Beyond the Rankings: Stories from Columbus County

What does health look like in a rural community?

In Columbus County, North Carolina, it looks like a long drive to specialized medical care. It looks like a neighbor sleeping outside in freezing weather. It looks like local leaders building trust, sharing information, and finding ways to help people live longer, healthier lives.

In this episode of Rural Narratives, you'll hear four personal stories about healthcare, housing, communication, and community action from residents working to make life better in southeastern North Carolina.

Hosted by Layna Hong.

Rural Narratives is a project of Narrative Arts, a nonprofit media and storytelling organization working alongside communities to share stories that deepen connection, expand understanding, and strengthen public life in rural America. Learn more at www.narrativearts.org.

Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:00

I'm Lena Hong. Welcome to Rural Narratives. For the past year, Narrative Arts has been traveling across rural North Carolina collecting stories about health. Many of these stories were shared in story circles. Community members came together to listen and learn from each other's experiences. Over the next couple of episodes, we'll be sharing stories from across different rural counties in North Carolina. This week, we're in Columbus County, which sits right along the South Carolina border. For years, Columbus County has faced some of the poorest health outcomes in the state. Residents are less likely to have health insurance, have less access to healthcare providers, and on average live shorter lives than people in the state as a whole. But those numbers only tell part of the story. Today, you'll hear four stories about healthcare, housing, trust, and community action in Columbus County. First, we'll hear about a high-risk pregnancy and the experience of getting specialized health care in a place where resources are spread out. Then, we'll hear about the growing unhoused population in the county. Next, a local nonprofit leader will talk about the importance of effective communication and support networks in times of crisis. And lastly, a local mayor will tell us what he's doing in his community to help his residents live longer, healthier lives. Kayla Hinson recalls her experience getting care during her high-risk pregnancy. She lives in Tabor City. It's a town in Columbus County, right on the North South Carolina border.

SPEAKER_03 1:30

I live in Tabor City, and there's not much there. It's on the state line, so when we need to go to the hospital, we pretty much go to Loris, which is technically South Carolina. That's where my child was born. But when I was pregnant with her, it was during the pandemic, and she was born in 2021. So I had a high-risk pregnancy. She had a birth defect. There was nobody in the area that could help me. So I had to go all the way to Wilmington, which for Whiteville is not as far, but for me, it's like an hour and a half almost. And nobody was allowed in the building with me. So I had to go in and, you know, deal with all of that by myself. It's the reality of living in rural places.

SPEAKER_04 2:12

There's not a lot of resources, so you end up having to spread out and go to multiple places.

SPEAKER_03 2:17

Thankfully, I had the ability to be able to drive to Wilmington, but there's a lot of people who don't. So I just wonder about those people who are like me who had issues with their child, maybe not being able to get the care that they need.

SPEAKER_04 2:35

Kayla says that when she was pregnant, her child was at risk for being born with mental and physical disabilities.

SPEAKER_03 2:42

Fortunately, she's blessed. It's almost nothing. She's fantastic. But I had Medicaid and it covered all of that. If I had not had Medicaid, I had multiple visits to the high-risk pregnancy doctor in Wilmington. And then after she was born, I had to go to Duke because there was a possibility she could have had shunts. She had to have MRIs when she was an infant. That would have bankrupted me if I did not have that insurance.

SPEAKER_04 3:08

While she was on Medicaid, Kayla was ironically working for a private health insurance company at the time. She says the company wasn't very understanding about her situation.

SPEAKER_03 3:17

And when she was having to go all the way to Duke because they didn't have anything like that around here, I would get an occurrence at work when I had to take off because they said, Well, we didn't approve for you to be able to take that day. I was like, Well, I'm taking it anyway. Um, my child's health depends on it. She she has to have she has to have an MRI. My my infant child has to have an MRI, but it was an occurrence. So I essentially got punished for taking my child to the doctor. In this job, Kayla says she learned a lot about how the private healthcare industry works. Your insurance is dictated not just by the company, but by your employer. And employers work with them to pick and choose what they want to give you and to what level, and what they're willing to pay for you to have, basically. And a lot of the plans that I worked with had no coverage for home health care. None at all. And they said, when you want somebody, basically, it has to be like a skilled nurse. If it's I need somebody to come in because my mother cannot be by herself, she cannot do things for herself. They didn't care. Not covered. If it wasn't strictly a medical issue, it's not covered. Needless to say, I did not stay in that job very long because the whole process disgusted me.

