Winning the Lottery

     I imagine that winning the lotto is an amazing feeling- I wouldn't know. I've only played the lotto once, and it was only because it was my turn to play Santa, and I filled the stockings with a dozen or so lotto tickets for my family and myself. Winnings were conditioned upon the fact that if anyone actually won, they had to use the money to go towards funding a family compound. I think the most any of us won was a free lotto ticket. No cash. Certainly not enough to fund a family home.

     I hear one is more likely to be stuck by lightening than to win the lottery.

     In fact, I've never really won anything. Well, I have won sports contests- but nothing like a new car, or money, or some random prize in a raffle. Wait- I won an ipod once. Funny story. I had been up all night (in Vegas) partying with my friends. When 7:00am rolled around- I was still rollin'... My friends and I were all in some sort of daze, hovering in and out of sleep, the various drugs in our systems vying for control of our mental activity. When I realised the time, I jumped off the couch, suddenly fully alert. The room full of people looked at me confusedly, still in my work uniform from my shift the previous evening.

     I've got to go! I exclaimed.

     You're not really going to that party are you? They all wanted to know. It's lame! It's not like you're going to win the ipod or anything. Somehow I had found myself in a room full of people that had all worked where I was working, had all been to the same company party, and had all been fired. I didn't even know that there was an ipod being raffled off- but apparently, they do it every year. Ironically, I did win it- the last prize awarded, and the only one I received.

     So, I do know what it's like to win something. It's a good feeling, and almost makes up for the feelings of disappointment of consistently not winning anything, an entire day full of prizes awarded, none to you. But perhaps an even better feeling would be the one you have when you tell someone that they've won something. You get to vicariously experience their joy, without the preceding trepidation of thinking that you'll never win.

     One of the greatest feelings I've ever experienced was telling someone that they won the lotto. It happened like this:

     I was sitting by a window in an internet café in Machala, Ecuador, reading a book and sipping on a cup of bad coffee while my friend surfed the internet. Machala is an unremarkable town- it feels like any suburb in The States, but closer to the Equator. Sitting in the corner, I noticed in my peripheral a man approaching. He looked flustered, holding a stack of papers in disarray, his glasses tilted, and slightly hunched over, his demeanour suggested that he was internally fighting between hopeful anticipation and disappointment, frantic and confused.

     He walked directly towards me, so I gave him my attention. In Spanish, he introduced himself, and said that my friend had indicated that I may be able to help him. The stack of papers he held were in English, which he could not read. My friend, neither a native English nor Spanish speaker, had expressed that I would be able to better help him.

     I smiled, introduced myself, and explained that I could tell him, generally, what the papers said, but would not be able to provide a direct or complete translation. He smiled eagerly, sat down, and handed me the papers.

     Before saying anything, I briefly looked over the pile. The first few pages were certificates, of sorts, and licences. Then letters and emails originating in England and Nigeria. Intrigued, I began to tell him what they were. A licence of operation. A certificate of funds awarded. A certificate of authenticity from the FBI. Then, multiple letters from a law enforcement agency in the UK, from the FBI, from some random woman in Nigeria. Also, a notice of funds transferred, and a notice of fees for funds transferred. As I read over the documents, A story began to emerge:

     The man with whom I was speaking had been told that he had won a UK lottery. When the money was to be transferred, it went from Nigeria, to the UK, the US and finally to Ecuador, sending off numerous red flags to the appropriate agencies. A Nigerian man in the UK was jailed and my new friend was informed of the apparent fraud. A week later, at the internet café, he had checked his email to find dozens of letters from the various agencies. They explained that no fraud had taken place, the Nigerian had been released from jail, the money was in the process of being transferred, for a fee of £11,000, and that he was, in fact, the recipient of £250,000.

     The only thing that didn't add up: a letter from a mysterious Nigerian woman, dated more recently than any of the other documents, saying that she hoped that she and the Ecuadorian man could keep things quiet and between them, until the matter was all sorted out. However, the dates on the other documents indicated that it had already been resolved. My only explanation: it still takes longer to get information to Nigeria than to Ecuador.

     It was a crazy story, for me reading the documents, and for the poor man whose hopes and dreams were continually raised and dashed. To be the one to tell him, definitively, that he had, in fact, won $400,000 is perhaps one of the coolest things I have ever done.

     Now, if only I got a translation fee...