May 12, 2008 at 11:05 pm (Uncategorized)
After a nice but overlong lunch at the Starlite Cafe in Greenville (which had very good but tremendously large hamburgers), we went on down to Morehead City on the coast.
I was very excited about this one – I love boats, and I love the ocean, and I haven’t been near the Atlantic in eight or nine years. It was much colder and windier than I had expected, and we were all a little worried – we were supposed to go in two research boats out to Shackleford Banks, a barrier island. I kind of like rough water, but I didn’t think many of us would. Sure enough, it was too rough to go beyond the harbor – we could see the white caps across the breakwater even though we were a long way off.
They decided to instead take us on a boat tour of the harbor, which I thought was very nice of them considering they didn’t have enough time to do the originally scheduled lecture (we took too long at lunch, I believe). There were two boats – the smaller UNC boat and the bigger Duke boat. I got on the UNC boat, naturally. According to one of the grad students based there, it had formerly been a drug smuggling boat that was then taken away and sold to the University. Very cool if true – we have a pirate boat. 
Also very cool is that UNC, Duke, and NC State all have marine installations there and the faculty members based there made a point of telling us that all three work together and get along very well – with slight tension during basketball season – despite all rivalries.
It was great – it was cloudy and windy, but beautiful. I sat up on the bow of the boat with Kirill (Digital Archives) and Jason (Public Health), and we saw a lot of other boats, many old houses and houses made to look old, a long stretch of marsh on one side, and a rusty old canning factory. A sobering reminder that this area had once had a strong industrial side – it’s primarily dependent on tourism now. Some people saw dolphins – I did not, but I did see a very, very big gray pelican, and an Ibis. I thought it was an egret, but someone said it was an Ibis. No shots of the birds, but I did get a nice one of the sky.
We got back to the dock, and had to hop to to get to the hotel in New Bern. New Bern is pronounced Newbern, btw – I had no idea.
I will write up our evening and post it tomorrow – I’m tired!
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May 12, 2008 at 10:26 pm (Tar Heel Bus Tour)
Tags: Breaking Free, Day One, Tar Heel Bus Tour
Okay, please forgive any incoherencies – I am very tired after a long day. A long interesting day. This is the official website for the Tar Heel Bus Tour – it provides an itinerary: http://www.unc.edu/bustour/
Our first stop on the bus tour, after waking up and meeting VERY EARLY Monday morning, was in Rocky Mount at Dudley’s Beauty Salon. We were there to meet the women of Breaking Free, a community based breast cancer screening program. These women were incredibly impressive – the beauty shop owner and a friend who also owned a beauty shop were moved to work against breast cancer by a friend and employee who was a survivor.
African American women have a much worse rate of survival than white women – breast cancer is likely to be found much farther along and to be more aggressive. The fact that Edgecombe County especially has a very high rate of poverty and that many women are likely to be uninsured does not help – Edgecombe itself is the county with the 16th highest rate of breast cancer in the United States. That’s hardly a distinction that any county could want.
The women of Breaking Free had a captive audience – their beauty shop clients, who would be sitting listenting to them talk and would return on a regular basis. They promoted breast self-exams and mammograms. In time, they applied for and received a grant from the Susan G. Komen Foundation to create a program to train lay educators to go out into the community as well as work with the hairdressing clients. These women saw a major health disparity and worked to overcome it, using a medium that made sense – what could be more perfect than hair salons for something like this? Many women in their target audience might not go to the doctor for lack of insurance, fear, lack of awareness, or other reasons, but almost everyone gets their hair cut.
After the first year, they applied for and received funding from ECHO, a UNC program targeting health disparities, which is how it came to be part of the Bus Tour. It was a great way to start off the trip – the project was very inspiring, with two survivors helped by the program and now working with it speaking to us as well as the director, a beauty shop owner, and several other people. Each of the speakers was well chosen – both very effective speakers, and funny as well, which was great so early in the morning for waking us up.
One of the Bus Tour particpants is a surgical oncologist whose practice is largely made up of breast cancer patients – he brought special pink ribbon patches that are designed using half African American colors. That was really nice – I think that the women he gave them to were really touched.
Then we were on to the next stop after a group picture – I do not have any pictures myself from this stop, though I may add some later if I can acquire them.
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