11 ms·

Shipping a laptop to a refugee camp in Uganda

701 points by lexandstuff 4mo ago

robocat 4mo ago
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.
- dullcrisp 4mo ago
  I’m glad it basically worked out but damn do we take free next-day delivery for granted.
nxobject 4mo ago
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."
- benatkin 4mo ago
  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.
217 4mo ago
reading this article while listening to billie eilish made me feel something i've never felt before, what a blogpost
prepend 4mo ago
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.
- Aachen 4mo ago
  > 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
- skydhash 4mo ago
  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.
sulam 4mo ago
Django has strong honey badger energy!
xp84 4mo ago
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.
- afh1 4mo ago
  All governments. And if you bypass their abuse, you're a "smuggler", shamed on by the press.
- foxygen 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  - oceanhaiyang 4mo ago
    What does this reddit-esque whataboutism add..?
    - MArgentinaGA 4mo ago
      [flagged]
    - ajsnigrutin 4mo ago
      EU just implemented a new customs tax law that will be coming to member states on july 1st. Until now, items below 150eur (bought by private citizens) were not a subject to customs, and some time ago not even for VAT if below 22eur. From july 1st, it's becoming painful, in slovenia for example, 3eur per TARIC code + customs fee + vat. So, for example you go on alixpress, you buy a silicone phone case for 1eur, a screen protector/foil for 1eur, a phone "sock" for 1eur and a stylus for 1 eur (+whatever shipping, often free). A few years ago, you'd pay 4eur and get the package. Then they implemented IOSS, so aliexpress has to report the 4eur order to EU, and they charge you 22% VAT on that, so you'd pay 4.88eur directly to aliexpress and they'd pay the tax. Ok, a bit more expensive but doable, unless you want to go outside of eu and order the stuff there and just bring it in with you. And now? Since they're 4 different items, that's 4 TARIC codes, and that's 3eur per each separate item, so that makes 4eur for items themselves, 4x3eur for customs (16eur together with the item price), then you pay VAT on the full price (including customs!), that makes it 19.52eur + whatever the post office decides to charge for "processing" (used to be ~4-5euros, but usually avoided by aliexpress shippers). So, instead of 4euros, you'll pay 20-25euros for the same thing, the government taking 20 euros of tax on 4euros of items (even less total worth, aliexpress + chinese shipping has to earn their share too). I mean sure, they want you to buy locally from dropshippers, but it's still cheaper than that, or from amazon, which will probably be the biggest winner here, and it's not even a european company.
dvduval 4mo ago
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.
- Imustaskforhelp 4mo ago
  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
  - Imustaskforhelp 4mo ago
    https://archive.org/details/img-20260523060043 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
arjie 4mo ago
Really makes you appreciate infrastructure. Great story. Maybe one day everyone will have Zipline style drones that can drop off stuff anywhere.
WatchdogReset 4mo ago
I have old electronics, including macbook that I would like to give is there a way or an assiociation to know how ?
- oceanhaiyang 4mo ago
  You could also try your local schools as well. Many children have no access to one.
  - WatchdogReset 4mo ago
    I will, good idea !
- NicuCalcea 4mo ago
  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.
  - codeforafrica 4mo ago
    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?
picsao 4mo ago
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oceanhaiyang 4mo ago
Really like how Django writes his response. Well written and very polite. Feels like I only see that sort of genuine writing from penpals
0xAstro 4mo ago
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wildzzz 4mo ago
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.
- lexandstuff 4mo ago
  ~$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.
  - oefrha 4mo ago
    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?
fvdessen 4mo ago
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.
- margalabargala 4mo ago
  > 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.
  - seany 4mo ago
    On the plus side that kind of thing is getting more and more "printable"
- solidasparagus 4mo ago
  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.
  - fvdessen 4mo ago
    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.
jojobas 4mo ago
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.
infamousclyde 4mo ago
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.
solidasparagus 4mo ago
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.
- komali2 4mo ago
  Can you please expand what you mean? It's not clear how money would have solved this problem better.
  - nautikos1 4mo ago
    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.
    - deleted 4mo ago
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    - gizajob 4mo ago
      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.
  - solidasparagus 4mo ago
    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.
RomanPushkin 4mo ago
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.
komali2 4mo ago
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.
- winterrdog 4mo ago
  > 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.
- petesergeant 4mo ago
  “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.
  - nephihaha 4mo ago
    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.
Pay08 4mo ago
What's with the downright brigading?
- geekone 4mo ago
  seems to mostly be one person with multiple accounts, but they are getting rightly buried.
