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July 27 - September 9, 2019
My worst fear was that I would be humiliated in front of my parents, Elliott and the girls, my extended family, my medical residents, my professional colleagues, and my friends. That I might make a monstrous mistake and blow it somehow—and look as if I were in over my head.
There is an Arab concept called aeb, or “shame.” I always did my best to banish it from my brain, because it’s wrong and stupid and shouldn’t be in my mind, but at the same time, it had been planted there so long ago, it was like a tumor that couldn’t be completely excised. It had cells that kept mutating and replicating.
“Because this isn’t about what happens to you if you do something. This is about what happens—or doesn’t happen—if you don’t do something.”
What we had was more than love. We understood each other. We were grounded in the same core ideals and morals—and were always moving toward the same goal: to make the world more just, more equitable, and a more human place. To do the right thing, even if it was hard.
There was no way I could walk around Flint, watching kids grow into adolescents and then adults, and wonder if their problems were related to a poison that I hadn’t done enough about.
At sixty-nine, like my mom, he showed no interest in slowing down. Alloys and metals aside, he has lots of passions—for languages, international affairs, and history. He loves research most of all—digging into archives and making new discoveries.
The rug was a puzzle. Not only did my dad decipher the Farsi key on the border of the rug to identify the historic figures (all men, of course), he worked with art historians and textile scholars to unravel the rug’s origin and secrets. There even was a connection between the rug and Freemasonry and the Knights Templar. It was like The Da Vinci Code for carpets.
But now, because of my dad’s discovery—which he has given many PowerPoint presentations about—the descendants of the Shekwana and the Kas Shamoun families, literally hundreds of people who have since scattered to every corner of the globe, have connected with cousins they didn’t know they had, including us.
What we never knew, until my dad’s work, was our family’s direct connection to a Nestorian priest named Israel Raba of the Shekwana family. He was born in 1541—my grandfather, twelve generations removed. Israel Raba and his family were famous scribes, known for their poetry and mystical literary work. They lived in an ancient monastery, Rabban Hormizd, just outside Alqosh, where they produced and guarded a library of intricately beautiful and painstakingly illustrated manuscripts.
As the Roman Catholic Church grew in power by converting people to its faith in the 1800s, the Nestorian liturgy and traditions were threatened. But some monasteries hid the scrolls in secret libraries—and priests transported them to safe places—so that around two hundred of the Shekwana manuscripts are still in existence today in private collections, libraries, museums, and churches around the world.
MY DAD’S SUCCESS WITH this Nestorian puzzle led him to other remarkable discoveries. He stumbled onto the haunting story of Dr. Paul Shekwana, the public health pioneer who came to the United States at the turn of the last century and mysteriously died outside Iowa City.
MY DAD’S SUCCESS WITH this Nestorian puzzle led him to other remarkable discoveries. He stumbled onto the haunting story of Dr. Paul Shekwana, the public health pioneer who came to the United States at the turn of the last century and mysteriously died outside Iowa City. Iowa
Nuri hid in a spare room of Haji’s family home for many weeks, until a safer location could be found. Then Haji’s mother dressed him in a woman’s abaya and transported him to safety. He fled to Paris in 1937 and became involved in pre-war activism that led to the French resistance.
Then he moved on, joining 35,000 other freedom-loving idealists in the International Brigades that were fighting the fascists in Catalonia on behalf of the Spanish Republic. He served with the American volunteers in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, was promoted to officer, and fought in the pivotal Battle of the Ebro, often called the first battle of the Second World War. Nuri was one of only two Iraqis in the International Brigades. The other was his friend, an Iraqi Jew named Setti Abraham Horresh.
But alas, the defense of the Spanish Republic was a losing battle. With Hitler’s help, fascist dictator Francisco Franco took control of Spain in 1939. It sure didn’t help the cause of freedom that General Motors and other U.S. auto companies sent 12,000 trucks to help Franco, basically on credit.
When he heard that Nuri Rufail Koutani, a well-known resistance fighter, was arriving on the train and was bound for prison, my grandfather found him and quietly offered him water and words of comfort.
