Thinking About Flint: No Words, A Guest Post

I've been thinking about the Flint water situation for a while. Actually I wrote about the importance of investigative journalism and its relationship to Flint back in October of 2015 . (Congratulations to Curt Guyette for winning the Michigan Press Association award of Journalist of the Year.)

Other than that I have not been sure what to say (that hasn't been said already). Luckily  my friend Beverly Davidson wrote a very powerful piece on her blog, and she has agreed to let me cross-post it. Thank you!

[If you want to make a donation, Dr. Mona Hana-Attisha is suggesting the Community Foundation of Greater Flint.  Bev volunteered with Crossing Water.]

No Words, by Beverly Davidson

Crossposted from beverlymsw.wordpress.com.

Yesterday two of my friends and I had the honor of volunteering in Flint, MI for a small NGO called Crossing Water.   This is a volunteer organization started by some members of the National Association of Social Workers-MI chapter.  The goal of this group is to create connections among community groups in Flint to help serve impoverished communities who are deeply affected by the current water crisis.  What I saw was heart-breaking beyond words.  And it was only one day there.  I am trying to imagine living this way and I can’t. 

We came to a low-income housing complex run by the Flint Housing Commission.  I saw a case of water on people’s doorsteps that had been delivered earlier in the day by volunteers.  There was no governmental system in the complex to test water, distribute water, or provide lead-testing to the children.  This is a complex managed essentially by HUD.  Where are the government leaders?

We knocked on one door to deliver filters and water.  A young man answered who was happy to see us.  “Do you have a filter?” He does, but it did not fit, so we gave him another one which would work in his unit.  I asked if he had had his water tested, and he was not sure.  He showed me the testing bottle he had from his aunt’s house, which was on the floor of his car, but he could not find the paperwork to go with it (which is used for tracking and data analysis).  I explained how he had to get his water tested, making sure he understood to use unfiltered water that had been in the tap for at least 6 hours.  He had no idea he had to do this, as he had not heard that filtered water was not safe to drink either.  Children under six live with him, and they cannot drink even the filtered water. He had no idea, no one told him, and he does not have access to the internet to get all of the updates online.  My brilliant friend had the idea that instead of the Governor hiring PR firms to spin his reputation, perhaps he should hire PR firms to get a coordinated message out on safety and testing to ALL the people of Flint.

The next house four young children answered the door gleefully, as if they knew we were delivering water to them.    The little girl joyfully showed us her newly painted nails as we talked to her young auntie who was caring for them while their mom was at work.  We explained to the aunt about how to get her water tested, and she had no idea of the process.  She at least had a filter and we made sure she knew the kids could only drink the bottled water.  Then, the young boy strongly and sternly put out his arms for the case of water.  I said, “It’s pretty heavy, kiddo,” but he persisted with “I can do it!” I gave him the case and he proudly held it and brought it into the apartment.  All I could think about was that this little boy should not have to be so strong and sturdy that his little arms have to carry a case of water for his family, he should be holding out his arms to catch a ball or grab a swing.  But he was eager and ready for water.  Water he should be getting out of his tap, not out of a bottle.

Knock. knock.  A young mom answers her door and we ask if she needs water or a filter. She needed both, and I asked if there were any urgent medical issues.  She said her baby had a bad skin rash after a bath the other day, “but it’s ok, it went away today.”  NO, NO, NO, it’s not ok.  In the state of Michigan in 2016, a mother should be able to joyfully give her baby a bath and trust that her baby will be safe from skin rashes.  The saddest part is that this young mom just accepted this without much anger or question.  She has learned to live in a world that has treated her less than for so long that she readily accepts that her home is giving her baby skin rashes.

A few doors down, a young man answers the door for his elderly male relative who is homebound.   We give him some jugs of water and ask if they have a filter.  “yea, someone came by one day and gave us one.”  Did you know that you have to change your filter regularly, like every 2 months?  He yells to his relative and asks about the filter.  “no, we didn’t know that, ya got any?”  So we gave him a replacement cartridge.  Did anyone tell you to test your water? “Nah, how do you do that?”   We give him a test kit, the instructions, and realized that the water testing being done is abysmal.

A woman runs out to our car and asks if she can have some water because her daughter is pregnant.  Her apartment is not on our targeted list but of course we will give her water.   “Do I need to sign something for the water?”  My friend reassures her “No, no, you do not need to sign anything, we are not checking anything, we just want you to have water.”  She knows that her pregnant daughter cannot drink even filtered water, but she does not know how to get her unit tested.  We give her a test kit.  “We need to get our blood tested, do you know where we can go?”  I look up test sites on my Iphone, give her some information and tell her to take care of herself and her daughter.  She thanks us profusely, and we get in our car and scream.  How can this be happening?