7kmph 4mo ago
Bram Moolenaar tips his hat
jimkleiber 4mo ago
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.
- pseudosaid 4mo ago
  but how would that benefit those in government?
  - Hnrobert42 4mo ago
    More to steal?
    - pjscott 4mo ago
      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.)
      - pseudosaid 4mo ago
        its usually those with financial interests and objectives simply corrupt politicians to legislate their way into reality. politicians serve the highest bidder
    - Ray20 4mo ago
      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.
- codeforafrica 4mo ago
  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.
motohagiography 4mo ago
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.
juancn 4mo ago
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.
mchl-mumo 4mo ago
I wonder how much the laptop costs in a Ugandan store
y-curious 4mo ago
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?
ahaucnx 4mo ago
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dbgrman 4mo ago
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.
- takipsizad 4mo ago
  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
imadierich 4mo ago
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throwaway85825 4mo ago
I recommend the documentary "Empire of Dust" if you would like learn more about the difficulties of doing business in africa.
- chrisvenum 4mo ago
  I just started watching this after seeing your comment. Great recommendation, extremely interesting.
  - Aachen 4mo ago
    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
    - throwaway85825 4mo ago
      Full thing is on youtube. https://youtube.com/watch?v=kOkrYW3vF0o https://youtube.com/watch?v=kOkrYW3vF0o
      - Aachen 4mo ago
        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
        em-bee 4mo ago
        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.
iririririr 4mo ago
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.
ckemere 4mo ago
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…
- pjc50 4mo ago
  There's an important difference between tax (predictable, evenly applied) and corruption (uneven, unpredictable, and doesn't go to the government but individuals)
eeelll404 4mo ago
Holy crap what a read. I now feel grateful for some of the luxuries that I have taken for granted in our lives haha.
Uptrenda 4mo ago
we should give refugees golden ipods
atmosx 4mo ago
> 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.
ktpsns 4mo ago
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.
- scarier 4mo ago
  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).
  - sammy2255 4mo ago
    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
- gucci-on-fleek 4mo ago
  > 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.
throwaway2037 4mo ago
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.
MikeNotThePope 4mo ago
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.
madradavid 4mo ago
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.
- interludead 4mo ago
  From the outside, the "official" shipping route feels like the safest and most obvious option
- user_7832 4mo ago
  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.)
  - oncallthrow 4mo ago
    It’s “trope”, not “troupe”
    - fsckboy 4mo ago
      it's mostly actors who traffic in tropes, and also actors who travel in troupes... coincidence? i think not
perbu 4mo ago
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.
hacker_88 4mo ago
Western way of problem solving . Still remember OLPC (ONE LAPTOP LER CHILD). China would have 50$ laptops for all.
brador 4mo ago
What is appropriate compensation for someone handling a bar of gold? Some could argue corruption is an attempt to equalise on that.
- Aachen 4mo ago
  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.
  - brador 4mo ago
    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.
seblon 4mo ago
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.
liotier 4mo ago
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 !
- petertodd 4mo ago
  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!
jarek83 4mo ago
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.
- 71bw 4mo ago
  What did you use to ship the laptop?
bhartipoddar 4mo ago
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
rock_artist 4mo ago
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.
fleroviumna 4mo ago
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interludead 4mo ago
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xzp12138 4mo ago
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wolfi1 4mo ago
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
asdefghyk 4mo ago
Why not put a tracking device in it?
lesser-shadow 4mo ago
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deno 4mo ago
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/documents/lithium-batteries-quick-reference-guide.pdf https://auspost.com.au/content/dam/auspost_corp/media/docume...
haritha-j 4mo ago
Django has a certain determination that will take him far in life. As do you OP. Kudos.
ardev111 4mo ago
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deleted 4mo ago
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prmoustache 4mo ago
Next time sell your laptop locally and order one on ugandan apple (or third party) store.
samrivera 4mo ago
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alexb87 4mo ago
Next time, just him some money
alexb87 4mo ago
Next time, just give him some money
- cindyllm 4mo ago
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mystraline 4mo ago
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.
- cindyllm 4mo ago
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- dennis_jeeves2 4mo ago
  >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.
ProofHouse 4mo ago
Fantastic! Now get to changing the world Django!!
mdnahas 4mo ago
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.

