The DV 2009 is very popular in Ethiopia. The US green card lottery makes many dream with migration. All over Addis Ababa, internet shops offer the possibility to help fill out online questionnaires. For a small fee (around 7br) anyone can fill out a form prepared in the shop and give in some photos (or make them there as well). The internet shop takes care of the rest.
The Green Card lottery program enables non-American natives to obtain their US immigration Green Card citizenship through a lottery based program that makes available 50,000 permanent resident visas annually to persons from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States.
For a European citizen a lottery system sounds like something only American could invent. It carries with it the fate and the luck that a self made man needs. Europeans seem rather to set on a more anal question of rights.
Probably the fate behind the lottery scheme is less one that it seems. The eligibility of a certain number of country nationals is probably decided by US politics. In these respect, Ethiopia is lucky, because she figures high on US strategies, which might be the reason that on the last DV2008 5, 241 migrants from Ethiopia.
Our friend Fekadu of the internetcafe shows us pictures of his clients: women and men, families with their children. He was astonished at the number of forms he had filled out since the beginning of the programme. He did not want to leave Ethiopia, with the shop and lessons he gave on computer programming he was going well and could also help his family.