By the time Nuri died in 1980, he had spent half of his life in hiding or in jail.
MY DAD’S CHILDHOOD WAS shadowed by the decline of his homeland. As a boy, he had been a firsthand witness to the abduction and gruesome death of Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri al-Said, as he fled through the Baghdad streets on the day after the July 14, 1958, revolution to overthrow King Faisal II.
Women dressed as they pleased. Photographs from my mom’s college years in the 1960s, when she studied chemistry, look like images from UC Berkeley. She wore fashionable short skirts and held liberal values.
But unlike France, where the eighteenth-century Reign of Terror—its counterrevolution—had lasted only a few years, Iraq’s terror, the Ba’athist years, lasted decades. Some of the very best people of Iraq were imprisoned and killed—writers and poets, scientists, freethinkers, intellectuals, academics, teachers, and political organizers. The mass murder and purging of “communists” throughout the Cold War in the Middle East uprooted the left wing, stifled secular voices, and led to the brain drain that was one of many causes of fundamentalism.
Worried that the police would come looking for evidence of his political views, my grandmother Mama Evelyn gathered all his books with red covers, wrapped them with a blanket, and buried them in their yard. Dawood was released from prison a couple of months later and returned home but was never completely whole again.
At sixteen, he traveled alone from Baghdad to Zagreb by train, almost two thousand miles, to attend a language boot camp to learn Serbo-Croatian. He went on to the University of Zagreb to study mechanical engineering using old-school German methods, learning to draft perfect letters and becoming a master of the slide rule.
The plan was to go back home to Baghdad after that. But returning to Iraq would have meant working at a government job he’d been assigned—at the Osirak nuclear power plant—and possibly dying there. It was bombed by Israel in 1981. Instead, they moved to Houghton for my dad’s postdoc work, then on to Royal Oak, when he got the job with GM.
Meanwhile the homeland my father knew and loved was quickly disappearing behind him. Almost nothing was written about Saddam Hussein in the U.S. media in the 1980s. Saddam was considered a friend of the Reagan administration, even though his brutalities and murders were well-known abroad. During the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88), the United States actively supported Saddam with intelligence and food credits—and also allowed Iraq to buy high-tech equipment for chemical weapons.
My dad published opposition newsletters and newspapers, which he sent to other Iraqis abroad, and to U.S. government leaders, politicians, and other activists. He laid out the articles and photographs by hand, in his office at home.
The chemicals were a mix of things—different toxic gases that killed some people immediately. Others were burned and died slowly and painfully. As many as five thousand civilians were killed and another seven to ten thousand were horribly injured. The genocidal massacre is the largest chemical weapons attack directed against a civilian population in history. An entire city was poisoned.
That was the first time I saw a dead child—an infant wrapped in a pink blanket being held by her father. They had died in each other’s arms. I have never forgotten it, or gotten over it. And I never will.
The wars we saw on CNN. The sanctions were a quieter but more deadly affair. They hurt innocent people and never touched the heart of Saddam’s operations. Overall the 1990s were a time of pointless misery, when tens or even hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children may have died. It left me wondering, throughout my teenage years and young adulthood, if the leaders of my adopted home cared about kids at all.
I wasn’t a politician, government official, or trained speaker, but I wasn’t afraid of the spotlight either. The days and nights I had spent in drama club back at Kimball High School were paying off.
That same sense of openness—or even eye contact—was not happening directly across the table, where Natasha Henderson, the Flint city manager, and Howard Croft, the public works department head, were sitting. Without a word, they made known their feelings about the meeting immediately.
Croft seemed to care even less; his sleepiness and audible yawns communicated a total lack of interest in the meeting, if not downright disapproval.
Valacak claimed it was in alignment with the Safe Drinking Water Act—and besides, no health advisory could be issued without a directive from MDEQ. When Kirk asked his board to vote on a resolution urging a health advisory, Valacak stayed silent, abstaining from casting a vote. The resolution passed without him.
