Visa Lottery

Just as I was settling down to a nice relaxing time focusing on Burkina Faso and the tasks at hand there, Rakieta informed me that Marie had written a letter via computer. As usual nothing had arrived. They can not seem to get the hang of things like checking the .whatever. They all use .fr on most everything and I assume the computers over there, getting newer like everyone elses, are automating the .fr
So once again I am notified of a huge crisis with no facts or concrete useful information to back things up.
It makes it very hard to get things accomplished.
Anyway, evidently a young man has won the visa lottery. By the way the story has been relayed to me, it sounds majorly like fraud. Then I got the song and dance that he is arriving in Michigan this weekend. Now we have not agreed to anything yet, but typical Burkina style , everyone runs off half cocked and the next thing I know our names are supposedly dropped off at the Embassy.
So after several days of no real clarity in any direction, I called the Embassy. This is always exciting.
To begin with, there are only a couple of real Americans there. The rest are Burkinabe people who do not understand American law. In addition, most would sign every visa application that walked through the door because they believe that everyone's problems would be solved if they could just get to America. So here I am trying to get questions answered by people who speak very poor English at best, who are not familiar nor do they care about American red tape or rules and regulations but they have absorbed the attitude of the most entrenched bureaucrat with ease.
I was told they could not verify that he was indeed a winner, that yes, indeed they would just drop him off in the US and that he would manage to get by and that our sponsorship was only a moral agreement not a legal one. Oh yeah, and no, there was no one else higher for me to speak to. The usual Burkina silliness. This folks, is why they have so much trouble getting visas. Having Al Keida cells in the outer wilderness is not helping either.
I wasn't as patient with her as I should have been. That may or may not be something to deal with later, but I just could not believe what I was hearing.
So, I went on the internet, did the homework this woman wouldn't do and found the supporting documents to communicate about this.
Now there is no guarantee the aforementioned young man wasn't scammed, but we shall find out today. I found out last night that he has virtually no English. So today Rakieta will translate. I am still hoping that our government has not completely lost it's mind, but I am not ruling anything out yet.
One thing is for sure, sponsorship is a huge commitment and is not done lightly. In addition, the government is giving 50,00 of these things out a year right now. That scares me some. Quite a lot actually. That is a small city every year. Our corrupt politicians at work again I see.