What the Eyes Don't See_A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City

by Mona Hanna-Attisha

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  HUDDLED IN OUR CORNER of the kitchen, Elin and I continued to talk about the leaked EPA memo. It felt as if a two-person pup tent had dropped over us, and the rest of the party had gone away.

  “I need more wine,” I said, and hunted for the open bottle.

  Lead in the water. Now that I knew the truth, I couldn’t un-know it. I could only go forward.

  “Let’s think for a second.”

  “I don’t want to sound pessimistic,” Elin said, “but you’re probably looking at years of fighting this before anything will be done.”

  It was Elin’s nature to be cautious and circumspect. When we met, I had been young for ninth grade, only thirteen, an extrovert who went out for every sport, every activity, every play, and every musical, even though I had limited athletic talent and a pretty terrible voice. Elin was almost a year older, an introvert with an engineer’s mind who looked at life as a series of problems and puzzles to solve, slowly and carefully. She was the kid who read every page of her assigned work—and then read all the books that it referenced. By our senior year of high school, I was class president, and she was class valedictorian. And while I was perpetually upbeat and talkative, my old friend was, well, kind of ruminative and quiet.

  Her career had emphasized this even more. Her degrees in environmental science and environmental engineering had led her to work at government bureaucracies where she was always rolling a giant boulder uphill, going against improbable odds, doing endless paperwork exercises, and struggling against political tides. Results came after decades, not after days or months—something that would have been torture for an impatient person like me. We were both newly married and starting families in the years when she was working at the EPA. She had been scarred by that experience, but I didn’t really know how.

  “I had a bad feeling about Flint from the beginning,” she went on, describing a water-quality meeting she had attended in Michigan the previous year, when she first heard about the water switch. It was supposed to save Flint money and to be better down the road, or at least that’s how it had been explained at the time. “It didn’t make any financial or engineering sense to change from Lake Huron. Water source changes are very rare. No one goes from a high-quality water source to a lower-quality source unless they are running out of water. And Lake Huron wasn’t going anywhere. The infrastructure was all in place. But there was a new requirement that states do an evaluation to make sure that corrosion isn’t a factor when a water source change occurs. So I reassured myself with that.”

  Elin’s and my longest and deepest bond was environmental activism, something we also shared with my brother. We had been profoundly influenced by Roberta Magid—or “Bobby,” as we secretly nicknamed her—a feisty, progressive New Yorker and high school librarian who was the faculty adviser to our high school environmental club, SEA. But SEA was more than a school club. It was a serious real-world undertaking where we learned to strategize and create real change through direct action. Sure, we did the regular stuff of any high school environmental club, like recycling cans and putting on eco-plays for elementary school kids. Mark played an evil Trash Monster, Elin was Aqua Anastasia, and I was always Mother Earth.

  AN ENVIRONMENTAL FAIR WITH ELIN, NINTH GRADE, 1991

  But Roberta encouraged us to take it further—to take risks, to put ourselves on the line. We studied activism by becoming activists—going beyond changes in individual behavior to explore how policy and politics helped or hurt our causes.

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  OUR BIGGEST UNDERTAKING WAS the Madison Heights incinerator. An elementary school stood in the shadows of its smokestacks, and from soil samples and air-quality reports commissioned by a local community group, Clean Air Please (CAP), we learned that the adjacent neighborhood had higher rates of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. For decades, soot from the incinerator coated these modest working-class homes. The county closed the incinerator for a time, but when it tried to reopen it, we went to the streets with CAP, led by a courageous nurse and single mom, Pam Ortner. A group of us—including Elin, Annie, Mark, and our classmate Dave Woodward—protested, knocked on doors, and wrote letters.

  Then we campaigned to elect John Freeman, an environmentalist and lawyer, to the state legislature. Once in office, he added a provision to a state law to make it impossible for an incinerator to operate so close to a school. That was the end of the Madison Heights incinerator. It closed down for good in 1992, our sophomore year of high school.

