Day 30

Name: Maria Poza

Profession: Cook/Front Counter at Boston House of Pizza (BHOP)

Location: Front counter, BHOP

Question: Why are you here?

Answer: I’m not afraid to make the difficult choices

Stop by the Boston House of Pizza during the day and I guarantee that you won’t see Maria Poza sitting down or taking it easy. That’s because the 25-year-old, with a 4-year-old daughter in daycare, a full-time job to wake up to every morning, and her family still in Guatemala where she left them ten years ago, has always faced in one direction: towards the future.

Moving here because of the opportunity for security and a stable job, Poza has since never forgotten where she comes from. In fact, her daughter makes sure of it.

“She knows her grandma. She actually asks me like every day to call her,” she said. “She remembers.”

As for Poza, she misses home.

“It’s hard,” she said. Though she visits every year, “I wish I could do it more often.”

The sunshine, the nature, the fresh air, her sister and mother: All are things she can’t bring herself to move back to with the birth of her daughter.

“I have to think of her future now,” she said, and jokingly added, “so I’m definitely stuck here.”

She doesn’t seem to regret it, though. Poza has almost earned her GED and is already looking ahead. She hopes to become either a medical assistant or get a job of a similar salary in order to better support herself and family.

“The bad part of being a working mom is not spending a lot of time with my daughter,” she said.

As for motherhood, she said, “it’s the best thing ever…. You have this kind of feeling that you never had before, and now you have a responsibility and you have like all these dreams, but it’s not for you anymore. It’s for your daughter or son.”

If it were a possibility financially, she said she’d love to have another child immediately so her daughter had a playmate. However, it’s looking like it is going to be another two or three years until she’ll get the opportunity to support one.

Does Maria love anything as much as her bilingual baby?

Well, she said, her husband comes pretty close.

“I always knew there was love out there for me,” she said. “I think it’s hard because we’re young, too, with a kid, so sometimes it’s hard. We can have some problems too; it’s normal. But I do see myself being with him forever. ‘Til I die.”