Reznet

A sign points the way to the Senior Citizens Center in Crownpoint, N.M.Reznet Photo by Andi Murphy

Working Together to Help Navajo Elders

By Andi Murphy

CROWNPOINT, N.M.— Many of the Navajo Nation elders living here don't receive adequate care, but three Crownpoint agencies are working together to solve the problem.

The Crownpoint Elderly Home, the Navajo Housing Service and the Community Health Representative program provide care, company, housing and transportation to the elders.

"We take care of the elderly by giving them baths, showers" and performing tasks that they can no longer do for themselves, Esther Kee said, a house parent at the Crownpoint Elderly Home.

Kee and other house parents take care of five elders who call the facility their home. They make sure the elders go to their medical appointments, and sometimes they take them out on leisure trips.

The elders are there on a short- and long-term basis, Kee said. Sometimes they are there on an emergency basis in which the staff members care for elders who are there from the hospital. "Either they have no heat or nobody to cook for them," Kee said.

Around the corner from the facility is the Navajo Housing Service, where eligibility technician Sarahlene Yazzie works through piles of papers to see if people are eligible to get houses through the program.

The housing service has a point system in which the elders always win, she said. It is based on age, income, disability and need. The older, poorer, more disabled and needy they are, the more eligible they are, she said. The elders receive homes that cost around $70,000 that are paid with federal funds and they have about two bedrooms.

One problem: "If they don't have a home site lease, we cannot serve them," said Yazzie.

Homes are just one of the many problems that face elders who are on their own. There is also the question of transportation.

"Transportation is a real big problem. Most of them don't have transportation," Peter Jordan said, supervisor of Crownpoint's Community Health Representative (CHR) program. "Sometimes they're without food ... sometimes they can't cook for themselves."

With CHR, elders are visited in their homes and receive free health checkups. The CHR workers also act as advocates and sometimes as company for those elders who live alone.

"I guess isolation is a problem; they have nobody to talk to ... they have no family support," Jordan said. Another problem is that the elders sometimes have to support their families and often let their children and grandchildren "take their money," leaving them with none, Jordan said.

Sometimes the CHR workers see extreme cases in which the police and social services are brought in to solve abuse and neglect situations. In the CHR program, "our priority is the elderly," Jordan said.

Andi Murphy, Navajo, is a student at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. A graduate of the Freedom Forum's 2007 American Indian Journalism Institute, Murphy interned as a reporter at The Daily Times in Farmington, N.M., and, last summer, at the Great Falls Tribune in Montana.