We check back in with Jeneyah McDonald, (click here) whom we first met nearly two years ago. McDonald, who lives in Flint, Mich., says she still doesn't have drinking water.
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Ever since the water crisis in Flint began, we've been checking in with Jeneyah McDonald. I first arrived at her house in February of last year. She was making dinner and trying to teach her boys to stay away from the water. They were 2 and 6 years old at the time.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
JENEYAH MCDONALD: I don't know any way to explain to a 6-year-old why can't take a bath anymore every day, why you can't help mommy wash the dishes anymore. So I told him it's poison, and that way he'll know I'm serious. Don't play with it even when I'm not looking. If this is poison, I better not touch it.
SHAPIRO: And Jeneyah McDonald joins us once again now from her home in Flint. Jeneyah, it's so good to talk to you again.
MCDONALD: Oh, it's always good to talk to you, Ari.
SHAPIRO: Boy, it's been more than a year and a half since we first met. Are you still using bottled water for everything?
MCDONALD: Every day.
SHAPIRO: Wow.
MCDONALD: Nothing has changed.
SHAPIRO: Nothing has changed.
MCDONALD: Nothing....
In the story below an 11 year old discovered a way to test the water for lead. She did so in less time it has taken for the water to be returned to Jeneyah McDonald. There is something wrong with the expediency this is occurring in Flint.
October 20, 2017
By Laurel Wamsley
When the drinking water in Flint, Mich., (click here) became contaminated with lead, causing a major public health crisis, 11-year-old Gitanjali Rao took notice.
"I had been following the Flint, Michigan, issue for about two years," the seventh-grader told ABC News. "I was appalled by the number of people affected by lead contamination in water."
She saw her parents testing the water in their own home in Lone Tree, Colo., and was unimpressed by the options, which can be slow, unreliable or both.
"I went, 'Well, this is not a reliable process and I've got to do something to change this,' " the seventh-grader told Business Insider.
While Rao was doing her weekly perusal of MIT's Materials Science and Engineering website to see "if there's anything's new," she tells ABC that she read about new technologies that could detect hazardous substances, and decided to see if they could be adapted to test for lead....
...And she set about devising a more efficient solution: a device that could identify lead compounds in water, and was portable and relatively inexpensive....
