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

by Mona Hanna-Attisha

  Marc Edwards gave his EPA buddies, especially Miguel Del Toral, a heads-up and told his trusted media contacts that my team had been able to produce the final piece of the puzzle that was missing in the D.C. crisis.

  Blood data.

  Proof of impact.

  “This is a game changer,” Marc kept saying.

  He predicted that the state would not be able to continue stalling. He told LeeAnne Walters and other citizen scientists and Flint activists about the press conference and urged them to attend. After being ignored for so long, they had doubts that the medical community was actually going to do anything. Marc assured them this would be different. The blood data would change everything.

  * * *

  —

  SLEEP WAS THE ONLY THING I needed. I had to be fresh and ready for whatever tomorrow would bring. But every cell of my body buzzed with excitement, every neuron and synapse of my brain was firing in every direction.

  I was sure of my research. We had checked and double-checked and triple-checked. Jenny and I, both cautious to the point of paranoid, ran the numbers in multiple ways. They always came out the same. And although we still didn’t have the state data, our sample was sufficiently large to make the point with statistical certainty—and enough proof to force the state to confront its negligence and mistakes. But there was no way to know what the reaction would be, and I was worried.

  Down deep, something else was eating away at me. Aeb. It was difficult to describe without using the imprecise word shame. It was not just an Iraqi thing; it was an Arabic thing. It was the idea that you were never acting independently of your family or larger community. You always had a connection to a larger group, and there were always repercussions. If you behaved badly, or strayed even a little bit from the accepted norm, you would bring shame not only upon yourself but on your people. There was nothing worse.

  Aeb is used to keep people in line, particularly kids and particularly girls. Anything could be aeb. Getting in trouble in school. Not going to church. Being gay. Wearing skimpy clothes. Whatever. Even small and seemingly insignificant things could be considered aeb. If you offered someone chai, for instance, and they said no, you still had to bring them chai. Because it didn’t matter what they said—it would be aeb not to.

  I hate aeb. It’s a debilitating and ugly concept. I try not to conform. If somebody doesn’t want chai or isn’t hungry for dessert, I don’t bring it to them. But in my mom’s mind, this is aeb, and it drives her crazy.

  Even though my family lives on the edges and outside the norms of the Chaldean community—we are progressives, political dissidents, and nonchurchgoers—the concept of aeb was deeply ingrained in us. My mom still talked about aeb. My dad did too. Aeb is the reason I started eating meat, so I wouldn’t insult Elliott’s mom with rude and ungrateful behavior. It’s serious in our culture—and hard to ignore.

  I thought about the press conference, the public release of my research. I thought about getting it wrong, embarrassing and shaming my family, my colleagues, my clinic, and my profession—in such a public way.

  That would be the most colossal aeb of all.

  * * *

  —

  ELLIOTT KNOWS THAT WHEN I’m under stress or am facing something big and overwhelming, I want to be left alone and not talk too much about it. So he carefully and sweetly asked if there was anything he could do. “You’ll be great tomorrow,” he said.

  My brother emailed too, striking the balance of encouraging me while leaving me alone, something he’d calibrated over a lifetime of big-brothering. He didn’t mention that he’d explained the entire Flint water saga to Bebe—how it had happened, and how wrong it was that nobody was doing anything about it. He told her that I was doing the right thing, the only thing I could do—advocate for the kids of Flint.

  “But why does it have to be Mona,” Bebe asked, “not somebody else?”

  “Because Mona has the data. She has the proof. Nobody else has done that. She is a doctor, a scientist, maybe they will listen.”

  Bebe was quiet for a second. “What if somebody attacks her, or hurts her?”

  That question tells you so much about my mom’s life. But she didn’t try to stop me, or say a word. She called my dad in China instead and told him. They studied the time difference and figured out how to tune in and watch the press conference on TV.

  The last person I heard from was Andy. To him, I was just a doctor, hence clueless about how to give a press conference, handle a crowd, or be an activist. He sent a text, making sure everything was set up with Ron Fonger at The Flint Journal.

  ME: I talked to him. We are meeting tomorrow at Flint Farmers’ Market at 8:45 A.M. for an interview

  ANDY: Excellent. Get some rest. I am sure it will be good to get this off your chest

  ME: thanks. I’ll hopefully be able to sleep better ;)

  I set my head down, but no part of my pillow was comfortable. No place in the bed felt right. I tossed, waiting to become drowsy.

  * * *

  —

  ALMOST EVERY YEAR when Mark and I were growing up, my parents sent out Christmas cards. They did them in newsletter style, like a PR bulletin that covered all the year’s accomplishments in a classic American way. In 1991, when we were sophomores at Kimball High School, Mark and I coauthored the card and wrote about two engineering awards that my dad had won and the teaching certificate that our mom was studying for. We described our own involvement in SEA, the environmental club—and the three months we’d spent organizing an eco-fair against toxic pollution with Greenpeace and local grassroots activists. We talked about our family car trip to Yellowstone, Badlands, and Mount Rushmore.