“The vast evidence supports an increased likelihood of a decrease in IQ. Even a blood level of 1 to 4 μg/dl—which is not yet considered above the reference level—drops the mean IQ by 3.7 points. This reduces the number of high achievers, or those with an IQ over 130, and increases the number with low IQ, at 70—shifting that bell-shaped curve to the left. This impacts not only life achievement expectations but special education services and employment prospects. This has drastic implications at the population level.
Then I got to the costs, because this was what the city, the county, the state, and the federal government would pay attention to. People listen to dollar signs. (Wasn’t that how we got into this mess?) You had to factor the number of children who had been exposed and make a forecast of costs. It was about probabilities and estimates, but that is how governments plan ahead and prepare.
When there’s a viral outbreak, the CDC and FEMA don’t just make survival plans and prevention strategies, they immediately begin determining what it’s going to cost to implement them.
For about 25% of infants drinking formula made from tap water at 10 ppb, blood lead would rise above the CDC level of concern of 5 μg/dl Increase in fetal death and reduced birth weights
Post-switch, the percentage of children with blood-lead elevation was almost double. I emphasized that this increase was contrary to every national and state trend. Elsewhere the percentage of kids with elevated lead levels had been coming down every year.
The next slide compared Flint to the rest of Genesee County, where the water was the same as ever. This comparison made it clear that there was no statistically significant increase in elevated blood-lead levels in the rest of Genesee County—only in Flint.
Medicaid mandated lead screenings at a child’s one- and two-year checkups, but that was way too late if you were worried about lead in water. “Infants are not screened for lead exposure,” I said, and “lead has a short window of detection in blood—a half-life of twenty-eight days.” Also, many children who are supposed to be screened never are.
He referred to a public statement he had made just the week before that Flint would be “lead-free” by 2016. Huh? Now, having seen my presentation, he seemed excited that finally, finally, the rest of us were jumping on the lead-awareness bandwagon he’d been driving for years. I was confused.
It also mattered that Dr. Reynolds is African American and lives in Flint, the eighth-largest “majority minority” city in the United States—57 percent black, 37 percent white, and 6 percent other, mostly Latino.
And then there was me, somewhere in the middle. I wasn’t black, and I wasn’t white either. I felt, as I often do, like an outsider, straddling but never completely or comfortably inside either world.
The mayor was finally ready to talk water. “We’ve just this morning had a meeting about this with the EPA and DEQ,” he said. “And they’ve told us there’s no corrosion issue. It has to do with old pipes in residents’ homes and couldn’t be helped.”
It was pretty simple. If he wouldn’t stand with me and make the announcement that there was lead in the blood of the kids of Flint, then we would do it without him. Kirk, Melany, Senator Ananich, Andy, and I had agreed on this step going into the meeting.
Some of us were focused on the kids in Flint. Some of us were looking forward to meeting the new pope.
There was no reason to vilify him, we agreed, or turn him into the enemy—he had no power, being mayor in name only. The truth was that the citizens of Flint didn’t have a democratically elected leader. They had a figurehead.
He was a tall, relatively young guy
Physical description
I was still angry and pinned the blame on MDEQ and the governor’s office, calling them “Republican bastards” who put dollars above poor kids. This was followed by a long silence. “I’m a conservative Republican,” Marc said.
If I saw myself as committed to public health and protecting kids, Marc was probably even more so. He had devoted his career to crusading against negligence and dishonesty. He believed if you weren’t on the right side of a public health crisis, you were a bystander to a crime. And he wore baby-animal ties.
But on the other hand, what mattered wasn’t politics or political philosophy—it was Flint’s kids. That was ground I was willing to stand on with anybody. And it was a good piece of ground to occupy: anyone who wasn’t on it was on the wrong side, regardless of political affiliation.
I was a true believer when it came to government. I had faith in its ability to protect rights, promote equality, and mitigate historic injustice. So much of my life and advocacy rested on that. But what had happened in Flint, and what was happening with the state, was seriously eroding that faith.
