Homemaker Services

“A test of a people is how it behaves toward the old. It is easy to love children. Even tyrants and dictators make a point of being fond of children. But the affection and care for the old, the incurable, the helpless are the true gold mines of a culture.”
–Abraham J. Heschel

The first program I looked at when I started writing for the Partnership was the Elderly and Disabled Victims Program, and in my post on it I talked about how important it is to take care of the elderly – if not out of respect then at least through the selfish realization that we will all be in their shoes given enough time. There is more to caring for the elderly than saving them from abuse though, and the Partnership provides more long-term care through its Homemaker Services.

I recently met up with Sheryl Dungan, a caseworker with Homemaker Services, and shadowed her while she worked. She explained to me that homemakers visit clients once or twice a week to help with cleaning, groceries, laundry, meals, and access to community resources to help with things like bills, expenses and room and board. They also drive clients to doctor visits, pick up their medicine, help with essential shopping for items such as clothing, and write out checks. Clients don’t always need all of these services, but they are all available. Each of the program’s homemakers is attached to one of its two caseworkers, who in turn visit clients regularly to make sure that adequate service is being provided in addition to organizing and coordinating the work of the homemakers. “Our goal is to keep them at home,” she said, “to maintain self-sufficiency.”

On this day Sheryl was checking up on a very special client named Roberta. Roberta has devoted her whole life to caring for others – she has raised a whole generation of foster children and was herself a homemaker until she was 78 years old. I was too polite to ask how old she was, but she gave me her birthday and let me do the math*. She is so used to helping others that she has trouble sitting back and letting others do for her now, but when I met her she was so tired from a marathon church session the night before (she still sings in the choir) that her protests were more playful than anything.

Roberta’s homemaker is Brenda, an affable woman in scrubs who works harder in a day than I do in a week and complains much less, but that could be said about almost anyone at the Partnership. Brenda’s been with the program fifteen years, during which time she has only seen one man hired. She winked as she told me that she’s also seen one man quickly leave because he couldn’t handle the work (Eat your heart out Mike Rowe). She worked in a nursing home before coming to Homemaker Services, and while we all understand that nursing homes are sometimes necessary, her experience with them is part of what drives her to do everything she can to keep her elderly clients living in their own homes. She also explained to me what’s entailed in essential shopping; it’s not just food and medicine, it’s also things like books. Books might not seem necessary, but one of her clients is on dialysis, and without his books to read he would be stuck at the hospital staring at a wall for hours on end.

Brenda took a break when we arrived, and we all sat down around Roberta. The three of them spent a long time talking about their experiences as homemakers, remembering triumphs and failures (the latter are surprisingly few), as well as moments of laughter and sadness and the strange hybrids of the two that working with the elderly can often bring. So many of their stories ended with one of them asking, “Whatever happened to her?” and another softly saying, “They passed on,” that I had to ask how they deal with the constant loss that goes hand-in-hand with serving a population at the twilight of life. The recipe seems to be a potent mix of faith and a very stubborn sort of grace, but they’re still not immune to the effects of death. “That’s the most painful thing for all of us,” Brenda said about clients who pass on.

They also told me that the program’s funding is in danger – there is a very real possibility that at the end of this contract year Homemaker Services will no longer be able to pay two caseworkers, which will mean a loss of service for vulnerable elders as far away as Rhea County. That was something to be worried about another time however, because now was the time for work. I would like to say that I did a lot to help, but by the time I had changed Roberta’s linens the floors had been mopped and vacuumed and the garbage and laundry had been carried out - I felt a little useful all the same. As Sheryl and I prepared to leave, Roberta took our hands, smiled, and said, “Thank you, I love you, sweeties.”

We love you too, Roberta.

“Resolve to be tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant with the weak and the wrong. Sometime in your life you will have been all of these.” –Dr. Robert H. Goddard

*It’s 1918 if you want to play the home game.

Building Stable Lives

Unless you’re one of the richest 1% of Americans, you have probably been or felt poor at some point in your life. There is poor and then there is poor though, and while some of us might have had to suffer the embarrassment of reduced lunch and too-big hand-me-downs, or drafty one room apartments and a steady diet of ramen and rice, I hope that most of us will never wonder if, without help, without some intervention, we might starve, might lose our homes, might not be able to give our children the basics for living let alone a prosperous life.