I ask another woman if anyone from the Housing Commission has been out here.  “Nah, but we got some water delivered once by a guy in a big Budget truck.”  Good God, this crisis has been going on for 2 years and no one from Housing & Urban Development (HUD) or the Housing Commission has been out here to educate its residents or test the water?

Later in the afternoon we go further into the East side of Flint.  The dilapidated homes are surrounded by barren lots, old abandoned buildings, a trailer park with gutted trailers tagged with graffiti all next to a junk yard and old factory.  One house we are trying to reach has a disabled adult who is homebound.  His dog is outside and greets us, doing his duty and barking and protecting his home.  We respect him, but then I see a person looking out the window.  We hold up some water, but no one comes out.  I wonder, would I come out and get water and a filter from a complete stranger?  Would I want to show my vulnerability and inability to perhaps walk or move, and come face to face with a stranger who reminds me daily that I cannot drink water from my own home? No, I do not think I would.  We understand this, we understand that this dog is not menacing, but protecting its owner, and we gently leave the cases of water and filter on the driveway.  I hope they understand we do not judge, we do not want to cause shame.  We just want them to be safe.

My friend knocks on the next door, and an elderly woman doesn’t get up but let’s her peek in.   “We are here with Crossing Water to deliver water to you.”  She does not want us to come in and really does not want us to ask any questions.  We know she is homebound, is isolated, and has cancer from the canvassing done earlier, which is why we are there.  We want to make sure she is medically ok, has a filter and understands the risks.  My friend tells her we have 3 cases of water for her.  “I only want 2.” No, really, we have three for you.  “I only want 2.”  Respectfully, we leave two cases for her.  And I know my friend will never be able to get this woman’s face out of her mind.   What will happen to her?  2 cases of water does not last long.

Across the street we go and knock, knock, knock.  A young mother of four races out to greet us in her driveway.  “Oh, my god, I’m so glad to see you guys, I just had a baby 3 weeks ago and I’ve been drinking water from the tap my whole pregnancy.  I don’t have a car because someone stole the ignition out of it.  I have some water for the formula but I have to wash his bottles with the tap water.”  We give her a filter, a test kit, and extra jugs, breaking the rules of how much water we can deliver to each house.  My heart breaks.  I work with infants, I know the effects of neurotoxins during pregnancy.  This baby likely has had massive lead exposure that is yet to be discovered.  This mom may have known the risks but HAD NO CHOICE but to use her only source of water for the last 9 months.  Her older daughter is watching us from the window.  She looks sad.  But is she mirroring my face?

The city was eerily quiet, with a myriad of In and Out marts, gas stations, bars, vacant lots, run-down houses, and churches surrounding the East side.   I wondered where all the water trucks were, where the National Guard were, where are all the governmental leaders?  This city has its entire water distribution destroyed, and all we could see were private volunteers at churches and businesses handing out cases of bottled water to people through a make-shift assembly line.   We can go to the Middle East, bomb and destroy entire cities, rebuild these cities, and we can’t fix this?  Where are the temporary water systems that our government could set up?  Where are the military personnel and trucks who could deliver cases of water and filters to people who have no resources nor transportation?  Folks are supposed to go to a local fire station, pick up a filter, a test kit, some water, and then return the test kit to the fire station for testing?  That’s the plan?  Seriously?  In 2016, that’s the plan?

I thought we’d see a local Command Central in an abandoned building, a church, or a school where there was a base of operations for water testing, water distribution, and lead testing.  I thought we’d see National Guard going door-to-door collecting water samples from each home so that accurate testing and mapping of the city could be done in an organized and coordinated manner.  I thought we’d see Red Cross tents throughout the poorest parts of the city.  What I did see were local groups and amazing volunteers of people from churches, social service groups, and unions meeting people in their homes so they could at least have bottled water and filters.  What I did see was good people trying to help, perhaps restoring some kernels of hope for people who have been beaten down.  More importantly, what I did see were poor people who, instead of being outraged at the indignity and destruction their government has created for them, have been so disenfranchised and are so impoverished that they have been conditioned to believe they are not worthy of even a basic human right such as clean water.

Not only does the infrastructure need to change, but so does an entire belief system on how we treat the poor.

In the words of Hubert Humphrey, “The moral test of a government is how it treats those who are at the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the aged; and those who are in the shadow of life, the sick and the needy, and the handicapped.”

In this city, in this state, our government has failed this test immeasurably.

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W.E.B Du Bois: Of The Color Line, the Class Line, and a Boyhood in Western Massachusetts

Photo by Ruth Kraut, 2010

To close out Black History Month,* I thought I'd share some thoughts I had about a visit I made a few summers ago to the W.E.B. Du Bois Boyhood Homesite in western Massachusetts. Before that, I knew about Du Bois' as a wonderful thinker. I had read--more than once--his book The Souls of Black Folk, in which he wrote that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line." [Read the Souls of Black Folk online here, check it out from the library, or invest in a copy!]

