(FLINT, Mich.) — His childhood memories are still vivid: warnings against drinking or cooking with tap water, enduring long lines for cases of water, washing in buckets full of hot bottled water. And for some, stomach pains, rashes and hair loss.
Ten years ago in Flint (April 25, 2014), city and state environmental officials raised glasses in celebration as the mayor pressed a button to stop the flow of Lake Huron water supplied by Detroit for nearly half a century. That set in motion a bacterial and lead public health crisis from which the city has not fully recovered.
But dozens of children affected by the water crisis (now teenagers and young adults) have turned their trauma into advocacy. They provide input on public health initiatives, participate in campaigns on social issues, distribute filters, and offer free water testing for homeowners.
They know Flint is a place that still struggles. The population has fallen by about 20,000 people in the last decade, leaving abandoned houses targeted by arsonists. Nearly 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 the owners were allowed to choose not to replace them.
But young activists say they want to help make a difference and change the way outsiders perceive their city. And they want to challenge 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 kind of traumas we were going through.”
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It has always been easier for 16-year-old Sima Gutiérrez to express herself through art. Drawings, paintings and wire sculptures decorate her family’s tidy bungalow.
Now, the teenager who describes herself as “very shy” and 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 Water Laboratory. Flint Community, where more than 60 high school and college interns have provided free testing to thousands of residents since 2020.
He helped plan public awareness campaigns on issues such as gun violence and how racism affects public health as a member of the Flint Public Health Youth Academy.
“I wanted to be around people who wouldn’t hide the fact that people still have problems,” Sima said. “I was able to… share my life with anyone else who is going through what I am going through.”
A decade ago he complained that his stomach hurt when he drank water. Her mother insisted that she help Sima’s body eliminate the medications she was taking for an autoimmune disorder that caused her hair to fall out in patches and left her skin with light spots.
Residents had begun reporting rashes and complaining about discolored, smelly and bad-tasting water shortly after the city began drawing water from the Flint River to save money until it could be connected to a new pipeline from Lake Huron. But they assured them that everything was fine.
Sima said she was unaware 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 became the face of the crisis and continues to highlight environmental justice issues to her nearly 200,000 Instagram followers and raise money, including for water filters she distributes to communities across the United States.
“I want to continue to use my voice to raise awareness about the water crisis in Flint because it’s not just Flint that has a water crisis,” Mari said. “The United States has a water crisis.”
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Nearly a year and a half after Flint made its switch, residents frustrated with water quality turned to an expert who later found high levels of lead caused by the city’s failure to add chemicals that prevent corrosion of the pipes. State officials had said they were unnecessary. Around the same time, a pediatrician discovered that the children’s blood levels had doubled after the change.
Legionnaire’s shoots The illnesses, including a dozen deaths, were also ultimately linked, in part, to the city’s water supply.
Flint was reconnected to its old water line shortly after, but the pipes continued to release 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 years later.
Data collected over a decade now shows that Flint children have higher rates of ADHD, mental and behavioral health problems and more learning difficulties than children tested before the water crisis, said Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha , the pediatrician who first noticed rising blood lead levels in Flint children. She said other issues, such as 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 so harmful to her and I didn’t believe her,” said her mother, Jessica Gutiérrez, who works as a public health advocate for hospitals and nonprofit organizations and fears for her daughters. . ‘long-term health.
Guilt and anxiety are “part of the trauma of the crisis,” Hanna-Attisha said.
That’s why it’s important for Flint children to feel like they are being heard and are part of the solutions, he said. For example, the Flint Juvenile Justice League, an advisory board of its Pediatric Public Health Initiativehas offered 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 disagree with the status quo and demand that we do better for them and for generations to come.”
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Asia Donald remembers feeling helpless and bewildered when her little sister developed rashes and her mother boiled pot after pot of bottled water to bathe.
But just a few years later, he was talking to children in Newark, New Jersey, guiding them through their own lead-in-water crisis. During Zoom meetings, Flint children explained parts per billion, how to test water for lead, and how they had dealt with fear.
“They felt exactly the same way I felt when I was… going through this,” said Asia, 20, now an aspiring accountant and one of 18 interns at the 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 biweekly talk show on YouTube, where they’ve talked about everything from mental health to COVID.
Last summer, they planned and hosted a summer camp for dozens of children that focused on gun violence and school shootings. This year, along with the Greater Flint Community Foundation, they are coordinating a youth summit on community violence.
Dr. 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 dissertation.
He wanted to introduce black children to possible health-related careers, but he also felt that “everyone had written off the youth of Flint because of the impacts of lead.” So he gave them more than a voice, she said. He gave them control.
“I didn’t want (the water crisis) to be a pessimistic sentence for youth,” he said. “I wanted it to be a catapult… to launch the next generation of public health professionals.”
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Dionna Brown, who was 14 when the water crisis began, became interested in advocacy after taking a class on environmental inequality at Howard University. She is now planning her life around this: completing a master’s degree in sociology from Wayne State University with plans to become an environmental justice attorney.
She is also the 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 hosts a two-week environmental justice summer camp in Flint each year to teach teens about topics such as policy, climate justice, sustainability and housing disparities. She also works with children in Baltimore and Memphis.
He said the water crisis made Flint children resilient.
“I tell people all the time: I am 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 we will forget about it.”
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Associated Press video journalist Mike Householder contributed to this story.