  And the beginning of the card covered the latest news from the Persian Gulf War:

  Since Iraq is our homeland, we were in constant fear for our relatives. My grandparents as well as numerous uncles, aunts, and cousins reside in Baghdad; fortunately they were all unharmed. As the end of the war came, so did a little peace of mind for us, but little else for the Iraqi people still under the tormenting dictatorial eye of Saddam Hussein.

  The following year the annual letter reported on family progress again. I had become the publisher of the Kimball High newspaper. Mark had gotten a summer job working for a computer company. We were both still active in environmentalism. News from Iraq was a bit better, or so we thought: “Saddam is still in power, but his end looms near, which will bring great relief to the people of Iraq.”

  After 1994, my dad wrote the cards (although Mark and I edited the grammar; there are nuances in English he has never quite mastered). He seemed to really enjoy heralding our achievements. Mark and I graduated from Kimball with honors. I was president of my class, on the homecoming court. (Subversively, I wore a tie-dyed SEA T-shirt.)

  AT THE HOMECOMING COURT, 1993

  But my dad focused on a commendation that Mark and I both received from the EPA, signed by President Clinton, for our environmental activism.

  And his optimism about Iraq ended.

  The situation under Saddam Hussein is getting progressively worse. This is very disheartening to us. After the war, the embargo has strangled the Iraqi people while Saddam is living in luxury. The suffering has triggered another exodus to the United States, especially to the Detroit area where there is an established Middle Eastern community.

  By 2000, I was in medical school and living in Flint. Mark was in D.C. My mom had established herself as an in-demand ESL teacher and spent two weeks in Japan, studying the education system and culture. The World Trade towers were still standing, and President Bush wasn’t yet using their tragic fall as an excuse for a new war.

  Of course we continue to keep our eyes on our native Middle East. While much of the world is focused elsewhere, Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime is continuing to strangle the Iraqi people and the sanctions on Iraq only exace
rbate his hold on power. We pray for a just peace there and throughout the troubled Middle East.

  At home, my dad was a man of Vulcan-like stoicism and restraint—he never even hugged us—but every year his Christmas tone grew darker and sadder, like the sound of a mournful trumpet. He saved the news about his homeland for the ending, a memorial space for those still in Iraq, still suffering and in danger. We never wanted to forget them. As for us, the message was clear: The Hanna family had once lived in Iraq. We loved that place in the deepest part of ourselves. And we were living with its loss—with homesickness, with disturbance, with injustice.

  The loss only got worse after September 11. It hit us all, and it will go down as one of the modern world’s great evil acts. And then the lies of the George W. Bush administration about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction caused more destruction, death, and suffering. Some five thousand American soldiers died in the Iraq War, tens of thousands were injured, and an entire generation of soldiers will live with lifelong trauma.

  A great many more Iraqis have been harmed or killed. Since the 2003 invasion, according to the Iraq Body Count website, some 268,000 Iraqis have been killed by violence—most of them civilians—and as many as half a million have perished in total, if all the deaths resulting from the war are counted.

  “Every year we mention the situation in Iraq,” my dad wrote in his Christmas letter of 2004, the year Elliott and I married—and the year my father produced a PowerPoint presentation called “Mass Graves Symphony” about the atrocities in his homeland. “The occupation was bungled,” he wrote. “A civil war loomed. And the final bonds between ethnic and religious groups that once lived alongside each other in peace are now broken….Besides the removal of Saddam, it’s hard to find anything positive to say.”

  In America, it’s easy for some to pretend that the suffering world is a million miles away, on another planet, while we are safe and innocent. But for me, the suffering world was etched in the sadness on my parents’ faces. It was written in the Christmas memos. Even though we were in the suburbs, safe and sound and on soccer teams and driving to Yellowstone, we were also connected by blood and heritage and humanity to the suffering world, and we couldn’t forget it. In every picture, every radio voice, every video image, I felt the pain of Iraq. And I saw it in me, in my family, and in my children.

  Now, as the press conference loomed, I was beginning to see that my family’s saga of loss and dislocation had given me my fight—my passion and urgency. It was what had led me to the after-school meetings of SEA at Kimball. When I heard Roberta Magid’s dismay at what was happening to the planet, I had felt it too, because I grew up with dismay and knew how wrong leaders could be, how cruel and negligent. They have to be held accountable, have to be challenged, because power corrupts, and our moral sensibility can be so dulled that we let atrocities happen right around us, unless we manage to stay constantly vigilant, sensitive, aroused, and ready to take a stand.

  * * *

  —

  JUST TWENTY-EIGHT DAYS BEFORE, I had known very little about water treatment, anticorrosives, service lines, and lead leaching. I hadn’t known much about lead exposure beyond paint and paint dust and bullets. I hadn’t met Marc or Senator Ananich or Andy. I couldn’t have told you the names of the directors in charge of the MDHHS or MDEQ. It was hard enough to keep track of the revolving door of EMs in Flint.

  I was drawing on something deep inside me. Maybe it was the letters my mom received from Haji in Baghdad, or the pictures I’d seen of the gassing of the Kurdish babies. Maybe it was the tenacity and optimism of Mama Evelyn or the strength and integrity of my dissident parents. Maybe it was the inspiration of my heroes, fighters like Alice Hamilton, Genora Johnson Dollinger, and Frank Murphy. Or maybe there was even something in my DNA, an ancestral inheritance of persistence and rebellion and activism, handed down to me from the generations of prolific scribes who had hoped to keep Nestorian traditions alive, or from Nuri Rufail Koutani with his brave rebellion, or from Paul Shekwana with his passion for public health.

