Safe to say the United States is a nation of caregivers. AARP reports in 2023, 1 in 4 adults was serving as a caregiver. One in three of those caregivers is under the age of 50, and 29% of those caregivers are providing care for both adults and children. The AARP numbers also show over 40% of caregivers now provide high-intensity care. Many performing complex medical tasks like administering injections or managing equipment. Yet only 22% receive training, and caregiving can look different in different locations.
That’s the impetus for a new podcast created in northwest Arkansas called “Narratives of Care: Puerto Rico,” created by Charlotte Bayala. This new podcast complements her other current podcasts, “The Cancer Caregiver” and “Caregiver Breathing Room.” Charlotte says the new podcast, with episodes available each Tuesday, is the first season of a new feature that will each year focus on caregiving in one specific place. She says she knew she wanted to start this project with Puerto Rico.
Bayala: I’m Puerto Rican, so I had assumptions, but I wanted to kind of put those on a shelf and really listen to what they were telling me. Not anyone just flat out said, “This is why caregiving is the way it is for me, because I’m in Puerto Rico.” But I started to see that a lot of it has to do with your social circles and the social norms and rules, how people either band together through community services and institutions or not. Also where you live and the people that you live around determines who takes on the care role.
But not only that, being on an island in Puerto Rico, there are still so many things that are aftereffects of Hurricane Maria that have really impacted caregiving on the island and will continue to do so in probably a very serious way that will need to be corrected, or there will be larger implications than just people trying to recover and reconnect after so many different things that happened after the hurricane. But also politically and economically, there’s a lot of issues on the island that aren’t always duplicated here on the mainland. And so people are trying to give just as people here on the mainland, but with some other factors that are in play.
Kellams: Can you give me an example of one of the other factors?
Bayala: Yeah. After Hurricane Maria, a lot of people had to leave because there were no jobs for them anymore or they couldn’t support their families by staying on the island. And so a large number of younger Puerto Ricans left to go to the United States mainland or to other countries to find jobs so that they could support their family.
So now the problem is that the younger generations are largely outside of the island. And so in Puerto Rico, an emerging problem is the majority of the population is now aging in place where there aren’t those people in those social circles and the support systems that were there before to help the people who were aging live through that phase of their lives.
Also, there’s a lot of doctors that have left after the hurricane because of the same things. Not having access to jobs, not being able to make the income that they want to make. And so when people go to get medical support, it’s really difficult for them to get into appointments in a timely manner, to find experts that they might need. Sometimes they have to leave the island and go to the states or other places to actually find the care that they actually need, because that system of care is not available on the island.
Kellams: The name of the podcast is “Narratives of Care: Puerto Rico.” It’s 12 parts. How do you break down what we hear over those 12 parts?
Bayala: Yeah, it’s four parts. So the part of the series that we’re in right now is, it’s following a family who cared for a loved one who had dementia. The next four episodes are based on conversations I had with people at American Cancer Society’s Hope Lodge in Puerto Rico. So that’s the cancer caregiver story. And then the last four are about what we’ve been talking about now, the larger picture of caregiving on the island.
Kellams: Caregiving, I think, is one of those things that if you haven’t done it, you can imagine, you can sympathize, but you might not be able to empathize. And I think one of the things that I like about this podcast is it brings home, if you haven’t had the experience of caregiving for a loved one and how challenging that can be. This, you really are letting us know what those challenges are.
Bayala: Yeah. And the difference between this show and the other shows is the main purpose of the show is to share stories. The other shows are all specifically for caregivers. And I know caregivers will listen to this show.
And someone who’s caring for someone who has dementia, I talk about, I think it’s in this week’s episode, where the problem is the person with dementia is blaming everyone for stealing her money. I’m sure someone who’s caring for someone with dementia is going to think, “Oh my goodness, that happened all the time. It’s happening right now. Or what did they do?”
But also because it’s stories, I feel like it has the potential to open up the conversation and make it a little bit more interesting for people who don’t caregive right now, who haven’t had it in their lives, because they’re interested or they’re curious, or maybe they’re a health professional who wants to understand, “I take care of people who have dementia. I want to have a little insight into what life is like for the person that walks in with them.”
So I really hope that the storyline helps other people become curious about what it’s like to live as a caregiver for someone who has cancer, who has dementia. The cancer caregivers, a lot of them were telling me stories of there being a caregiver, but for their children, which completely changes the implications of caregiving. And in Puerto Rico, a lot of the people who cared for their children, they actually moved into the hospital with them. So there’s a lot of conversations about home, like where is home in the different contexts of where they had to and how they had to create that for themselves.
Kellams: Has working on these podcasts made you think differently about your life and what might be later for you?
