Blue Hill Ave Fun Times!!

I apologize for neglecting my blog for over a week! In addition to having some extra-curricular distractions last week, I had absolutely no desire to go out to enumerate. I felt somewhat depressed at the thought of knocking on doors so I just completely blew it off. Knowing that I was waaay below where I needed to be in terms of hours and completed work, I jumped at the chance to work over the weekend. Our Crew Leader, Ron, had the idea that we go out as a group with a few binders that hadn't been touched yet, and bang out a bunch of EQs. Cool! I'm in! We met at Forest Hills at 10:45am on Saturday to take the bus over to... Blue Hill Avenue. If you're not familiar with that part of Boston... well, you're probably better off. It has the reputation of being one of the worst areas of Boston. We were counting right where Mattapan and Roxbury meet. As soon as we got off the bus at Blue Hill Ave and Morton Street, we all noticed how much trash there was all over the place. We walked past a group of teenage girls on the sidewalk, and one of them had just bought some make-up- she was opening up the packaging and was casually letting the plastic and cardboard fall to the ground. I was tempted to stop and say something, but I had the good sense to just keep walking.

It was a beautiful day, and we really lucked out there. We split up a bunch of the assignments, and I set off with Sarah- a high school senior who had gone through training with me. So, I don't know if I would call it a revelation, but as bad as this neighborhood was, we still found really nice people who were welcoming and helpful- after the initial "WHO DAT?" when we'd knock on the door. I found that people there were much more defensive when they'd first come to the door- often demanding an introduction before they would open the door. Only about three quarters of the occupants who opened their doors knew what the census was, so I got really good really fast at the super short description of what the census is and why it's important. "We need to count all of the people in the country so we know how many schools we need and other things like that." That worked really well.

The other amazing thing about this neighborhood was how crammed in people were. We'd visit an apartment building with units that I would think could hold 4-6 people comfortably, but we'd consistently find out that there are 8 or 10 or even 14 people living in one apartment! There would always be lots of cousins, and cousins' kids and cousins' girlfriends. Frequently, the respondents wouldn't know the first and last names of everyone that was living there!

We went into one apartment building in which we found dried blood and cigarette ash all over the stairwell. Surprisingly, that particular apartment building housed some of the nicest people we met all day. I was invited into a couple of apartments (by women), and I felt completely safe to do so. I met a lot of kids that day, too, and I gave them all animal stickers.

We decided to go back to the same neighborhood on Sunday- again the weather was really nice, but as I was leaving the house Sunday afternoon, I really really didn't want to go back. I forced myself to because I knew that I would feel awful if I didn't get up and go. There was no excuse for me not to. We waited until the afternoon on Sunday because we knew lots of people would be out at church in the morning, but man did we pick the wrong time to go over there... it was Haitian-American Day, and there was a big parade down Blue Hill Avenue! It was really cool to see everyone out, waving flags, playing loud music, etc, but it made our job impossible because most people were out of the house. We only worked for about 90 minutes before giving up to watch the parade.

I managed to get out again tonight... in the rain. I'm trying to get my last few down so I can grab another set of assignments from Ron- hopefully I can grab those by Thursday or Friday of this week. Then, all I have to do is get those finished and that should be it for the census gig.