If your drinking water, your shower water, the water you use for just about anything, was contaminated with high levels of lead, you’d want all the help you could get. You’ve been facing this issue for three years and you are still waiting for the government to take proper action.

For 1,060 days, the city of Flint, Michigan has been without clean water supply. Student Advocates for Medicine in Politics (SAMP), a Loyola organization, understands the injustice Flint has suffered these past 1,060 days (and counting), and stands in solidarity with Flint.

SAMP is an organization at LUC (Loyola University Chicago) founded in 2015. The club is made up of student advocates on campus. It was founded with the intention of combining healthcare and medicine from a practical approach and the overlooked socio-political side. The goal of the organization is to intertwine these fields.

SAMP focuses on social and ethical issues that overlap between medicine and politics. Not only do they want the Loyola community to become more aware of these issues, but they make an effort to take action as well.

The Flint water crisis is a perfect example of this interconnection as the high levels of lead in the city’s water supply directly affects the health of the flint community. As an attempt to bring attention to the Flint issue at Loyola, SAMP held a Flint Simulation at Loyola’s Damen Student Center. This simulation gave students the opportunity to discover some of the issues the city of Flint experiences with their water crisis.

In addition to this simulation, many members of SAMP have organized several service trips to Flint, Michigan. On these trips, the members work with agencies in Flint which include ‘Flint Rising’–a local group of Flint residents who go door to door to work on data collection. The most recent organization SAMP has worked with is ‘Crossing Water’–a non-profit organization. Loyola’s SAMP continues to bring attention to issues crossing the medicine and political fields today.

Interested in learning more about organizations like SAMP? Contact us at uncoveringloyola@gmail.com and follow us on Twitter @UncoveringLUC!

 

Writers: Michelle Song, Emma Nyssen, Liliana Sheppard