Photo by Ruth Kraut, 2010

I did not realize, until I passed this historic site, and stopped to visit, that Du Bois had graduated from the mostly white high school in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. I wonder how that experience affected his thinking about education?

In Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois spends some time talking about the Talented Tenth, the idea that an elite group of intellectually-motivated black students should be encouraged in intellectual pursuits.

In Chapter 3 of Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois also takes on the legacy of Booker T. Washington, who promoted the idea of industrial/trade education for the majority of black students.

Photo by Ruth Kraut, 2010

Photo by Ruth Kraut, 2010. Part of the caption here reads,
"Violence is black children going to school for 12 years
and receiving 5 years of education."

Taken together, these two trains of thought--W.E.B. Du Bois' Talented Tenth on the one hand, and Booker T. Washington's belief in trade education on the other hand, created--and continue to elucidate--our understanding of education for people of color today.

Yet as I once heard Ted Shaw, former president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund say (paraphrasing here, I wasn't taking notes at this speech! but I think I found an account of the speech here): "If the issue of the 20th century was the color line, the issue of the 21st century is likely to be the class line."

According to this account, Shaw also commented that: "Race has always masked class differences in the United States. . . Why are educational opportunities at the best universities and colleges so limited? . . .
Shaw described the tracking, sorting and labeling of young students by ability as 'diabolical.'"

Are we--should we be--training students to be automatons, cogs in an industrial machine? Or are we--should we be--training students to be intellectual leaders? And are those our only choices? I find echoes of these discussions in the arguments around the narrowing of the curriculum that is in part caused by high-stakes standardized testing and the reduction of the arts in public schools.

I'll close with this excerpt from Souls of Black Folk, Chapter 1, Of Our Spiritual Strivings, because in this excerpt Du Bois writes of his time in the western Massachusetts Berkshire Mountains:

And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,—peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe. It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the revelation first bursts upon one, all in a day, as it were. I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys’ and girls’ heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards—ten cents a package—and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card,—refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the worlds I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine. But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them. Just how I would do it I could never decide: by reading law, by healing the sick, by telling the wonderful tales that swam in my head,—some way. With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.

*As it happens, I have been thinking about writing this post since I took these pictures in the summer of 2010, and because of Black History Month I decided that I should finish the post now. As I was getting ready to hit the "publish" button, I came across something that gave me Du Bois' birthdate--February 23, 1868. And the date of today's post? February 23, 2014. Today is, in fact, the 146th birthday of W.E.B. Du Bois. He died in Accra, Ghana (in self-imposed exile!), the day before the 1963 March on Washington. So much of what Du Bois wrote, over 100 years ago, is still relevant now. And that's why, if you haven't yet picked up and read the Souls of Black Folk, I'd recommend you put it on your "short list" of books to read in 2014. 


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Sequester Affects Back to School Funding for Low-Income Families

I saw this in the Friends in Deed Newsletter:

BACK-TO-SCHOOL NEEDS FOR LOW-INCOME FAMILIES 

Because of the much publicized 2013 “sequestering” of some planned federal budget expenditures, states are reducingfunding for some helping programs. Michigan recently announced cuts in back-to-school clothing allowances forDepartment of Human Services cash recipients. In previous years, low-income families on state cash assistance received
$75 per school-age child to use for new school clothes and shoes. That help will not be available to those families this upcoming school year. 

To address the potential impact of this decision, clothing donations are urgently requested.
DHS will be referring clients to local clothing closets. FID recommends that you take your donations of good condition used clothing to one of the following places:
Brown Chapel, Ypsi, 734-482-7050

House By The Side Of The Road, Ann Arbor, 734-971-2550

Emmanuel Lutheran, Ypsi, 734-482-7121 

YPS Foundation ReSale Shop, Ypsi, 734-714-1829 

Call ahead to check on the days, times and locations that donations are accepted. 

DHS is also collecting school supplies for distribution to local students. Donations of backpacks, paper, pens, pencils, notebooks, folders and other needed supplies can be dropped off at the DHS office in Ypsilanti. Email Greg Pordon at pordong@michigan.gov.

School Supplies

I happened to be on line at one of our big box stores last week, and in front of me were some people buying school supplies. School supplies! In early July! I mean, really?! I'm usually the person at the store the day after school has started!