  Standing there in the kitchen, I thought back to Roberta and Pam and John and their leadership. How much they had inspired me. How committed they were, and how much they cared. Their activism combined environment, health, and policy at once—and made the world a little better.

  Once you have had a chance to change things, to have a real-world impact, you never forget it. I felt myself tapping back into that powerful feeling, but the urgency and scope of the problem felt overwhelming.

  “Years? But how could this take years to resolve?” I asked, incredulous. “Lead is the worst kind of poison. Permanent. Life-altering. These kids can’t afford another day.” I thought Elin was being too pessimistic.

  “Remember what I went through in D.C.?” she asked.

  I shook my head. I was embarrassed not to remember an important story from Elin’s life that she apparently had told me, but I didn’t have time for apologies at that moment. “Remind me.”

  “Remember when I left the EPA?” she went on. “And why I refused to work for D.C. Water?”

  I searched my memory, trying to jar something loose. “There was somebody you were trying to stay away from, right?”

  “Something like that. Not only did nobody get punished for the D.C. crisis, some were promoted. What you need to know tonight is that, basically, scientists and activists tried to prove that children were harmed, but they couldn’t get the health data to show it. Lead was in the D.C. water for years. More lead than you could imagine. More lead than I want to think about.”

  This shocked me. Where had I been?

  “D.C. is the worst-case scenario,” Elin said. “They made a treatment change but didn’t study its effect on water quality in advance. When they started measuring high lead in the water, they just kept sampling to try to bring down the system average, but in fact they kept measuring lead at higher and higher concentrations. And they didn’t tell the public. Nothing happened until The Washington Post put the story on the front page three years after it started. Even then, the government and utility demanded proof of impact, but never really got it.”

  “Proof of impact, like—”

  “Proof. Like, researchers couldn’t draw the link between increased lead levels in water and impact on kids. No link, no traction. No link, no action. Just a lot of stalling and—”

  She stopped in midthought. “Wait, aren’t you in charge of the hospital in Flint? Or something like—”

  “No, I’m in charge of the pediatric residents, and—”

  “But don’t you have access to the kids’ blood-lead tests?”

  “Yes. Of course I do.”

  Kids on Medicaid are supposed to have their blood-lead levels tested at one and two years of age. My mind began working so quickly, thinking about how to get hold of the blood data that I’d need, that I forgot to keep up my end of the conversation.

  “Mona.”

  “Yeah.” I wasn’t really hearing her.

  “Mona, listen to me.”

  “What?”

  Elin moved very close to me, inches away. Her gray-green eyes were emitting a laser sharpness and energy that would have been scary if I hadn’t known her so well.

  “You can do this,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  A fog of unreality fell over the rest of the party. Elin’s
words pinged and echoed in my head as the ragtag rock band devolved into chaos, and two of the littlest kids had very dramatic meltdowns. There were cries and pleas, Mommy, Mommy! It was late, past their bedtimes. We moved our guests quickly to the front door, where I gave everybody a hug and a short goodbye. With difficulty, Elliott put his sling back on. We cleaned up, did the dishes, and went upstairs to put the girls to bed.

  I WAS DISTRACTED, MY HEAD STILL SPINNING from the conversation with Elin. All I could think about was getting to a computer and searching for papers on lead exposure, on the D.C. water crisis, on water treatment chemicals and their corrosion effects. But Nina and Layla were asking for a bedtime story. They wanted me to tell them “Haji and the Birds.” They usually heard it from my mom or my brother.

  “Oh, I’m not good at telling that story,” I said.

  “Come on,” Nina said softly.

  “Tell us!” Layla insisted.

  “What if I just talk to you about Haji instead?” I said. “I don’t think you remember him.”

  “I do,” Nina said.

  Elliott entered the room. “Are you telling Haji stories?”

  “Yes!” The girls called out.

