Children of Flint’s Water Crisis is creating change as young environmental and health activists

Tammy Webber
| Associated press

Flint, Mich. — Their childhood memories are still vivid: warnings against drinking or cooking with tap water, long lines for crates of water, washing from buckets filled with heated bottled water. And for some, stomach ache, rashes and hair loss.

Ten years ago in Flint – April 25, 2014 – city and state environmental officials raised celebratory glasses as the mayor pressed a button to stop the flow of Lake Huron water supplied by Detroit for nearly half a century. That set off a lead and bacteria public health crisis from which the city has yet to fully recover.

But dozens of children from the water crisis – now teenagers and young adults – have turned their trauma into advocacy. They provide input on public health initiatives, participate in social issue campaigns, distribute filters and offer free water testing to homeowners.

They know Flint is a place where things are still tough. The population has fallen by around 20,000 in the past 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 drinkable, mistrust runs deep and hundreds of lead water pipes remain in the ground because homeowners were allowed to refrain from replacing them.

But the young activists say they want to help make a difference and change the way outsiders view their city. And they want to defy expectations.

“One of the biggest problems growing up in Flint is that people had already decided and predetermined who we were,” said 22-year-old Cruz Duhart, a member of the Flint Public Health Youth Academy.

“They had ideas about our IQ, about behavioral things, but they never really stopped to talk to us and how we felt about it and the kind of trauma we were going through.”

For 16-year-old Sima Gutierrez, it has always been easiest to express herself through art. Drawings, paintings and wire sculptures decorate her family’s neat bungalow.

Now the self-described “very shy” teen, who rarely spoke for fear no one would hear what she had to say, collects water samples from people’s homes and brings them to the Flint Community Water Lab, where more than 60 high school and college interns to sit. have been offering free tests to thousands of residents since 2020.

As a member of the Flint Public Health Youth Academy, she helped plan awareness campaigns on topics such as gun violence and how racism affects public health.

“I wanted to be around people who didn’t want to gloss over the whole fact that people still have problems,” Sima said. “I was able to… share my life with everyone who is going through what I am going through.”

It was ten years ago that she complained that her stomach hurt when she drank water. Her mother insisted it would help Sima’s body flush out the medications she had taken for an autoimmune disease that caused her hair to fall out in patches and leave light spots on her skin.

Residents began reporting skin rashes and complaining of discolored, foul-smelling and foul-smelling water shortly after the city began drawing from the Flint River to save money until it could be connected to a new Lake Huron pipeline. But they were sure everything was fine.

Sima said she was unaware of the problems until one of her primary school classmates, Mari Copeny – then a seven-year-old beauty pageant winner known as Little Miss Flint – started protesting. Mari became the face of the crisis and continues to highlight environmental justice issues to nearly 200,000 Instagram followers and raise money, including for water filters that she distributes in communities across the US.

“I want to continue to use my voice to raise awareness about the Flint water crisis, because it’s not just Flint that has a water crisis,” Mari said. “America has a water crisis.”

Nearly a year and a half after Flint made the switch, residents frustrated with water quality contacted an expert. This found high lead levels caused by the city’s inability to add chemicals that prevent pipe corrosion. State officials had said they were not necessary. Around the same time, a pediatrician discovered that children’s blood levels doubled after the switch.

Outbreaks of Legionnaires’ disease, including a dozen deaths, were also ultimately linked in part to the city’s water supply.

Flint reconnected to the old water main shortly after, but because lead was still coming from the pipes. The state provided filters and bottled water for residents.

Lead is a powerful neurotoxin that can damage children’s brains and nervous systems and affect learning, behavior, hearing and speech. There is no safe exposure level for children and problems can manifest years later.

Data collected over a decade now shows that children in Flint are more likely to have ADHD, behavioral and mental health problems and to have more difficulty learning than children assessed before the water crisis, said Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, the pediatrician who led the first rising signaled lead levels. in the blood of Flint children. She said other issues, including nutrition, poverty, unemployment and systemic inequality, could also be factors.

Sima and three of her sisters were found to have elevated lead levels and have since been diagnosed with ADHD; Sima also has learning difficulties.

“I felt responsible because I forced my child to drink something that hurt her so much, and I didn’t believe her,” said her mother, Jessica Gutierrez, who works as a public health attorney for hospitals and nonprofits and fears for her daughters . ‘long-term health.

Guilt and fear are “part of the trauma of the crisis,” Hanna-Attisha said.

That’s why it’s important for Flint children to feel like they’re heard, that they’re part of the solutions, she says. For example, the Flint Youth Justice League, an advisory board to its Pediatric Public Health Initiative, has suggested programs that include prescribing fresh fruits and vegetables, reducing poverty and connecting residents to public services.

“Our young people are amazing,” says Hanna-Attisha. “They disagree with the status quo and demand that we do better for them and for generations to come.”

Asia Donald remembers feeling helpless and bewildered as her sister developed a rash and her mother boiled pot after pot of bottled water for bathing.

But just a few years later, she was speaking to children from Newark, New Jersey, and guiding them through their own water-in-water crisis. During Zoom meetings, Flint’s children explained parts per billion, how to test water for lead and how they had dealt with anxiety.

“They felt exactly the same way I did when I … went through it,” said Asia, 20, now an aspiring accountant and one of 18 interns at the Flint Public Health Youth 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, they are coordinating a youth summit on community violence with the Community Foundation of Greater Flint.

Dr. Kent Key, a public health researcher at Michigan State University College of Human Medicine in Flint, started the academy after studying health disparities in the black community as part of his dissertation.

He wanted to introduce black children to potential careers in health care, but also felt that “everyone had written off Flint youth because of the impact of lead.” So he gave them more than just a voice, he said. He gave them control.

“I didn’t want the water crisis to be a sense 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 course on environmental inequality at Howard University. Now she plans her life around it: She’s completing a master’s degree in sociology at Wayne State University with plans to become an environmental law attorney.

She is also national director of the youth environmental justice program at Young, Gifted & Green, formerly called Black Millennials for Flint and founded by Washington advocates to support post-crisis Flint.

Brown holds a two-week environmental justice summer camp in Flint every year to educate teens about issues such as policy, climate justice, sustainability and housing inequality. She also works with children in Baltimore and Memphis.

She said the water crisis has made Flint 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’re letting the world know that you can’t just poison a city and we’ll forget about it.”

Associated Press video journalist Mike Householder contributed to this story.

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