An asthma attack gave me a mission: Provide people in the Mon Valley with the tools to survive

Qiyam Ansari, of West Mifflin, stands for a portrait in front of the billowing stacks of U.S. Steel’s Clairton Coke Works on Feb. 27, 2024.(Photo by Stephanie Strasburg/PublicSource) High school was phenomenal until an air inversion nearly killed me. Then a voice told me: “Don’t worry, I’ll show you why.” First-person essay by Qiyam Ansari, For PublicSource I first heard of Pittsburgh in 2010 when my mother told us we were moving there. I looked it up on Google and saw it was a 13-hour trip with six people from our home in New Haven, Connecticut. All of 14 years old at the time, I thought: This will be rough.& When I went on Google to search for Pittsburgh, all I saw was the steel industry and the Steelers. On the way there, I remember seeing all the farms in Pennsylvania for the first time, and I thought we were moving to the country. I was so happy when I started seeing houses again.& As I got to know the area, I was in complete awe of how massive the old mills were and how many train lines crisscrossed the neighborhoods. When I first went Downtown, I thought Pittsburgh was...