701 points by lexandstuff 4mo ago

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.

dullcrisp 4mo ago
I’m glad it basically worked out but damn do we take free next-day delivery for granted.

nxobject 4mo ago

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."

benatkin 4mo ago
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.

217 4mo ago

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

prepend 4mo ago

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.

Aachen 4mo ago
> 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
skydhash 4mo ago
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.

sulam 4mo ago

Django has strong honey badger energy!

xp84 4mo ago

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.

afh1 4mo ago
All governments. And if you bypass their abuse, you're a "smuggler", shamed on by the press.
foxygen 4mo ago
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- oceanhaiyang 4mo ago
  What does this reddit-esque whataboutism add..?
  - MArgentinaGA 4mo ago
    [flagged]
  - ajsnigrutin 4mo ago
    EU just implemented a new customs tax law that will be coming to member states on july 1st. Until now, items below 150eur (bought by private citizens) were not a subject to customs, and some time ago not even for VAT if below 22eur. From july 1st, it's becoming painful, in slovenia for example, 3eur per TARIC code + customs fee + vat. So, for example you go on alixpress, you buy a silicone phone case for 1eur, a screen protector/foil for 1eur, a phone "sock" for 1eur and a stylus for 1 eur (+whatever shipping, often free). A few years ago, you'd pay 4eur and get the package. Then they implemented IOSS, so aliexpress has to report the 4eur order to EU, and they charge you 22% VAT on that, so you'd pay 4.88eur directly to aliexpress and they'd pay the tax. Ok, a bit more expensive but doable, unless you want to go outside of eu and order the stuff there and just bring it in with you. And now? Since they're 4 different items, that's 4 TARIC codes, and that's 3eur per each separate item, so that makes 4eur for items themselves, 4x3eur for customs (16eur together with the item price), then you pay VAT on the full price (including customs!), that makes it 19.52eur + whatever the post office decides to charge for "processing" (used to be ~4-5euros, but usually avoided by aliexpress shippers). So, instead of 4euros, you'll pay 20-25euros for the same thing, the government taking 20 euros of tax on 4euros of items (even less total worth, aliexpress + chinese shipping has to earn their share too). I mean sure, they want you to buy locally from dropshippers, but it's still cheaper than that, or from amazon, which will probably be the biggest winner here, and it's not even a european company.

dvduval 4mo ago

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.

Imustaskforhelp 4mo ago
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
- Imustaskforhelp 4mo ago
  https://archive.org/details/img-20260523060043 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

arjie 4mo ago

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

WatchdogReset 4mo ago

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

oceanhaiyang 4mo ago
You could also try your local schools as well. Many children have no access to one.
- WatchdogReset 4mo ago
  I will, good idea !
NicuCalcea 4mo ago
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.
- codeforafrica 4mo ago
  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?

picsao 4mo ago

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oceanhaiyang 4mo ago

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

0xAstro 4mo ago

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wildzzz 4mo ago

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.

lexandstuff 4mo ago
~$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.
- oefrha 4mo ago
  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?

fvdessen 4mo ago

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.

margalabargala 4mo ago
> 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.
- seany 4mo ago
  On the plus side that kind of thing is getting more and more "printable"
solidasparagus 4mo ago
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.
- fvdessen 4mo ago
  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.

jojobas 4mo ago

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.

infamousclyde 4mo ago

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.

solidasparagus 4mo ago

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.

komali2 4mo ago
Can you please expand what you mean? It's not clear how money would have solved this problem better.
- nautikos1 4mo ago
  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.
  - deleted 4mo ago
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  - gizajob 4mo ago
    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.
- solidasparagus 4mo ago
  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.