SPEAKER_04 4:45

Our second story is from Jason Ellaby. He's the mayor of the town of Brunswick, is a population of a little over 900 people. You might recognize his voice from the third episode of this season of Rural Narratives, where he talked about building community trust in public systems. At the story circle, he shared his experience of seeing more unhoused people around the county.

SPEAKER_00 5:05

A lot of it this past weekend, and that's homeless in Columbus County. And there's a lot of people who bought the attention up before years ago, and it keeps getting shut down by the county. And I honestly feel like our county don't want it in because they look at it as they don't want to be near or have that rift raft near them. And every area you go into, they're like, well, we don't want it in this area, we don't want it in that area. But I look at it this way, they're human. And we never know what somebody's going through. This past weekend, well, at least and I was in contact the whole weekend. There was this, we call him my bearded friend because he got a long beard.

SPEAKER_04 5:47

The man was sleeping in below-freezing weather under the canopy at a local restaurant.

SPEAKER_00 5:52

And so Friday night, while he's called, and she comes by the town hall, and me and her are talking. I go home, I think about it, I think about it. I'm not, I'm not going out there, it's too cold. So I goes out there, he's still there. He didn't want to talk, so I leave. Well, the next night, she um that Saturday when we started getting heavy snow, she called me and she said he's still out there. So at that moment I paused, I'm like, okay, let me go down there. Granted, I didn't know the gentleman, so I'm like, I got two deputies here. I said, can one of y'all jump in the car with me instead of your car so we won't frighten them?

SPEAKER_04 6:26

The man gets in the car and Jason gives him some blankets and winter clothes. He also gets the man a hot meal. It's going okay. But then Jason says the man started reacting fearfully.

SPEAKER_00 6:37

But there's something that triggered this guy that he's afraid to go to a shelter. And I feel like we start to see a homeless person every day added to the bunch.

SPEAKER_04 6:49

So Jason ends up leaving the man under the canopy.

SPEAKER_00 6:52

And this gentleman, he stayed out there this whole entire weekend and the snow and all. And he just slept under there. So I checked on him every day. And when I finally talked to him that night, I went out there with the sheriff, he he just cried because he was frightened by something. When we tried to give him the food, he reached for it, but then he jumped back. And so at that point, we had to like assure him that you're not hurt. I tried to get him to go into my car, let's take him back to our woman's shelter for the weekend, and he wouldn't.

SPEAKER_04 7:19

Jason says seeing more people without stable housing has left him wondering what more Columbus County should and can be doing to help.

SPEAKER_00 7:27

So my thing is, what can we do in Columbus County? Not just to help the rich or the who's who, but to help everyone. Because this is getting sadder and sadder. As a child growing up, I never thought we'd see homeless people laying in the streets on the sidewalks in Columbus County. Not our small little town. I mean, at this point, something has to be done because I mean, the way the economy is now, we all one paycheck away from being homeless.

SPEAKER_04 7:56

This is Walise Todd. She's the director of Community CPR. It's a local nonprofit that coordinates and offers resources and support during disasters. She emphasizes the importance of support networks and working together to build trust and understanding.

SPEAKER_02 8:12

I know that we work with a lot of people with mental health issues. I've dealt with clinical depression. I have ADHD. You laugh with me about how fast I talk. Well, try to live in my head. I say this though, in that we don't know what someone's dealing with. And so because in my own circle of influence, I know a number of people who have mental health issues, but they might not show it on the external. And because they have a framework of support, that they have networks, that they have communication, that there's people they can trust, they're not homeless.

SPEAKER_04 8:40

She says that when people don't have support networks, it's difficult to gain the skill set to go from surviving to thriving. And the support networks need to be vast.