  “Okay,” I said, sitting on the edge of the bed with Elliott, all four of us together. “Just like you guys are learning a lot of amazing stuff from your grandparents, like how to speak Arabee, make yummy food, and grow a garden, I learned lots of things from Haji.”

  Layla was starting to drift off, but fighting it.

  Nina, a night owl, was hanging on every word.

  “Haji lived far away, in Baghdad, where he had many successes, many jobs and businesses, and where he had so many friends. They were all kinds of people with different religions and different ethnic backgrounds—Kurds and Jews and Muslims. He was an idealist. Do you remember what that means? It’s somebody who believes the world can be better than it is now. Haji had great faith in people but less faith in religion.”

  “Did he go to church?” Layla asked. I figured she was curious because, unlike most Chaldean families, we weren’t regular churchgoers.

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “There’s actually a story about that,” I said.

  “Tell us that story, Mama.”

  “Okay.”

  Layla smiled and settled deeper into her bed.

  “Haji had four brothers. All their names ended in an L. I don’t know why. And Haji’s real name was Khalil, so his name ended in an L too. He had two sisters. Do you remember their names?”

  “One of them was Layla!” Layla said.

  “That’s right. They were all very creative and started many businesses. One uncle was a lawyer. Another uncle opened a famous bookstore called Dar Al Katub Al Kadema, which means ‘The House of Old Books.’ It was the meeting place for idealists in Baghdad. Another uncle was a prominent chemist who graduated from American University in Beirut, and another became a lawyer. And Haji was a successful businessman who traveled around the world and later became director of Pepsi-Cola in Iraq.

  “But at one time all the brothers were in business together. They owned a perfume factory. Haji enjoyed tinkering with various oils and scents to create amazing, exotic fragrances. He had an amazing nose,” I said, touching the tip of Layla’s. “Later, they made plastic prayer beads and sold them to Shiite pilgrims traveling to the holy cities of Karbala and Najaf.

  “We have a lot of chemists and scientists in our family, don’t we?”

  The girls nodded.

  “Because of their reputation for mixing chemicals, during World War II, the British Royal Air Force asked Haji and his brothers for advice. It was so dry and windy in the desert of Iraq, and there were so many sandstorms, that the paint on the British airplanes was peeling off. After some experimentation, Haji and his brothers melted reels of old movie film and mixed it with the paint, and the problem was solved. In addition to keeping the paint from peeling, the brothers’ paint recipe seemed to make the planes invisible from the ground—and harder to shoot down.

  “Pretty cool, huh?” The girls were captivated.

  “Around that time, Haji’s perfume factory burned down. He and his brothers lost everything in this fire. As the factory smoldered, or burned down to ash, they sat on the corner across the street. They were inconsolable. Do you know what that means?”

  “Keep going,” Nina said, nodding.

  But I knew she didn’t know what inconsolable meant.

  “They were feeling as sad as they’d ever felt, and unlucky. Nothing could lift their mood. While they were sitting on the corner, a long line of people came to say how sorry they were. All their friends came, their neighbors, the local imams, and a rabbi. Finally all their employees came, to offer words of support and encouragement. Don’t give up! Just build a new factory!

  “Haji said that wasn’t possible. He didn’t have the energy, and he was feeling too defeated. But the employees kept encouraging him. Don’t give up! When Haji said he didn’t have the money to build a new factory, the employees offered him money. How much do you need? they asked. One by one, they began handing him Iraqi dinars.

  “This impressed Haji so much. The employees had little money of their own, but they wanted to help. Afterward, whenever he told the story of his perfume factory burning down, he would cry. He was moved by the goodness of his friends and employees. Their generosity consoled him—made him feel better. It helped him to be brave and rebuild. And he was no longer sad.”

  Layla looked me sideways. “Ha!”