RomanPushkin 4mo ago

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.

komali2 4mo ago

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.

winterrdog 4mo ago
> 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.
petesergeant 4mo ago
“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.
- nephihaha 4mo ago
  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.

Pay08 4mo ago

What's with the downright brigading?

geekone 4mo ago
seems to mostly be one person with multiple accounts, but they are getting rightly buried.

7kmph 4mo ago

Bram Moolenaar tips his hat

jimkleiber 4mo ago

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.

pseudosaid 4mo ago
but how would that benefit those in government?
- Hnrobert42 4mo ago
  More to steal?
  - pjscott 4mo ago
    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.)
    - pseudosaid 4mo ago
      its usually those with financial interests and objectives simply corrupt politicians to legislate their way into reality. politicians serve the highest bidder
  - Ray20 4mo ago
    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.
codeforafrica 4mo ago
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.

motohagiography 4mo ago

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.

juancn 4mo ago

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.

mchl-mumo 4mo ago

I wonder how much the laptop costs in a Ugandan store

y-curious 4mo ago

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?

ahaucnx 4mo ago

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dbgrman 4mo ago

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.

takipsizad 4mo ago
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

imadierich 4mo ago

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throwaway85825 4mo ago

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

chrisvenum 4mo ago
I just started watching this after seeing your comment. Great recommendation, extremely interesting.
- Aachen 4mo ago
  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
  - throwaway85825 4mo ago
    Full thing is on youtube. https://youtube.com/watch?v=kOkrYW3vF0o https://youtube.com/watch?v=kOkrYW3vF0o
    - Aachen 4mo ago
      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
      - em-bee 4mo ago
        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.

iririririr 4mo ago

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.

ckemere 4mo ago

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…

pjc50 4mo ago
There's an important difference between tax (predictable, evenly applied) and corruption (uneven, unpredictable, and doesn't go to the government but individuals)

eeelll404 4mo ago

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

Uptrenda 4mo ago

we should give refugees golden ipods

atmosx 4mo ago

> 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.

ktpsns 4mo ago

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.

scarier 4mo ago
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).
- sammy2255 4mo ago
  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
gucci-on-fleek 4mo ago
> 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.

throwaway2037 4mo ago

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.

MikeNotThePope 4mo ago

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.

madradavid 4mo ago

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.

interludead 4mo ago
From the outside, the "official" shipping route feels like the safest and most obvious option
user_7832 4mo ago
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.)
- oncallthrow 4mo ago
  It’s “trope”, not “troupe”
  - fsckboy 4mo ago
    it's mostly actors who traffic in tropes, and also actors who travel in troupes... coincidence? i think not

perbu 4mo ago

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.

hacker_88 4mo ago

Western way of problem solving . Still remember OLPC (ONE LAPTOP LER CHILD). China would have 50$ laptops for all.

brador 4mo ago

What is appropriate compensation for someone handling a bar of gold? Some could argue corruption is an attempt to equalise on that.

Aachen 4mo ago
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.
- brador 4mo ago
  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.

seblon 4mo ago

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.

liotier 4mo ago

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 !

petertodd 4mo ago
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!

jarek83 4mo ago

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.

71bw 4mo ago
What did you use to ship the laptop?

bhartipoddar 4mo ago

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

rock_artist 4mo ago

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.

fleroviumna 4mo ago

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interludead 4mo ago

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xzp12138 4mo ago

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wolfi1 4mo ago

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

asdefghyk 4mo ago

Why not put a tracking device in it?

lesser-shadow 4mo ago

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deno 4mo ago

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/documents/lithium-batteries-quick-reference-guide.pdf https://auspost.com.au/content/dam/auspost_corp/media/docume...

haritha-j 4mo ago

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

ardev111 4mo ago

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deleted 4mo ago

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prmoustache 4mo ago

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

samrivera 4mo ago

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alexb87 4mo ago

Next time, just him some money

alexb87 4mo ago

Next time, just give him some money

cindyllm 4mo ago
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mystraline 4mo ago

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.

cindyllm 4mo ago
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dennis_jeeves2 4mo ago
>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.

ProofHouse 4mo ago

Fantastic! Now get to changing the world Django!!

mdnahas 4mo ago

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.