Bayala: Well, I’m currently a caregiver. And so my caregiving, I always use it kind of as a foundation point for knowing what to be curious about, right? Our things knowing, especially with cancer caregiving, understanding that there are things that I’m sure other caregivers aren’t talking about that I know about because I’m living in that life.
But for me, the dementia side of caregiving story, I have friends who are already taking care of parents who have dementia. And so it is kind of highlighting what could be in the future for my husband and I, because we have people in our lives that are aging that we might need to start taking care of in the future.
And it is an eye-opener, but also seeing how everyone came together and how they did make it work for them is really reassuring. Because if any of us are thinking about having to take care of our aging parents, I think there’s always this sense of dread and anxiety that shows up instantaneously. But for people to hear these stories and to see they were able to figure things out, and it wasn’t pretty. Caregiving is not pretty, and that’s not what this show is about. It’s to show kind of where the cracks are and how beautiful it is to see how everyone comes together to try to fill those gaps.
Kellams: You’re based in northwest Arkansas. This 12-part podcast, “Narratives of Care: Puerto Rico,” is about people in Puerto Rico. How is it in 2026 to be based in northwest Arkansas with a podcast that is concentrating on something 1,500, 1,600 miles away?
Bayala: I feel that technology and the ability to hear anything that anyone puts out there makes it easy. It was hard for me to get the interviews, to do the oral histories, because I don’t live in Puerto Rico. The dementia story I had a personal connection to, but all the caregiving stories were people that I’d never met before that I was basically asking for them to be vulnerable and to give me trust that I didn’t deserve. And I think that’s where that distance really made a difference, because I wasn’t a person that lived in their community.
And quite honestly, I was a little bit of a pain in the butt to get someone to listen to me, because I had a week’s time between me coming up with this idea and actually going to the island, and I really wanted to get the cancer side. And so the cancer stories are important to me because these are people who shared without knowing me, which is very hard to do in any world, in any community. And coming in almost as an outsider was a different experience for me.
So being here in northwest Arkansas gave me the ability to have a foundation and a central place where I feel comfortable, and I have the ability to have access to equipment to make the show. It was getting the people to speak to me and having time against me to do it. That if I were living on the island, this may have been more interviews. If I had more time, this could have been a longer season.
But I really feel like the stories that I have, there are eight people that I interviewed, plus a few people who are representatives of different organizations on the island. I feel like it’s the perfect amount. So it’s a very, very small drop in the large ocean of caregiving in Puerto Rico. It’s by no means a representation of all caregivers, but it’s enough for people to start to realize, this is what caregiving looks like based on the stories that people on the island gave me. And here are things that we can be curious about when it comes to caregiving in other parts of the world.
Kellams: And the value of being able to share these stories with people who otherwise might not hear them.
Bayala: Yeah. That’s the problem. Caregivers don’t necessarily like talking about their caregiving. It’s so different, because when my daughter was younger, I belonged to a moms group, and we complained all the time about all the things that if someone didn’t have a child, maybe would say, “You are really bad parents to be upset about these things.” But that was all, we were all together. We could commiserate in our misery, right?
And so with caregiving, it’s so different, where I feel like it should be the same as those mom groups. We should be able to get together and complain and talk about things. Because if we vent, we can let all those things out, and we can give less power of our emotions in those moments, and just kind of let it be out in the air where someone can say, “Oh my goodness, I was in that position last year. It was horrible. I felt so bad.” So that we can just let it out and let people that understand know.
And that’s the problem. There’s so many, we pass by so many caregivers in our day. Nobody knows because we’re not announcing that. And that’s fine. I don’t think that we should have to. But if we’re not talking about being a caregiver, then we can’t self-identify and then find that caregiver that we might be standing behind in the grocery store.
So it’s really hard. And I feel that if it were a little bit easier for caregivers to be able to speak their mind and say what they’re feeling, but we don’t normally have that bandwidth or that energy or want to deal with the repercussions of someone saying something that invalidates how we feel. And so I do it for them so that then they can hear someone else say it. And then if they feel called to, they will email me back and say, “And this also happened when that thing that you’re talking about happened.”
So it’s a little bit more complicated. It’s not like getting together in a group, but quite honestly, getting caregivers in a group is very difficult because we’re just always so busy with caring for our loved ones. So yeah, so any time that I hear that my show has given them this “Oh, it’s not just me” moment, that’s the best.
Kellams: “Narratives of Care: Puerto Rico,” new episodes every Tuesday. Where can people find this and your other podcasts?
Bayala: They can find all the podcast information at charlottebayala.com.
Kellams: Charlotte, thank you so much for your time.
Bayala: Thank you so much for having me.
Charlotte Bayala lives in northwest Arkansas. Her latest podcast is titled “Narratives of Care: Puerto Rico.” Her other podcasts include “The Cancer Caregiver” and “Caregiver Breathing Room.” Our conversation occurred on Monday.
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