It reminded me of something that happened mid-year. I was cleaning out a shelf, and I found a surfeit of pencils. So I asked my son if he needed some for school.
"Oh no," he said.
"Really? You don't need them? You still have plenty of pencils from the ones I got at the beginning of the year?"
"No," he said.
"Then how do you get pencils?" I asked.
"Oh," he said, "I just find them on the floor!"

Perhaps your children are not quite as enterprising as my son.

Seriously, I do have money for school supplies. But not everybody does, and if you can't afford them, the beginning of school is stressful. Washtenaw County employees are trying to fill a school bus with school supplies. From 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., July 30th-August 3, the school bus can be found in front of the Target store, 3749 Carpenter Road, Pittsfield Township. Supplies will be given to Washtenaw County kids who need them.

If you miss that drive, many of the local shelters collect school supplies (and other supplies too) year-round.

Ben Franklin, Jane Mecom, Public Schools & the Real Tea Party

Mark Maynard, intrepid (and prolific!) Ypsilanti blogger, drew my attention to this stellar op-ed piece in the New York Times by Harvard professor Jill Lepore, about Ben Franklin's sister, Jane Mecom. She writes,

Franklin, who’s on the $100 bill, was the youngest of 10 sons. Nowhere on any legal tender is his sister Jane, the youngest of seven daughters; she never traveled the way to wealth. He was born in 1706, she in 1712. Their father was a Boston candle-maker, scraping by. Massachusetts’ Poor Law required teaching boys to write; the mandate for girls ended at reading. Benny went to school for just two years; Jenny never went at all.
Their lives tell an 18th-century tale of two Americas. Against poverty and ignorance, Franklin prevailed; his sister did not.

 (In case you are counting, that is 17 kids.) Lepore continues,

Today, two and a half centuries later, the nation’s bookshelves sag with doorstop biographies of the founders; Tea Partiers dressed as Benjamin Franklin call for an end to social services for the poor; and the “Path to Prosperity” urges a return to “America’s founding ideals of liberty, limited government and equality under the rule of law.” But the story of Jane Mecom is a reminder that, especially for women, escaping poverty has always depended on the opportunity for an education and the ability to control the size of their families.

Thanks to Lepore, I know what Ben Franklin thought about public schools.

That world was changing. In 1789, Boston for the first time, allowed girls to attend public schools. The fertility rate began declining. The American Revolution made possible a new world, a world of fewer obstacles, a world with a promise of equality. That required — and still requires — sympathy.
Benjamin Franklin died in Philadelphia in 1790, at the age of 84. In his will, he left Jane the house in which she lived. And then he made another bequest, more lasting: he gave one hundred pounds to the public schools of Boston. (Emphases added.)

Mark thinks this is required reading for Tea Partiers. I think this is required reading for everyone. But I will say this about the supposed "Tea Party." The original tea party was based on the idea that there should be no taxation without representation. Hey, we've got the representation (at least, we've got the vote--I'm not too happy with Snyder right now). So the premise of the current "Tea Party" is entirely false, and yet nobody seems to challenge them on it. Why??? It's actually a great argument for why learning history is so important. Know the real story.

[And so now I've got on my "books to read" list Jill Lepore's book, The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle Over American History.]

DESPAIR

A social worker friend of mine who works with low-income families wrote recently on Facebook,
Today was a bad day. There is so much despair out there. I think I need a new career.

Another social worker commented to her,
I know what you mean. This is the worst I've seen it in 30 years. 

And a friend who is a principal of a school in southeastern Michigan, a school with a high number of children living in poverty, told me,
The economic stresses on these families are unbelievable. Their instability in housing and jobs keeps them moving all the time. We enroll new kids in the school, and have kids leave the school, every week because of the instability.
And if a school has 30% turnover from the beginning to the end of the year, is it fair to measure kids' progress the way that we do in a school with 5% turnover?

When I was teaching, I remember kids coming up to me and saying, "There is too much chaos in my house (housing issues, immigration fears, lack of employment, etc.) and I just can't do my homework." For some kids, just making it to school is the miracle.

I know a lot of people are worried about those families. We think less often about the front-line workers--by which I mean, in this case, social workers and school staff--who confront increasing need and decreasing resources. I worry about the front-line staff. It is really hard to hear the public discussions around education and social services, to hear that teachers or social workers "get paid too much," to have pay and benefits rolled back, and not to acknowledge that it is hard to be the social worker or teacher working with the kids or families who need so much more, who deserve so much more, and who don't get what they need.

Sure, in our area there is a surfeit of teachers and social workers--so maybe they are replaceable, but is it a good thing to set up a system where teachers and social workers get burned out because there is so much need for their services and so little value placed upon them?

My friend was writing about the despair among her clients, but what I hear from her is the despair that things will get better. We alone cannot control the economy (of course, we can each do our small part), but when we value the work of front-line staff, we can improve their feelings about their work.