by Joe Azar

   I’m a firm believer that luck has actually little to do with chance, but rather the circumstances you put yourself into. You are far more likely to run into bad luck going down in an alleyway by yourself at 3 a.m. than if you are going to a restaurant with your buddies at 10 p.m.. Sometimes the circumstances can’t be helped. For me, my early days of bad luck were in large part thanks to where I grew up.

   I lived in Cuidad Ojeda, Venezuela for the first eight years of my life. I know, my pale white skin and brown hair is a definite giveaway.

   Thankfully, the country wasn’t the dumpster fire it is today, but the flames were definitely starting to ignite while I was there. Robberies and a whole other hoopla of goodies happened to me in my early years, but perhaps the most obscure case occurred when I wanted to flee the country.

   After we had been robbed for the third time (we’ll get to that later), my family decided it was finally time to leave Venezuela for the United States. My mother had family in Colorado, so naturally we were destined for the Rocky Mountains.

   Now, if you haven’t traveled out of the country, just know that when you do, you’re going to have a bad time. Especially if you try to move to the country. Since this all happened at the age of eight, I can’t remember much of the specifics.

   I do remember a ton of paperwork and staying in the airport for a long time. However, part of the reason why we were there so long was because of my predicament.

   My mother, father and I arrived at the airport after saying goodbye. The check-in process seemed to go swimmingly until the clerk looked at her screen funny.

   “I’m sorry to bring this up,” she said. “But it appears that your son is on the terrorist watch-list.”

   Yep. No joke. I was once put on the terrorist watch-list before the age of 10. Apparently, somewhere else in the world, some other person named Joseph Chukre George Azar was doing bad things (it’s Arabic; my family tree is more diverse than the puppets of “Sesame Street”). Looking back on this, I can’t blame them.

   This was three short years after the terrible attacks that occurred on Sept. 11, and all safety precautions had to be taken.

   Still, for a kid who only knew roughly four words of the English language it was pretty scary to see my mother argue with an airport employee for about a half hour, convincing them that a Venezuelan child wasn’t going to blow up the plane.

   It wasn’t the most gracious welcome to the United States of America, but eventually, I was able to get on the plane and I’ve never looked back since. Thanks to my name and the shady place I came from, I was once considered a threat to the nation I currently live in, but I am now so happy to be here.