By Jany Tomba

It's lunch time at the Trabajamos Community Head Start in the Hunts Point section in the Bronx. Through the narrow hallway of the basement of St. Margarita Church, a swarm of toddlers squeeze among baby carriages and adult legs. Wearing bright-colored jackets and bows in their hair, the children enter their classrooms, bustling and laughing with an air of excitement.

The mostly Hispanic parents gossip with each other, wave good-bye to their children and then go to their own classroom, where they will receive preparation for the high school equivalency exam.

At the end of the hall, through the double door enters an authoritative woman with an assertive gait. She is Greer Boyd, the coordinator for the parents' programs. The 5-foot, 9-inch statuesque beauty wears a fitted brown shirt with matching pants.

Her braided hair is neatly tied back. Her wrist is adorned with silver bangles and her front teeth, lined with gold, enhance her broad smile. She strides through and stops to greet a mother with an infant in a carriage. She instinctively picks up the baby and cuddles her as she chats with the mother.

Boyd, now the coordinator of adult workshops for two Bronx centers, spent her early teens in foster care and her late teens juggling parenthood and school. Now a single parent of five, through a combination of love for her children and ambition for herself, the 30-year-old former welfare recipient is employed to help other young parents learn to care for their children and themselves.

A resident of Flatbush, Boyd is the proud parent Cashieff, 14, Barry, 10, Nygeer, 6, Shakeerah, 5, and Kenya, 4. Her life today mirrors the life of many working mothers. She rises early to feed and dress her children to dispatch them to their caretakers by 7 a.m. and then she rushes off to commute to her own job.

But the life she led and the hurdles she overcame make her anything but typical. What got her through, she says, is the love of her children and a determination to get a college diploma.

``A degree makes a difference, and you have to want it or you won't get it," she says.

Boyd was still in foster care when she got pregnant at the age of 16. A year later she was discharged and went on welfare. Despite this hardship, she finished high school and registered for college, where she met the father of her next four children.

"I was living at the dorm when I got pregnant with Barry. His father was a student also but did not finish. I went to school pregnant."

During her 13 years on welfare Boyd managed to balance motherhood and education. The two fathers provided no help but she says that her oldest child's grandmother has given a hand by watching the children when she is in school or at work.

Boyd says her absentee husband, the father of the four younger children, receives disability benefits, abuses prescription drugs and his financial commitment is to his grandmother.

"The children don't even get a Christmas present or a birthday card," she says.

He was also physically abusive toward her, she says. She lowered her head, and with her piercing green eyes recounted a violent incident. Using a coworker, she demonstrated a headlock performed on her by her husband with whom she lived on and off. She is ready to get a divorce but says that she is too busy working and has no time to go to courts. "I have moved on," she blurted out.

She describes her college life as full and hectic. She had to get the kids ready early in the morning, drop off the two older boys at a relative's, and headed for school taking the three girls to campus day care. In between classes, she was a member of the radio WHCS in 1987, poetry editor for the Shield and welfare commissioner for Slam from 1996-1997. Boyd was also involved with Welfare Rights Initiative, which she said empowered her, "helping her understand how to petition for change."

Soon after her graduation, she distributed 30 resumes and was offered a job in her old neighborhood, the South Bronx. She joined Trabajamos Community Head Start where, in addition to coordinating programs preparing parents for high school equivalency exams, she schedules workshops that inform the mothers about their rights to window guards and other ways to protect their children.

Today, Boyd and her five children live better than when she was on welfare. She explains that she is independent and no longer has to go on "face-to-face interviews where they ask you about your business." She candidly describes their current lifestyle as not yet perfect but rather a story of "rags to slight riches." She points to a blue station wagon "that's my car over there" and adds that she loves taking the family out on picnics.

"Now we live in a three-bedroom apartment in the housing projects in Brooklyn. It is not a great neighborhood but it's okay. I deal directly with the landlord and pay for my own food." Boyd adds with pride that now she is able to save a little for her kids' college. "When on welfare, you can't put anything aside."