Navajo: We need nursing homes now

By Zsombor Peter
Staff Writer

TUBA CITY — Bobby Bennett Sr. used to live on his own. His wife passed away six years ago. His children have all grown up and moved on. But for the past three months, he’s been living with a pair of strangers.

Bennett met the couple — in their 60s or 70s; he’s not sure — during a meeting of the Tuba City Seniors Council, which he chairs. That’s when he heard their story. They had no heat or electricity at their Gap home. They were often sick; one suffers from high blood pressure. And their children weren’t doing much to help. One was constantly on the move. The other was mentally disabled. Bennett, 64 himself, decided to take the elderly pair in — at his own expense.

“I cook for them and I haul them to wherever they want, to the grocery store and hospital, or meetings, and a lot of times we just sit around and talk,” he said.

To Bennett, it’s a sign of how desperately his side of the expansive Navajo reservation needs a nursing home to take care of elderly with no one to take care of them or too old to take care of themselves. He’s called local county and hospital officials to an Aug. 8 meeting at the Tuba City Senior Citizens Center to start brain-storming ways to make it happen.

Options for the area’s elderly are limited.

The Navajo Area Agency on Aging provides a variety of at-home care programs for some 1,300 elderly across the reservation. But the costs, Bennett said, can prove burdensome.

“Sometimes the family runs out of money and that’s the last visit,” he said, “or (the programs) run out of people (to send).”

The Agency runs three group homes for elders who can take care of most of their own needs — in Crownpoint, Lower Greasewood and Shiprock — with 67 beds apiece. But even a stay there costs $30 a day.

For elders who need more attention, the options are even fewer. According to Agency Director Laverne Wyaco, the tribe runs no nursing homes of its own. Navajo Nation President Joe Shirley Jr. said he would build several with some of the money the tribe would raise through a massive bond sale. But when Council killed the bond, Wyaco said, the nursing homes went with it.

The only nursing home on the reservation — privately operated — is in Chinle. Families can find others in the tribe’s border towns, but that option comes with its own set of problems for elders.

Off the reservation, Bennett said, “they’re taken away from their environment ... from their families.”

At the very least, that can lead to language barriers. Most staff at off-reservation nursing homes don’t speak Navajo. Navajo elders often speak little English.

But the problems can run deeper.

“They long for their native foods,” Wyaco said. “They long for their homeland.”

The long distances can also put a strain on the entire family.

For families that live on the reservation, putting an elder in an off-reservation nursing home, said Joe Engelkin, Tuba City Indian Medical Center’s CEO, “means that families are going to be traveling a lot; they have to basically re-route their lives.”

According to Engelkin, Indian Health Service figures say some 90 elderly need the services of a nursing home in Tuba City alone.

“That’s a lot of elderly who have to leave,” he said.

Bennett, Engelkin and Wyaco all agree the reservation needs more nursing homes. Bennett hopes the Aug. 8 meeting will help them find the funding.

“I don’t know how much it takes to build a nursing home,” he said. “We’ll try to get as much (money) as we can.”

Engelkin, who said he’ll be attending the meeting, isn’t sure the hospital can help pay for a nursing home directly. But he said it might be able to contribute in other ways, by providing staffing, for example.

The meeting begins at 10 a.m.