  Or maybe it was simply that I was a mom. I cared about the kids in Flint as if they were my own, and I cared about injustice. That’s all I knew. That’s all I could think about. That fueled me, drove me on, and gave me a sense of commitment and inner purpose. All of me was in the fight now.

  * * *

  —

  AROUND FOUR-THIRTY IN THE morning, I texted Jenny and asked her to redo one of the graphs. I worried the presentation wasn’t grabby enough. Somewhere I read goldfish have a nine-second attention span. I didn’t know the attention span of journalists, but I didn’t want to just stand at the podium and show slides of words, graphs, and maps. This was not an audience of academics. I needed something more striking, more physical and real.

  I called Hurley and asked a nurse on the night shift what kind of baby bottles we had. They were all small, two ounces, and contained premixed formula. That was reassuring but not what I was looking for.

  “Okay,” I said, “I don’t want that kind. But could you put a can of the powdered formula in my office?” After I got off the phone, I realized the nurse must have thought I was crazy. Next, I sent a text to Allison. It was five in the morning, but she had a baby at home—maybe she was already up.

  THE PRESS CONFERENCE WAS ANNOUNCED IN a release from Hurley, then Ron Fonger wrote a story in The Flint Journal that my study was going public at one o’clock that afternoon and my presentation would be live-streamed online.

  When Governor Snyder’s office heard that I was calling a press conference about blood-lead levels in Flint kids, they had an immediate, very strong reaction.

  They went nuts.

  They called Hurley—upset that Senator Ananich had seen a draft of the presentation already—and asked for my data immediately. I guessed that meant I was in big trouble.

  Swearing and cursing was never my thing. I am a pediatrician and a mom with small kids. But now, after clocking time with Andy and Marc, who were masters of the explosive epithet, I was beginning to see the usefulness of an outrageous exclamation. Hearing that the governor’s people were upset was a perfect moment to get started.

  Give me a fucking break.

  I had been stalking and harassing the state health offices with concerns, inquiries, and warnings for weeks. Nobody cared. Nobody gave a shit. Now suddenly I was in trouble for not being in touch with Governor Snyder directly? You have to be fucking kidding. They were trying to cover their asses in so many different ways at once, it was stunning. And somehow it was all my fault.

  Another call came in to my boss, Melany, from a former lobbyist for Hurley. While on vacation out west, he had received a call from the governor’s “director of strategy,” who was also on vacation, asking about my study and the press conference. He was pretty angry, screaming and yelling. The former lobbyist explained that he didn’t represent Hurley anymore, was two thousand miles away, and had no idea what it was about, but would give Melany a call—which he did.

  Natasha Henderson was the next angry call to Melany’s office. Natasha’s aloof professional veneer had finally cracked. She didn’t mince words. “I understand there’s going to be a press conference?” She was just back from D.C., she said, and was calling from the airport. She wanted Melany to stop me.

  “Well,” Melany calmly explained, “it was my understanding that you were given a clear deadline, and that deadline passed. We’re a children’s hospital, and advocacy is our job. I’d like to think a public servant would feel the same way.”

  Although advocacy is a duty of a children’s hospital, it almost never means holding a press conference.

  Melany told me not to worry. She trusted me, and she trusted my science. If Hurley were a private hospital, or part of a hospital chain that looked only to shareholders and the bottom line for guidance, it might have quashed my sensitive research. But thankfully, it is a public hospita
l, one of the few left in the country, and we had a mandate to serve the community above all else. I sent my presentation to the Hurley PR people, and they sent it along to the governor’s office.

  That same morning another unsettling call came in, directly to me. It was Aron Sousa, the new interim dean of the medical school. Earlier in the week, when the Hurley press people had been crafting the news release, they contacted the MSU communications office to see if we could officially add MSU to the list of entities supporting my research. I had invited Dean Dean to the press conference, but he couldn’t make it. I hoped somebody from the college would be there.

  Aron Sousa called me directly with a response: nobody from the university would be attending.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “The university supports you as a member of the faculty,” he went on to explain, “but it cannot support your research.”

  What? I found the strange hair-splitting—supporting me but not my study—confusing and disturbing. I worried I was being thrown under the bus already.

  All along, Dean Dean, who ran the public health program at MSU, had been supportive but had also warned me that this was the health department’s job, the state’s job, not mine. I had argued with him that advocacy is part of my job—and the people at the health department were clearly not doing theirs. I told Aron Sousa the same thing. It’s my job—and also the medical school’s job. Our mission as a community-based land grant medical school was “Service to People.” I don’t think they were actively trying to discourage me. It was more nuanced than that. Dean Dean wanted me to understand that I was stepping out of my lane and into a role that would threaten people. He was a military man and probably saw things in terms of a rigid chain of command. I was stepping out—but what do you do when the people at the top of the chain are doing nothing and every day counts?