I would like to give is there a way or an assiociation to know how ?

You could also try your local schools as well. Many children have no access to one.

I will, good idea !

I'd wager the most efficient way would be to sell your electronics and donate the proceeds to a local charity that does this at scale and knows its way around local needs and regulations.

When I was a kid in Moldova a couple of decades ago, we had a lot of Americans donating their old stuff (electronics, clothes, shoes, even furniture) thinking they're being super helpful. Just had a quick search and it seems to still be happening to a small degree. It's a nice sentiment and I'm sure it makes people feel like they're making a difference, but economically it makes no sense. The cost of processing and shipping second-hand items is probably not much lower than just giving people money to buy locally, and supporting local businesses while you're at it.

Sort of unrelated, but the funny thing was these donations were often distributed by American missionaries who were using them as a pretext to hand out bibles (or rather just the New Testament). In Moldova, which by some metrics is the most Christian country on the planet after the Vatican. And the bibles were usually in English, a language almost none of us spoke.

Not to say that's necessarily the case for Uganda, but if the OP blog is any indication, they could have bought several second hand laptops for what it cost to ship one.

The lowest price for a working second hand laptop in Uganda is about half a million ugandan shillings, which is about USD130. That gets you a 10 year old second hand model with minimum specs. If you want anything decent, expect to pay at least double. The difficulty of importing and the import taxes are at least part of the reason. In hindsight, sending the money would have saved a lot of trouble, but it would not have gotten him a better laptop than the one he received.

But otherwise you are right. Not only is it not economical, a lot of stuff that is sent to Africa is junk, and that's exactly the reason why Uganda generally does not allow importing of second hand products. On the other hand, i believe second hand imports are the only way to make laptops available at that price range. I don't know how that works though. Maybe they make exceptions for importers that they verify are not importing junk?

Thank you for the answer - I think one the biggest trap is to bring more problem than solution. I am afraid that a some laptops or smartphone that I gave a second life will have almost no value on the second hand market. I will keep offering them locally on market place or charity shops

Thank you for you insight - Probably best is to act locally and or use charity association to be more efficient for other countries. It is sad sometime some people use charity or assiociation to push things that makes the work of the good one even more difficult

Next time sell your laptop locally and order one on ugandan apple (or third party) store.

Django has a certain determination that will take him far in life. As do you OP. Kudos.

I wonder how much the laptop costs in a Ugandan store

What's with the downright brigading?

seems to mostly be one person with multiple accounts, but they are getting rightly buried.

Why not put a tracking device in it?

Next time, just give him some money

Next time, just him some money

we should give refugees golden ipods

Holy crap what a read. I now feel grateful for some of the luxuries that I have taken for granted in our lives haha.

Fantastic! Now get to changing the world Django!!

This is a very western approach to a very Ugandan problem. A trivial amount of money (for a Westerner) could have saved a lot of time and pain.

Can you please expand what you mean? It's not clear how money would have solved this problem better.

Specifically I was talking about this part

> "At some point, one man quietly pulled me aside and suggested that if I "gave something," they could help solve the problem more easily.".

You can pay that fee/bribe and things will go smoothly.

But more generally my thought was that the western idea is that bureaucracy rules are something to be followed and, even if painful, are the path to getting the state to provide the services. In Uganda, it's better to model bureaucracy as a system that exists to enable bribes and following the rules to the letter and expecting state services is fighting the system.

If you want to get goods to someone in Uganda, don't talk to the Australian Post about the rules, talk to a Ugandan importer who knows how to actually work the system that exists in practice.

Caveats about broad brushes of course, but that's the realistic approach IMO.

It was the local, not the Westerner, who refused to pay, right?

It was Django. But he had a very different financial situation. And a potentially fraught one as a refugee and foreigner. I would pay the bribe, but I would try very hard not to put the recipient in a position to have to do so (no criticism to the author).

Django rightly figured out he wasn’t in a hurry and he could just wait it out. The bribe is price discrimination for people who aren’t willing to sit around for a day.

Frankly Django got lucky. It is far more common for import controllers to delay until the costs of delay force you to pay.

>If you want to get goods to someone in Uganda, don't talk to the Australian Post about the rules, talk to a Ugandan importer who knows how to actually work the system that exists in practice.

Well, as it turns out, you also need to have sufficient local knowledge on the sending end to ensure that your parcel actually manages to exit the country in the first place.

I don't think that is a real concern.

I literally have a full time employee whose job consists almost entirely of keeping track of these rules.

I get daily emails saying things like "Shipping synthetic human hair wigs via lines X, Y is now forbidden", "Shipping line Z accepts steel coils again". Much of the time there's no obvious logic behind it either, like ... why does a single shipping line decide to ban plastic wigs?

It would have been easier and cheaper to send money to Django than to send the laptop.

Although, I'd say there is a certain charm in physical gifts.

And a MacBook at that. Not exactly the friendliest machines to experiment on, and yeah you’re right, the $400 could get a windows/linux machine one would think.

Also not sure what a computer scientist is doing plugging 12v into a usb port but maybe that was deeper into the science part than I’ve ever got.

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