It’s May 4th. May the force be with you day. I came back from a round of board games with our friends, and I tried to check if we won the diversity visa.

Of course, the website is stuck from the thousands of visits per second, but after a few minutes, I can check. I enter my confirmation number, name, and birth date, wait for the captcha image to load, and click submit. The first time it failed. No problem, I tried again. This time the page takes a few seconds to load after I click submit. After those seconds, I see this:

Overwhelmed with mixed emotions, I quickly ran to my wife Catalina who was outside, waiting for me to do some groceries. I had tears in my eyes and I yelled: “We were selected”. That was enough for her to know what I was talking about even if she did not know I was checking the results.

Joshua panicked when he also heard us and he thought we would leave tomorrow, haha, now knowing we will have a looooong period to wait for an interview.

I never thought this day would come so soon. The last updates I published on my blog about the DV program were those:

• DV2022
• DV2023

By the time I was also not selected for DV2024 I was so used to this that I did not even publish an update here.

But God the Lord almighty is so good that he answered our prayers so far.

The less good-looking part

Each year, the US government has 55.000 visas to issue on this program. Those 55k are assigned to multiple regions/continents: Europe, Africa, and so on. Europe gets around ~20.000 of visas. On each case number, there are an average of 2 persons, because if I won I take my wife and kids with me so I actually get 5 visas out of those 20 thousand with a single case.

The less good-looking part is that our case number is pretty high: 290xx. The last two numbers are taken out for privacy.

I have backtraced data from previous years for our embassy in Bucharest to see if in that year we would have won or not, every year since 2013.

So out of the last 12 years, 11 excluding the running DV2024 program, 4 (or 3 excluding) we would have not won with our case number.

If we were to calculate our chances of getting the actual visa after an interview using the average last case numbers from above, our chances are:

• 93.42% chance when we include the DV2024 data.
• 90.55% chance with DV2024 data

Of course, this is not actually correct, it is not actually a chance, that we would get a visa after 90% would get it. So the actual chance this way is way lower.

Next, notice a pattern since 2013 of green and red: 🟩 🟩 🟩 🟥 🟩 🟥 🟩 🟩 🟩 🟥 🟩 🟥 or 1 1 1…. 0 1 0 ….. 111 …… 010 …

Looking at this pattern (which of course is not confirmed and the next year could also be red, or the last red dot (DV2024) turns green until September 30, 2024) I can calculate chances based on the years (green or red).

• We have a 72.72% chance of getting a visa if we ignore DV2024 data (100*8 / 11)
• We have a 66.66% chance of getting a visa if we include DV2024 data (100*8 / 12)

If my pattern above confirms and I can assume the next number will be green (we would get a visa), our chances are 69.23% in our favor.

Adding a dose of optimism, our chances are 70% to get a visa in the DV2025 program.

Overthinking

My post is ridiculous by now. We got selected randomly and we had a 1% chance GLOBALLY to be selected for further processing. Now our odds got up from 1% to 70% of getting the visa, and I became worried. This must be a joke.

The God that helped us with the 1% miracle is the same One that can help us get the visa with 70% odds.

Human nature makes me worried, but instead, I should be grateful and full of hope.

The truth is, we made it so far and God will take care of us in the next year and He is the one actually getting us an interview, not the KCC 😅. KCC just listens to what He will say.

Ending

We have a long year in front of us where our patience will be tested. If we get an interview, I estimate it will be around August or September of 2025, the last two months of the program.

There are a lot of unknowns, like how many cases were picked in DV2025, how will DV2024 end, how will the embassies perform for DV2025, and how many invalid cases are in front of us, all those things are not known.

We can only trust God further and wait for the interview by faith.

I will keep you updated over the year with how DV2024 progresses, how our odds change month-over-month and other related things.

Thank you for reading this, say a prayer for us, and see you on my next post.