(FLINT, Michigan) – Your childhood memories are still vivid: warnings against drinking or cooking with tap water, enduring long lines for water tanks, washing in buckets filled with heated bottled water. And for some, stomach upset, rashes and hair loss.
Ten years ago in Flint – April 25, 2014 – city and state environmental officials raised celebratory glasses when the mayor pressed a button to stop the flow of Lake Huron water supplied by Detroit for nearly half a century. This triggered a public health crisis caused by lead and bacteria, from which the city has not fully recovered.
But dozens of children from the water crisis – now teenagers and young adults – have turned their trauma into advocacy. They provide information about public health initiatives, participate in social issues campaigns, distribute filters and provide free water testing for homeowners.
They know Flint is a place still struggling. The population has declined by about 20,000 in the last decade, leaving abandoned homes as targets for arsonists. Almost 70% of children live in poverty and many struggle in school. Although the water has been declared safe to drink, distrust is deepand hundreds of lead water pipes stay on the ground because owners were allowed to choose not to replace them.
But the young activists say they want to help make a difference and change the way their city is seen by outsiders. And they want to defy expectations.
“One of the biggest problems with growing up in Flint is that people had already decided and predetermined who we were,” said Cruz Duhart, 22, a member of the Flint Public Health Youth Academy.
“They had ideas about our IQ, about behavioral issues, but they never stopped to talk to us and how we thought about it and the types of trauma we were going through.”
___
It has always been easier for 16-year-old Sima Gutierrez to express herself through art. Drawings, paintings and wire sculptures decorate his family’s tidy bungalow.
Now, the self-described “very shy” teenager, who rarely spoke for fear that no one would want to hear what she had to say, collects water samples from people’s homes and takes them to the Flint Community Water Lab, where more than 60 High school and college interns have provided free testing to thousands of residents since 2020.
She helped plan public awareness campaigns on topics such as gun violence and how racism impacts public health as a member of the Flint Public Health Youth Academy.
“I wanted to be surrounded by people who wouldn’t gloss over the whole fact that people are still having problems,” Sima said. “I was able to…share my life with anyone else going through what I’m going through.”
It’s been a decade since she complained that she had a stomach ache when she drank water. Her mother insisted that this would help Sima’s body eliminate the medications she was taking for an autoimmune disorder that was causing her hair to fall out in patches and leaving her skin with light patches.
Residents began reporting rashes and complaining about discolored, smelly and bad-tasting water soon after the city began drawing water from the Flint River to save money until it could connect to a new gas pipeline from Lake Huron. But they were assured that everything was fine.
Sima said she wasn’t aware of the problems until one of her elementary school classmates, Mari Copeny — then a 7-year-old beauty pageant winner known as Little Miss Flint — began protesting. Mari has become the face of the crisis and continues to highlight environmental justice issues for nearly 200,000 Instagram followers and raise money, including for water filters that she distributes to communities across the US.
“I want to continue using my voice to spread awareness about Flint’s water crisis, because it’s not just Flint that has a water crisis,” Mari said.
___
Nearly a year and a half after Flint made the change, residents frustrated with their water quality contacted an expert who discovered elevated lead levels caused by the city’s failure to add chemicals that prevent pipes from corroding. State officials said that was unnecessary. Around the same time, a pediatrician discovered that levels in the children’s blood doubled after the change.
Legionnaire Outbreaks Diseases, including a dozen deaths, were ultimately also linked, in part, to the city’s water supply.
Flint reconnected to the old water line soon after, but the pipes continued to leak lead. The state provided residents with filters and bottled water.
Lead is a potent neurotoxin that can damage children’s brains and nervous systems and affect learning, behavior, hearing and speech. There is no safe level of childhood exposure and problems can manifest themselves years later.
Data collected over a decade now shows that children in Flint have higher rates of ADHD, behavioral and mental health problems and more learning difficulties than children assessed before the water crisis, said Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha , the pediatrician who first flagged rising lead levels. in the blood of the Flint children. She said other issues, including nutrition, poverty, unemployment and systemic inequalities, could also be factors.
Sima and three of her sisters were found to have elevated lead levels and have since been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder; Sima also has learning difficulties.
“I felt responsible for forcing my daughter to drink something that was hurting her so much and I didn’t believe her,” said her mother, Jessica Gutierrez, who works as a public health advocate for hospitals and nonprofits and fears for her daughters. ‘ long-term health.
Guilt and anxiety are “part of the trauma of crisis,” Hanna-Attisha said.
That’s why it’s important that Flint’s children feel like they are being heard and that they are part of the solutions, she said. For example, the Flint Juvenile Justice League, an advisory board for it Pediatric Public Health Initiativepresented suggestions on programs including prescribing fresh fruits and vegetables, reducing poverty and connecting residents to public services.
“Our young people are amazing,” Hanna-Attisha said. “They don’t agree with the status quo and demand that we do better for them and for generations to come.”
___
Asia Donald remembers feeling helpless and confused when her younger sister developed rashes and her mother boiled pot after pot of bottled water for her bath.
But just a few years later, she was talking to children in Newark, New Jersey, guiding them through their own lead in water crisis. In Zoom meetings, Flint children explained parts per billion, how to test water for lead and how they dealt with fear.
“They felt exactly the same way I felt when I was… going through it,” said Asia, 20, now an aspiring accountant and one of 18 interns at Flint Youth Public Health Academy.
They receive a monthly stipend to run the academy – writing grants, creating budgets, analyzing data, conducting focus groups, and creating public awareness campaigns. They have a bi-weekly talk show on YouTube where they discuss everything from mental health to COVID.
Last summer, they planned and organized a summer camp for dozens of children focusing on gun violence and school shootings. This year, together with the Community Foundation of Greater Flint, they are coordinating a youth summit on community violence.
Kent Key, a public health researcher at Michigan State University’s College of Human Medicine in Flint, founded the academy after studying health disparities in the black community as part of his doctoral thesis.
He wanted to introduce black children to possible careers in healthcare, but he also felt that “everyone had written off the young people of Flint because of the impacts of lead.” So he gave them more than a voice, he said. He gave them control.
“I didn’t want (the water crisis) to be a sentence of doom and gloom for the youth,” he said. “I wanted it to be a catapult…to launch the next generation of public health professionals.”
___
Dionna Brown, who was 14 when the water crisis began, became interested in advocacy after taking a class on environmental inequality at Howard University. Now she’s planning her life around it — completing a master’s degree in sociology from Wayne State University with plans to become an environmental justice lawyer.
She is also national director of Young, Gifted & Green’s youth environmental justice program, formerly called Black Millennials for Flint and founded by Washington advocates to support Flint after the crisis.
Brown holds an annual two-week environmental justice summer camp in Flint to teach teens about issues such as politics, climate justice, sustainability and housing disparities. She also works with children in Baltimore and Memphis.
She said the water crisis has made Flint’s children resilient.
“I tell people all the time: I’m a child of the Flint water crisis,” Brown said. “I love my city. And we warn the world that you can’t just poison a city and forget about it.”
___
Associated Press video journalist Mike Householder contributed to this story.
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
