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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.