MR.CTA - the Backstory - MITM

There's a line from the great movie Apocalypse Now that comes to mind when I meet people like Mr. CTA - "The light and space of Vietnam really put the zap on his head." When I first met him it was in the capital of a shithole of a country in Africa. You just knew this guy was bright, wrapped to tight to survive much longer under the daily bullshit of a police state, and getting by each day by being as professional as possible, smiling on the outside and silently screaming on the inside. If anyone ever needed to get out of Dodge it was him. That was seven years ago.

I had never even heard of the diversity visa program other than the scams that were being run over the internet to separate people from their money by promising to get them a green card visa to the U.S. if they paid some money in advance to some Ahmed, Mohammed, Dajingbye, Lucky Garang, etc. in London, or Paris, or Brussels. Guys used to bring these things to me all the time to ask me if it was legit. And they never were. And people wanted to come to the home of the brave and the land of the free so bad they kept getting conned. Go figure. It's not the bullshit they see in Hollywood movies or regurgitated MTV crap that makes them want to come here. What it is is the concept of Freedom - that's it, plain and raw and simple. We have nothing else to offer them. They see through the commercial crap, that's easy. It's like an Egyptian told me once - you promised us Chauteabriand and Mozart if we played by your rules - all we got was McDonalds and Michael Jackson. Ah, but freedom, that's a whole different beast. They know about it because they know its absence. It's something that burns in your soul late at night. It's something that once it infects you nothing less will suffice. And even those who bury it deep in their innards as they carry out the will of dictators to get money and power know that it is something of value, even if they have already sold their souls to the enemies of all that is sacred.

So Mr. CTA comes to me a few years ago and says he and the missus need an address of someone in the U.S. to put on their application for the diversity visa program. The program takes in up to 50,000 people a year into the U.S. from countries that are underrepresented in the U.S. immigration rolls. I checked out the paperwork and went to the U.S. Embassy to ask about the program's legitimacy. Now if you know anything about U.S. Embassies in Africa you know that they are always a day late and a dollar short when it comes to information about what's really going on. And the boys and girls who man these post are always a brick short of a full load when it comes to assessing who are the bad guys and who are the good guys in Africa. So I was, necessarily, a bit wary about the information I would get. But wonder of wonders - it was legit. I figured what are the odds - I gave Mr. CTA the greenlight for our house.

I sit here now in the U.S.A. with Mr. and Mrs. CTA and their three children buying lotto tickets in their names. I figure if Mrs. CTA won the diversity visa - what are the odds???

More about all this later....

MITM