Aniyah Harris, 17, of Riverview, briskly paced in her fifth-hour biology classroom at Detroit’s Renaissance High School. Then, she closed her lips around a cocktail straw, and tried to breathe through the tiny tube.
It wasn’t easy.
“Would you want to breathe like that 24 hours a day, seven days a week?” asked Taneisha Carswell, community relations coordinator for Gift of Life Michigan’s Minority Organ Tissue Transplant Education Program.
Harris and the two other students with straws in their mouths shook their heads, no.
“A person waiting for a lifesaving lung transplant breathes like that 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” Carswell said during an interactive presentation about the need for organ and tissue donors, especially in diverse communities, on a snowy late January day.
By going from classroom to classroom, talking to students across the region, Carswell is hopeful she’ll chip away at some of the racial disparities and myths about organ and tissue donation.