The Lottery

Whenever you hear or read this word, your mind suggests that this is about money. Yes, in many states within USA an in many countries lottery is either a state, government or privately sponsored game in which millions contribute some amount of money and usually one person becomes rich winning the lottery. Sometime there are more than one winners.

In Georgia, where I live, the lottery known as Georgia Lottery is a popular “game”, which millions of people play every day. This game is available from almost all the gas stations and many grocery stores, or about 8,600 vendors. This was created in 1992 by the state of Georgia by passing the Lottery for Education. So far in the 26 years of its existence Georgia Lottery Corporation has provided scholarships known as Georgia HOPE scholarship program and has benefited more than 1.8 million students. In other words, Georgia Lottery has transferred more than $21 billion to the State Treasury’s Lottery for Education Account. For more details you can visit the website of Georgia Lottery. So, you can see that the Georgia Lottery in a way contributing for education and helping millions of families to pay for their children’s college education, with only one condition that they maintain a GPA of 3.0 or better in the high school and continue to maintain that in the college.

I did not win a Georgia Lottery, but the title of my memoir is The Lottery. If you google “The Lottery by Syed Ahmed”, you will know at how many stores my book is available, and you may think that I must have made a fortune on this book. As a matter of fact, I had published my memoir as “self-published”, and could not even recover the cost of the publication, the printer and the re-sellers have made some profit, but I have not yet made a dime and do not expect to do that, unless somehow it is selected as a required text book in all the educational institutions in any state of USA or in any foreign country.

George H. W. Bush signed the Immigration Act of 1990, which introduced a new visa category called a diversity visa (immigrants under this category would become “diversity immigrants”), popularly known all over the world as a lottery visa, that allowed immigrants from low admittance countries to apply for a permanent resident visa. The basic requirement was a high school diploma, at least two years of job training, and at least two years of job experience. This visa program was widely publicized in countries, which were in this under-represented category, and the U.S. granted 55,000 diversity visas, with each country getting its allocation based on the proportion of under-representation.

I sent my details to be entered in this program in 1995, but had no luck. Next year I sent two applications. In one application I put my name as the head of family with postal address of my sister in Karachi (she had her own house), and in the other application, I put my wife’s name as the head of the family with her parent’s home address in Lahore. I even did not tell my wife that I have sent one application with her name.

One evening my brother who was renting a portion of my sister’s house, came to see me, not finding me home, left a large and thick envelope addressed to me from the Immigration & Naturalization Services (INS), USA. When I saw the envelope, I could not believe that it was actually for me. I could not hide my happiness from my wife, so I took her for a walk and told her about this lottery, which had no monetary value but could change our lives.

The only thing that worried me was that I was not sure how my mother would react. Because I was her eldest child, she was more attached to me and my family and she had been living with us since the death of my father in 1992. That day neither I, nor my wife told about this to my mother, but after about two weeks, we decided that we should not hide it anymore. Instead of giving her the shock of telling her when we got the visa and were ready to leave Pakistan, we took her into confidence. To our surprise, she was sad for a moment at the thought of our going so far away, but she was very delighted, or at least she made us believe that. I could see the tears in her eyes, but she wiped them away and said that they were due to her being overjoyed for our better future. We completed the forms and mailed them to INS. After waiting for three months, we got more forms, including instructions for medical checkups, and were given a date for our family interview at the U.S. Embassy at Islamabad.

To make the story short, after medical check up and submitting some more documents, and the interview at the US Embassy in Islamabad, the whole family’s passports were stamped with the Immigrant Diversity Visa and we had three months to enter USA.

To read more about this chapter in my life and all the struggles that I went through get a copy of my book from Amzon.com or any other book sellers that Google will display as mentioned in the beginning of the blog.