  “But he noticed that none of the Iraqi priests offered him help or support—or even a kind word. One priest told Haji that the fire was God’s punishment for his arrogance. He said that Haji believed in people more than in God. Haji stopped going to church after that. He said he would never step in a church again.”

  “Never?” Nina asked.

  “Almost never,” I said. “But you know, what the priest said was true. Haji did believe in people more than anything else. And they believed in him. He was a humanist, someone who believes that people can make the world better. Haji respected everyone’s beliefs and never spoke against any religion. But he didn’t believe that God wanted calamity for anyone—or that anyone deserved to be abandoned to fate or bad luck. He taught me to treat everybody well, because we are all equal, no matter what we look like, what we believe in, or how much money we have. To always do the right thing, even if it’s hard. Even if people tell you it’s impossible. And maybe that’s even better than going to church.”

  I looked over at Elliott, who was now smiling too, remembering Haji.

  “Even today,” I went on, “kids and grandkids of Haji’s employees reach out to us, totally out of the blue, to tell their Haji stories, and they always mention his generosity. So their gratitude is passed down through stories and extends to us, even to you, Haji’s great-granddaughters. Because Haji’s actions in life, and things he believed in, left a mark on us all—even though we can’t see it.”

  AFTER THE GIRLS FINALLY FELL ASLEEP, hours passed, a blur of time in the dark with only the brightness of my iPad screen. As soon as Elin arrived home and put her kids to bed, she had sent me a long email with links to Wikipedia pages, Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reports, and EPA memos. I was up for three or four hours in bed, deluged by reports about water quality, water testing, water treatments, water pipe corrosion, and lead. Totally consumed, I forgot to sleep.

  From time to time, I heard Elliott shifting. He was restless, trying to sleep in a big recliner that we’d borrowed from my parents and hauled up to the corner of our bedroom. The barbecuing had probably been too much for his shoulder. He was in pain and hooked up to an ice machine. Usually the continuous vibratory hum and pumping sounds were hypnotic and put me to sleep, but not tonight.

  He asked me what Elin and I had been so intensely
talking about. I thought he might have overheard something, but I didn’t want to get into it. I said quickly, “Oh—nothing, nothing.” He knew me well enough to let it go.

  FROM: Elin Betanzo

  TO: Mona Hanna-Attisha

  SENT: August 26, 2015, 11:57:56 P.M.

  SUBJECT: Lead in drinking water and Flint

  Hi Mona,

  Here is a lot of information about what I understand about the drinking water in Flint and a comparison to what happened in Washington, D.C. I’d be happy to help you wade through it if you’d like. If you know of any ways that I could help out in Flint let me know.

  As the hours passed, I was stunned by how Elin had anticipated the water problems before they’d begun. The year before, when she learned about the water switch, she had offered her expertise as an independent water-quality engineer to help ensure that the new water supply was safe, but she had been turned down, told she wasn’t needed. She was told everything was fine.

  I started my reading with a few stories by Ron Fonger, an intrepid reporter at The Flint Journal and MLive.com, its online platform. Fonger had done a solid job covering the water switch—the residents’ concerns and their activism, the parade of assurances from the city and state—but it felt as if nobody had been listening or paying attention. Not the people in power, anyway. I moved on to a series of articles by a Detroit investigative reporter, Curt Guyette, who had been assigned to cover the emergency manager story for the Michigan chapter of the ACLU, with funding from the Ford Foundation. Their concern was that citizens’ rights to self-government might be usurped by a state-appointed EM. The collaboration between the ACLU and the Ford Foundation was a first for both of them, a philanthropic effort to fill the gap in costly investigative work that traditional media could no longer afford.

  Guyette had been a skeptic about the water source switch all along. He dogged officials with questions they never answered, or at least not to his satisfaction. He tried to dig deeper into the story but didn’t really find answers until the EPA memo was leaked to him. In July 2015 he posted a news story on the ACLU blog and Deadline Detroit, releasing the memo to the public.