SPEAKER_02 8:49

Tammy and I delivered food during the pandemic to senior citizens and people with disabilities that Pastor Daisy had access to. So community CPR couldn't do it by themselves. But when you team up with Disability Resource Center, you team up with Penn's Grill, you team up with DSS, you team up with the mayors of different towns, you team up with the different healthings. I that's how things get done, is when, in my opinion, very strongly held and experiential year after year after year is as silos, we don't get a lot accomplished. It's okay to not all have the same worldview, political beliefs, religious uh orientations, personal orientations. You don't have to have the same of those to come together and have a sameness and the care for other people and finding commonalities. So I think though that you do have to build trust. There has to be access. But one of the things that I will, as much as I love to talk, I'm not just speaking about verbal words. We have to have effective communication. Because communication is what I have found over the nine years is one of the strongest absences within an effective way to help people. She recalls one example from this past winter. So for the first time ever, Columbus County had like six warming shelters over this frigid cold weekend. What a blessing.

SPEAKER_04 10:11

But while Lee says the county didn't have enough time to spread the word about the warming shelters to the people who needed it the most.

SPEAKER_02 10:17

We've got to have compassion to understand that not everybody will have the same framework. And it is if we could break the pattern that I have seen more in the last 20 years of my life than I saw in the first 30 or so, which is don't villainize somebody that's thinks different than you. Find out why they think different than you. Get to know that, understand their experience, and then you can build commonalities and work together. But sometimes people might have a prejudice because of an experience. That doesn't make the prejudice healthy, it just makes it humanly understandable. I don't like liquid okra. I don't know how y'all eat that stuff because my experience is slimy and awful. But for people who love okra, they're like, what? Why don't you? That's silly, but I believe that we have the potential in this circle to do um what is going to be a blessing to our world by sitting and listening to people and finding out if they're different, why they're different, and not villainizing them, and then trying to find commonalities of how can we communicate, how can we improve access, and how can we help people trust us and how can we start to trust others? And I think we could change the world.

SPEAKER_04 11:32

Our final story comes from Sean Maynard. He's the mayor of Bolton. It's a town of about 500 people in the southeastern part of the county. For years, Sean says he watched his friends, neighbors, and family members die younger than they should have. The experience led him to take action to help people in his community to live longer, healthier lives.

SPEAKER_01 11:52

I even noticed that during that time in this region, in this town, there were so many people that were not living to be 55. Some of her friends had already passed away, people that we knew. Nobody got to be 55 if you looked at the numbers.

SPEAKER_04 12:05

At the time, Sean was helping care for an elderly relative while living in Boston. As he learned more about local health conditions, he discovered just how severe the problem had become.

SPEAKER_01 12:36

Just by sharing the information that we had. You know, people are dying. We need to find out what's going on, how can we deal with it?

SPEAKER_04 12:43

The partnership led to free health screenings in Bolton, and what they found surprised them.

SPEAKER_01 12:49

People were had diabetes where it was an issue, uh, obesity, heart disease. It was just a number of things. And so with the students from UNCW coming to a small town of Bolton and doing free medical screenings, we literally didn't know that we were gonna have to send people that came to get a free blood pressure. They just came to get a blood pressure check or get a glucose check, and we had to send them to the hospital because some of them were about to have strokes and heart attacks and different things like that. And so they saw the need, we saw the need, and um together they we partnered with UNCW and we were able to build a state-of-the-art medical center right there.

SPEAKER_04 13:27

The facility became the Bolton Health and Wellness Center. But Sean says the goal wasn't just health care, it was also education.

SPEAKER_01 13:35

We named it the Bolton Health and Wellness Center because we knew not only did we just need health care, but we needed training.

SPEAKER_04 13:43

And that was back in the 90s. More than two decades later, Sean says those efforts are beginning to pay off.

SPEAKER_01 14:03

Today, the hospital has joined in with that great work, and we are actually getting a medical center, a hospital about six miles away from where we live at, from our small town called Bolton.

SPEAKER_04 14:17

And he says the future is bright.

SPEAKER_01 14:19

So we're excited about that, and we're excited about the change and things that have happened. We had to learn how to help one another, and because of that, us being late health educators, and we zeroed in on the situation. I think things are gonna improve.

SPEAKER_04 14:37

In the next episode, we'll be continuing to share stories that we've been hearing from North Carolina's rural communities. I'm Lena Hong. Thanks for listening to this episode of Rural Narratives.