In May of 2014, my mom won on the DV Lottery. The DV Lottery is the Diversity Immigrant Visa program which she played so she could have a Visa to come to the United States. The Diversity Immigrant Visa program is a United States government lottery program for receiving a United States Permanent Resident Card. You entered your name in it in October and then waited until the result was announced in May to check if you won or not.

My mom started playing the DV lottery in 2009, but she never gave up. My dad came to United States in 2011. He was one of the people who took pictures and worked to help Congolese get into the United States. My dad worked for the Congo government. My dad called my mom and told her that she won the lottery in 2014 and we were all excited and happy about it.

At that time, my mom was pregnant and so we waited three more months before we could travel. We were living in Mbanza-Ngungu, which was far from where we needed to do all the paperwork, we were traveling 4 hours in a car to get to Kinshasa to complete the paperwork to get the Visa. Since I was only 12 years old, I didn’t really understand some of what going on. There was an interview, a test at the hospital, and there was some things the embassy needed. It took us more than a year to do all the steps.

When everything was ready, some of my family went with us to the airport and it was really hard leaving them. We traveled for 1 day until we got into United States and then we took 3 different planes. The trip was really confused and tiring.

The first plane we took was from Congo to Brussel and then we waited for a few hours at the airport and flew from there to Washington DC. Our last flight was from Washington DC to Omaha Nebraska. We then drove to Schuyler and that’s when we started our new lives in Schuyler in December of 2015.