12-year-old helps document migrants' plight

12-year-old helps document migrants' plight
By Greg Mellen, Staff Writer
Posted: 12/04/2009
http://www.presstelegram.com/ci_13928742?source=rss


LONG BEACH - Stephanie Maldonado doesn't look like your typical community activist.

For one thing, she's just 12 years old. But this spring and in the summer of 2008, the seventh-grader at Hill Middle School spent time with destitute migrant farming families in the Coachella Valley. And that experience awakened something within her. Maldonado is no stranger to hard times. She is the youngest of three children and her mother works two jobs: in a cafeteria and as a cook at a restaurant. Her father, she says, is "not in the picture." She lives on the 1400 block of Elm Street in the gritty heart of Central Long Beach. When the idea of helping poor children was first proposed to Maldonado, it didn't immediately register.

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