“My mom said chances are you will be too busy with more important things.”
When then-8-year-old Amariyanna “Mari” Copeny wrote those words in a letter in March 2016, she had no idea how much her life would soon change. The “you”? Barack Obama. The “more important things”? Leading the free world. The request? For the president or first lady to meet with Mari and other citizens of Flint, Michigan, who were preparing to travel to the capital to see their governor, Rick Snyder, testify before Congress; he was being questioned about why, among other things, Flint’s nearly 100,000 residents were drinking contaminated water that needed to be so chlorinated it corroded new engine parts at a local General Motors plant.
As it turned out, President Obama wasn’t too busy for Mari, and her cause was a very important thing. To save money, in April 2014, Michigan officials switched Flint’s water supply from Lake Huron and the Detroit River to the Flint River without properly treating it, resulting in dangerously high levels of bacteria and lead.
“It smelled funny, and it was brown,” Mari says. “It wasn’t something you’d want to drink.” (Mari and her family started taking two-minute showers to minimize contact.) The bacteria resulted in an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease that killed 12 people and sickened another 79 between June 2014 and October 2015; bathing in the water reportedly caused rashes and hair loss (which Mari and her family tried to avoid by taking two-minute showers). More than 8,000 children, including Mari, face a risk of long-term developmental problems as a result of possible exposure to lead in the water.
The month after receiving her letter, the president responded with one of his own, thanking Mari for her activism and telling her he’d visit Flint. For the occasion, Mari wore a purple little miss flint sash from a state beauty pageant. When she saw the president, she ran to him at full speed, and he lifted her up. As he set her down, she placed her hands firmly on her hips, looked him in the eye, and said, “You know, I wrote to you!” Mirroring her pose, he responded, “I know! That’s why I decided to come.”
Their meeting went viral, and seven months later, President Obama authorized $100 million to repair Flint’s water system. “His trip proved to me that a kid can change the world,” Mari says. Nearly five years after the water crisis began, her advocacy is as necessary as ever. Last April, Snyder ended a program supplying free bottled water—even though lead pipes corroded by improperly treated water will still service some Flint homes until 2020.
Less than two months after the governor’s decision, Mari stood in a sunny parking lot, her hair in braids to keep cool, as she helped load case after case of water into Flint residents’ cars. To date, she and the education nonprofit Pack Your Back have handed out more than 700,000 water bottles to local families. And Mari and her supporters have also organized an array of projects on behalf of her hometown’s underserved kids—including free screenings of Black Panther and A Wrinkle in Time, bike giveaways, an anti-bullying campaign, and the distribution of 15,000 fully stocked backpacks to schoolchildren.
Mari believes that the skills she’s developing as an activist and organizer will help prepare her for the presidency, which she plans to seek in 2044. “Obama was once a Black kid with a dream, and he was able to achieve it, so I can, too,” she says. “When I’m president, I’ll make sure I use my voice to speak for the people—especially kids.”
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