Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Demographer Girl

My primary sheroes are the indomitable women of Hull House - Jane Addams and her comadres who founded the social work profession.  They spent much time wandering around the poor neighborhoods of Chicago, just gathering demographic information about the people who lived there - something few others had cared to do.  Yesterday, my Girl was worthy of them.

The Lone Star Girl and her little partner are doing their science project on (loosely) whether people living within two miles of our local refineries have more health problmes than people living over 15 miles away from them.  The LSG's little partner lives way away from the refineries so she did that part of the experiment, taking their survey to folks in her neighborhood.  I took the LSG to the north side of town near the refineres, though, and she wandered around senior centers and churches and daycare centers with her surveys, even after her science teacher had told her it wouldn't be safe for her to be going around talking to people in that neighborhood.  She did great. (Didn't much help her asthma, though - you really can tell you are close to the refineries.)

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