My Excellent Adventure

After spending most of my morning with our staff in Ethiopia, I spent the afternoon in search of a projector. This would definitely fall under the category of TIA (This is Africa). When I arrived at customs the sent my bags through the x-ray and discovered the projector I was bringing for the office. They confiscated it and we were expected to pay duty on it. The only problem was that they did not know how much it cost nor could they find any info in the computer so they sent us on our way and told us to come back today. We came back today to a different office several miles from the airport and they could not find the specific model in the computer so they sent us to the airport to get more info. After about 45 minutes we got to look at the projector. We wrote down every number we could find and took them back to the other office (did I mention the office was several miles away? After another 45 minutes, we finally got a price of $500. We were feeling very good about that since the projector cost $700 in the US. We took the paper work back to the airport and presented them to the customs officer to see how much duty we would have to pay. The customs officer informed us that it would cost us $450 to get the projector! But it would only cost $20 to bring it back to the US, so guess what will be making the return trip to the US with me?