Home is a place you come from and a place to return. Louisville is home to the University of Louisville, but its Cardinals come from all over the country and the commonwealth. Kentucky’s communities range from rural to metropolitan, it’s a state with diverse cultures and identities shaped by the South, Midwest, and Appalachian regions. UofL’s student body represents 117 counties in Kentucky and even more unique hometowns.
Two UofL College of Arts & Sciences winter graduates are looking to their hometowns for guidance in their professions and hope to serve the people who shaped them. Chloe Hale and Emmy Walters, studying anthropology and biology respectively, plan to continue their education in graduate school with the goal of utilizing their advanced degrees to support communities like those in which they grew up.
Documenting home
Moving to a city from a rural county can be a culture shock. Coming from Martin County, Hale quickly realized she had a different experience growing up in Kentucky than many of her classmates. Hale’s quiet anxiety around drinking tap water is something few could understand.
“It makes me sad to see on the internet when a place in my home county doesn’t have water and it’s not gonna be back on for two weeks or something like that,” Hale said. “Just the fact that I can drink the water here in Louisville from the tap makes me feel guilty, in a way, because my family members are there, and they can’t drink the water.”
Hale grew up in an Appalachian community where clean drinking water was not a guarantee or to be taken for granted. Martin County lost its regular access to safe water due to infrastructure, resource access, mining contamination and environmental destruction.
“I think when you can’t drink the water there’s this little piece of trauma in the back of your mind every time you drink from the tap,” Hale said. “It’s like, ‘Is it clean? Can I? Is this drinkable?’”
For an independent study, Hale chose to document how hairstylists back home struggled to work without guaranteed access to clean water. She asked her sister and fellow hairstylists to take pictures throughout their workday anytime they encountered the need to use water.
“I decided that it would be a good idea to examine water access through a group of women that rely on water for an income,” Hale explained. “Hairstylists need water for absolutely everything: to clean, to wash hair, to rinse hair, to make different cleaning solutions.”
The project used these pictures as a “photo voice” to document and display the obstacles the Martin County hairstylists encounter every day due to the lack of access to consistently safe tap water.
While returning home is a complicated option with the ongoing water crisis, Hale hopes to continue her education in Appalachian studies at UofL with her sights set on a future PhD to continue to document and uplift her hometown and other communities.
“I definitely love my hometown, but think I’ve been able to curate what it means to be Appalachian a little bit more just because it is its own culture and it is an identity I’m proud of,” Hale said.
A better vision for Kentucky’s future
Emmy Walters’ first connection to optometry was through her love of reading and an early vision assessment at school. She was one of the only members in her family to need glasses and this sparked a curiosity about the relationship between her vision and the biological mechanisms that supported her eyesight and her favorite hobby. As she aged, her curiosity for vision only grew as she understood the obstacles to both eye assessments and literacy in her community.
“Growing up, our access to eye care was sufficient, but then you get in surrounding counties where there won’t be an optometrist for 45 minutes,” Walters said.
Walters early childhood love for reading was protected by her access to an optometrist, and an early assessment allowed her natural curiosity toward books to go uninterrupted. Walters still reads regularly and will attend optometry school next year. After shadowing an optometrist in Campbellsville Kentucky, her hometown, she hopes to practice in a similar rural area.
“I felt like I was home, like I was talking to my own family members; the way that they approached me and talked about things is something I’m used to, and it was comforting,” Walters said.
While shadowing in the practice, Walters began to see the personal impact she could have as an optometrist practicing outside of a major city.
“At least a third of the people that came in had never been to an eye doctor or hadn’t been in a very long time, and most of the time those were people from surrounding areas,” Walters said.
Walters hopes to one day combine her interest in optometry with her love for reading by supporting literacy through eye exams and philanthropy.
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