Rebecca Howell grew up at Trinity View.
From gardening to transportation, she has done it all, and becoming part of the community gave her a chance to find her voice.
Five years ago Howell was in class when her father, Gary Howell, texted her to ask if she’d be interested in a part-time job spreading mulch and landscaping at Trinity View where he is the maintenance director. The then 17-year-old jumped at the chance to make some extra money while hiding in the flower beds.
“When I first started I would go out in the flower beds and I would just tend to my little flowers and try to hide from people. Then the weekend desk position opened up and I said I would push myself to be more sociable and get inside and use the phone,” she said. “It made me use the phone. It made me be able to talk to people. It really morphed me into the young adult that I am.”
As she mastered the front desk position, Howell slowly began doing any and everything that came up. She’s helped with transportation, housekeeping, decorating, and activities and given tours to possible future residents.
She has a great track record with those tours. So far she’s sold about five apartments.
“It would be great to have 10 people like Rebecca because she can do so many things and our residents really like her. I think she’s got a really good way about her, spending one-on-one time and she’s really a good listener and I think that’s at the heart of what people really want,” Sherri Redden, marketing director at Trinity View, said. “She’s very easy to work with and I think the residents liked her and trusted her. It’s nice to have somebody around that you can trust to do so many things.”
Finding her voice and career choice
Before Howell became a jack of all trades at Trinity View, she was a child living in fear of food.
“I had been off and on kind of a sick child my whole life, then it really hit hard in the 7th grade. Nothing I ate would stay down. I was sick all the time,” Howell said. “I couldn’t eat until I got home from school and then I’d be sick until that morning; go to bed, go to school, repeat.”
After visits to nearly a dozen doctors, she was finally diagnosed with celiac disease; an immune disease where people can’t eat gluten because it will damage their small intestine.
So the doctor told her everything would be fine, she just needed to eat a gluten-free diet.
“What’s gluten? We had no idea. We didn’t have internet at the time because we lived in such a rural area. We couldn’t even Google it,” she said. “So we tried to get as many books as we could and sort of figure it out. It wasn’t going well. I wasn’t gaining any weight. I wasn’t getting any symptom resolution.”
Finally she was referred to a dietician and the family figured out little things they were doing that was still making Howell sick like using the same plates and silverware for meals that weren’t gluten-free and washing all the dishes in the same sink.
“It wasn’t until I met with that dietician that I felt like I finally got my health under control and I didn’t know it was a career until then. I was like, I could do that. I can teach people how nutrition could make them feel better,” Howell said.
After graduating from Appalachian State University, Howell became a clinical registered dietician and mostly works in the cancer center at Pardee Hospital. She is also still a PRN for Trinity View.
“Trinity did help me find my voice because I wanted to eat the food there, but I would have to go back there and ask the chefs, ‘How are you making it? Can you put it in a different plate? Can you get it out before you add that sauce?’ So it was another way it helped me be braver in asking for what I needed for my health,” she said. “Working at Trinity really forced me to be an actual adult that knew how to do things instead of just a scared kid that hid in the flower beds.”
