How An Immigration Lottery Saved Me & My Family

I’ve been meaning to write this post for some time especially after Trump’s Muslim travel ban. And now with all of the DACA stories coming out, it’s more important than ever to share my own story. There have been many shared across social media about the impact immigration has on this country but also the hate many Muslim immigrants felt in this country after Trump’s election night win. I wanted to share a little bit of what that OP-1 lottery meant for me and my family. It’ll be part of a mini-series that I’ll share over the next few weeks.

The Facts:

• My dad was a farmer making less than .50 cents a day.
• I was born in a village in a city and country that most people have never heard of.
• I lost two siblings I’ve never met to a disease that is almost non-existent in the United States.
• My dad hit the OP-1 visa lottery in 1990, changing the future for everyone involved.
• He picked NYC because he heard about it on the radio.
• We were poor for decades but somehow found a way to get by.

Before I get into the details, I want everyone to just take a second to think about how lucky you are to be where you are. I’m a firm believer that luck plays an integral role role in how successful we are, where we end up in life and who we surround ourselves with. It took so many different things to go right for me to be where I am today. I’ll explain all of that in another post.

So we here go.

I don’t remember much about the long flight from Dhaka, Bangladesh to JFK. What I do remember is getting lost in the hotel in Dhaka the day before our flight because I’d never seen so many floors and doors in a building. And I couldn’t read the numbers on the door either. I was 5 years old and had never read a word of English. It took my mom hours to find me because she was also afraid. She’d never seen so many tall buildings and cars below or an elevator. She didn’t dare go into one of them. See, we come from a village far away from any major city, where animals roam free, farming is the way of life and survival means praying you have enough food for the next day and where a monsoon season can test the limits of human endurance.

When we landed at JFK, I was starving and didn’t know what was going on around me. My mom didn’t speak English and was in charge of me, my 9-month-old sister, older sister and two teenage cousins. They were also hungry. An older man saw all of this and offered my mom a roll of chips ahoy cookies and a can of Pepsi for all of us to share. We were so grateful and I’ll never forget that act of kindness. He didn’t see a group of strangers from a foreign country taking over his land, he saw a family in need of something to eat.

How my mom figured to navigate JFK, find an exit and bring us to our apt in LES is still a miracle to me. I’ve heard versions of this from different people but still, it blows my mind (my dad was in NYC a few months earlier and had come earlier to look for us at the airport). I don’t remember getting out of the cab, into our apartment on 161 Rivington, #12, but I remember sleeping for what seemed like days.

The first real job my dad could find for someone who didn’t speak English was an overnight shift at a bodega on Pitt Street. It was run by an Arabic family and my dad spoke Arabic so offered him the position. For those of you who grew up in NYC, you know that Arabic delis were always open 24/7, most of the time, because they were also immigrants in search of a better life and taking a break, wasn’t an option.

Because safety was a concern in the LES in the early 90’s, my mom, my two cousins and I would meet my dad halfway every morning to pick him up, even during school days. And along the way, we’d treat ourselves to a bagel from a local Jewish bakery on Attorney street. You could buy a dozen for a few bucks. Some days it was our breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Then one day it almost all came crashing down. I don’t remember the exact date but my dad came home bleeding from under his neck. He didn’t meet us halfway. He was already home by the time we woke up to go get him. He was held up at gunpoint in the deli overnight and the gunman used the end of the gun and dug it into my dad’s neck. Not having insurance and not wanting to stir trouble, he just taped his neck and finished his shift. I remember my mom telling us that someone in the deli accidentally threw something at him. He continued to work there for a few more weeks before finding a dishwashing job at an Indian restaurant. I didn’t find out the real truth about that night until a few months later when my mom was on the phone with family back home and mentioned it. I’ll never forget the fear in her voice. It still haunts me to this day. What could have been had the guy decided to pull the trigger?