Time to get the bugs out

By Brian McGrory, Globe Columnist, 10/7/2003

The first thing you notice walking from the worn hallways of the Charlestown public housing development into Maria Matos's ground-floor apartment is how shiny her linoleum floors are, how spotless her kitchen is, how every knickknack, every picture, every CD is sitting in its predetermined place.

There is an order in this tiny home that is sorely lacking in the world that surrounds it, an order she is trying to imbue in her children: the 18-year-old son in the ROTC program, the 15-year-daughter who plays soccer, the 10-year-old girl whose First Communion photographs hang prominently on the bedroom wall.

The next thing you notice is Matos herself, lying in the hospital bed that dominates her room, bragging about her kids.

She came to the United States from Cape Verde 13 years ago. She got a job managing a Wendy's restaurant and began a bright new life.Then six years ago, driving to work in the afternoon, she was involved in a five-car pileup. The impact snapped her neck, and she's been unable to walk or use her fingers ever since.

But she has made do. She divorced her husband and moved into public housing. She has learned how to draw and paint, using splints in her hands.

She tries to get out every day in a motorized wheelchair to attend job networking groups or medical appointments. And she devotes herself to her kids.

In other words, she can deal with her injury. She can deal with the fact that her apartment is so crowded that her oldest son sleeps on a bed shoved into a walk-in closet. She can even deal with the fact that her place isn't handicapped accessible and that she needs help just to get out the door.

What she can't deal with are the insults, the insults that come in the form of thousands of swarming bugs.

They're roaches, to be precise, and they have infested her immaculate apartment and no doubt many others around her. By day, they stay mostly in the kitchen, but when darkness falls, they come crawling into her room, up and down her walls, onto her bed, and across her body.

Matos has no feeling in her lower body, so when they race up her legs and across her torso, she doesn't know they're there. It's when they reach her neck that she wakes up with a scream, and because she can't control her hands she shouts for her kids to brush them off her and crunch them on the floor.

Matos is asked how often it happens. "Every night," she replies. "I keep a glass of water beside the bed, and they even get in there. I can't sleep anymore. I'm too afraid."

Matos's social worker, Nancy Powell, described Matos as an ideal client. "She is the last thing in the world from a demanding or difficult person to work with," Powell said. "This woman deserves to be relocated." Sandra Henriquez, the Boston Housing Authority administrator, said the agency has tried several times over the last few years to move her, but that Matos has refused. Henriquez said that until last month Matos had also refused three different times to allow an exterminator into her apartment.

Matos and Powell said there were two offers to relocate: one to go to the Old Colony development three years ago at a time of racial strife there and a year later to an apartment that was too small for her to maneuver her wheelchair. Of the exterminator, Matos said simply, "That's not true."

Henriquez promised yesterday to step up extermination efforts and to monitor the waiting list for a better apartment, a process that has already dragged on for two years. Matos worked until she couldn't, she's raising three good kids, and she remains upbeat about a life that would plunge others into despair.

All she asks is for a decent apartment. If it can't turn that trick, Boston has more problems than it knows.

Brian McGrory is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at mcgrory@globe.com.