Lottery winner is no stranger to bad luck

Baltimore Sun

BALTIMORE — Marialou Anobas doesn’t use the word “lucky” to describe herself because, as she sees it, surviving a hotel bombing and winning the lottery in the same lifetime requires more than just good fortune.

Instead, Anobas, a registered nurse, simply says somebody has a plan for her life, and the journey that led her from her native Philippines to Saudi Arabia to Kuwait to the United States to winning $250,000 in Tuesday’s Mega Millions drawing becomes more fulfilling every day.

Anobas was one number away from claiming the $60-million jackpot.

“There is always a reason for everything because it took us 10 years [of playing the lottery] to win,” Anobas said. “I could have died and not come to America. But that was not God’s plan for me. And maybe I’ll keep playing Mega Millions, and God has another plan for me.”

She lives with her 84-year-old mother and son Michael, 10. Spending $15 twice a week for the Mega Millions drawings has been a tradition for Anobas’ family, one she hopes to expand with her winnings. And for years, she has wanted to bring her sister and aunt from the Philippines to Maryland, reuniting family members separated since the mid-1980s.

Anobas, who turned 55 Saturday, went to nursing school before leaving the Philippines in 1985 to work in Saudi Arabia.

Anobas relocated there because “that was where the money was,” and she was escaping a fairly poor existence in her native country.

Six years later, Anobas was celebrating her birthday in a Kuwait hotel when a bomb detonated a few floors above hers. It was the start of Iraq’s invasion, and she was held captive in the hotel for nine days before she was rescued by the Philippines Embassy.

Anobas moved to New York in 1993, then Maryland. Anobas’ mother joined her in 1996, and they moved to Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1997.

Anobas was working at a hospital near the financial district in Manhattan when the World Trade Center towers were attacked. Two days later, she was at ground zero administering aid.

She came back to Maryland in 2007 and continued to play Mega Millions.

Anobas, who works with elderly patients at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, will keep her job — and keep playing the lottery. With the winnings, she plans to take her son and mother to the Philippines next year, then Disney World.

She’ll also pay off her car, put some money away for her son’s college fund and bank the rest.