Dorota: Opportunity and Loss in England

I met Dorota when she signed up for an after-school English language course I was teaching. She already had a decent grasp of English, and took the class seriously. Dorota grew up in Lesko, where she attended lyceum. Her father died when she was a child, leaving her mother to raise and support three children. They lived with Dorota's grandmother in a small apartment within a neighborhood of unadorned buildings surrounded by weedy lawns. Dorota eventually got a degree in economics from the agricultural university, but she was neither able to find a job in her profession, nor any other steady, reasonably paid employment in Poland. As a student, she spent her summers doing agricultural work in England, often in the company of her boyfriend. After graduation, she continued to visit and work there intermittently, without legal status. When Dorota and I spoke in the summer of 2005 she was home in Bieszczady for a short visit before returning to what, since Poland joined the EU in 2004, was legal employment in England. She was several months pregnant, and anxious about having her first child in a foreign country. She told her story as follows: