THE LOTTERY.(Green Card Lottery, migration to United States )

Raul Jara's grandfather tilled a rich man's land on the outskirts of Lima, Peru, until agrarian reform in the nineteen-sixties made four acres of it his. By the time Raul was born, in 1971, Lima had grown to surround the Jaras' compound, making their walled garden of bananas and bougainvillea an oasis from the increasingly chaotic and polluted capital city. Raul, an only child, was the first member of his family to go to college, and six times a week he would travel an hour and forty-five minutes by minibus to an oasis of another kind, the campus of Pontificia Catholic University, where he and his fellow engineering students immersed themselves in the elegant exactitude of ...