What It's Like to Live With Only Bottled Water
The ongoing contamination crisis in Flint, Michigan, has made everything from bathing to finding something to eat complicated and dangerous.
FLINT, Mich.—Nine-year-old Kaniya Fuqua-Strickland fidgets as the adults talk about her memory loss. Flint born and raised—just like her mother, a nurse’s aide—Kaniya leans forward on her long legs. She pivots against the kitchen table and shifts her gaze from morning cartoons to the floor to her grandmother, who is holding forth a few feet away.
“Kaniya is a child that …” begins her grandma, Gail Fuqua, mother to five and grandmother to 14.
“The memory loss!” Kaniya’s mom, Felecia Waters, interrupts.
“She do. She got a short term memory loss,” Gail says. “It just came out of nowhere.”
Kaniya listens, but says nothing and looks at the floor.
Telling strangers your child may have lost cognitive ability has recently begun to pass for normal
