A Complicated Application

One of my jobs as the wife in this family is to apply each year for the diversity visa.  This visa is provided to ensure the US is accepting a diverse new residents.  Countries such as Bangladesh, the UK, Canada, and Korea are not offered this visa as they have been assigned a large number of greencards already.  

The process involves US government officials pulling names out of a hat and granting greencards to who are pulled.  I make it sound so easy but there are many hurdles along the way.  

The first hurdle is to read and understand their website to work out the application procedure.  Official websites are not always very user friendly, it took me a good week to work out that even though they give very lengthy, repetitious instructions, all they were looking for was a square photo with no shadows, glare, or smile.  

The second hurdle is to apply at the right time.  The application is only open for the month of October each year and we were too late to apply in 2009.  

The third hurdle is to provide the aforementioned appropriate photo.  This can take some dedication but I've done it twice now and even do it for other New Zealanders, so that this is not a hurdle for them too.  

The actual application involves merely uploading said photo and knowing your birth date and full name.  

The fourth hurdle is to be able to receive the notification of the result.  Mail, we were informed, was the only way we would be contacted.  We applied in 2010 but we moved states during the month we might have heard so we weren't 100% that our names hadn't been pulled. 

For some reason I decided to check the website yesterday and found that there was a function where we could check our status for that first, mysterious application we had made!  This was a delightful thing to come across as it was the last day it would be available because today the new 'winners' will start being announced.

The last hurdle is to save your confirmation number.  My heart missed a beat when I couldn't find ours saved in gmail but they'd been squirreled away into My Documents in a most unorderly manner, without even a folder to call their own. 

Don't get your hopes up, we didn't win that lottery, but it was neat to confirm this, instead of just always wondering.  Results are announced during May and June so there's barely a wait before we'll know whether we win it this year!