But this is the reality of life for many people in America, far too many – as of 2008, nearly 15% of American Households were food insecure. There are programs in place to help people without access to food, such as United Way’s 211, but 211 and other programs like it are stopgaps, meant to get people through brief periods of urgent need. Serious poverty is a relentless monster, however, and many people find themselves calling for assistance over and over in a given year. Obviously the help they’re receiving isn’t doing anything for the core problem, that circumstances in their lives have brought them to a place where they can’t acquire the basics of human survival.

One of the areas with the greatest number of repeat callers in Chattanooga is East Lake, which has some of the highest poverty and unemployment rates and lowest high school graduation rates in the city. In other words, the area is a perfect storm of all the factors contributing to poverty and hunger, and it has the fewest resources available to aid in these problems. But how can that be helped, other than giving people food and monetary aid? For Raquel Hidalgo and the “Building Stable Lives” initiative, the solution is – as usual – not a handout so much as a hand up.


The biggest problem facing most of the families she deals with is a lack of work, which takes not only a financial but a psychological toll as well. This has gotten worse recently, as rising unemployment leaves people of all educational backgrounds scrambling to find any employment, leaving the poor of areas like East Lake, who often don’t even have a GED, to compete for work with high school and college graduates. Construction, labor and production have been good sources of work for those without high school diplomas in the past, but few construction projects are initiated in an economic climate like this one and those are temporary anyway – once the building is finished the job is done. Labor and production have been dwindling for years, giving way to a service based economy as the industrial and agricultural work of our parents and grandparents is moved out of the country. The logical solution is to go back to school or at the very least get a GED, but when food is scarce, children are crying, and the stresses of living in poverty pile up on every side, it can be difficult if not impossible to rally the time or the psychological energy, let alone the money, to do so. This is where Raquel comes in: she helps families in crisis take inventory of their lives and shows them ways to work within their circumstances to pull themselves out of their current chaos.

One of the most important services she provides for her clients is showing them how to get a GED and, beyond that, how to achieve even higher levels of education. Many have begun the process of getting their GED, many have already gotten it, and a few have even enrolled in classes at Chattanooga State. She also gives her clients access to computers and shows them how to use them to find work and handle their resources – something that many of us consider incidental but which have become almost necessary for full participation in society, since even the lowest paying jobs are moving to exclusively handling the application process online. Little things like computer illiteracy can add up to a severe handicap, and helping with these problems is a large part of Raquel’s work.

But working and thinking, jobs and education, those are the keys. Those are the foundation around which all the other work, all the other assistance, is done, and it really is staggering the dignity that meaningful labor can bring a person who thought they were useless, the hope that education can bring do a mind that has been for too long turned inward in despair and frustration. What Raquel and the rest of the Partnership provide for the people they help is not a crutch or charity, but – as I’ve said over and over – empowerment and the freedom to be productive. I will leave you with a quote from The Grapes of Wrath that, to me, sums up exactly what we mean when we use the E word:

The last clear definite function of man-muscles aching to work, minds aching to create beyond the single need-this is man. To build a wall, to build a house, a dam, and in the wall and house and dam to put something of Manself, and to Manself take back something of the wall, the house, the dam; to take hard muscles from the lifting, to take the clear lines and form from conceiving. For man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.

Deaf Services

Finding a job is hard. Keeping a job once you’ve found one can be just as hard. I know how difficult these things can be firsthand, but until recently I’d never considered just how much more difficult they could be. I have spent a lot of time mulling over all sorts of privilege, but it was shocking to realize just how complacent I’d been in my own abled privilege. What if a prospective employer wrote me off immediately because they assumed I was incompetent due to a disability? What if that same employer wrote me off just because my presence made them uncomfortable? These are only a couple of the difficulties faced by PWDs (People With a Disability), but each disability comes with its own difficulties as well. What if, for example, I was perfectly qualified for a job but lost it because I couldn’t communicate with an employer who would rather take someone less qualified than expend any effort on communication? The difficulty of working or even living in an environment where communication is difficult or impossible was brought to my attention when I spoke with the women in the La Amiga program, but it applies to another group as well – the deaf.

One reason my abled privilege took so long to dawn on me, at least where deaf people are concerned, is that none of the deaf people I have ever met – admittedly not many – seemed “disabled.” In fact when left to their own devices or among other deaf people they got by just as well as anyone else. Sure, they couldn’t hear, but they had access to a sophisticated visual language capable of conveying just as much specificity and meaning as any vocal one, and in a culture as literate and digital as ours what else would a person really need hearing for other than speaking with hearing people? The only time the deaf people I knew seemed frustrated or ill-equipped was when they had to do that very thing, and even then their difficulties more closely resembled those of a foreigner than a PWD*.

Still, calling interaction with the hearing a deaf person’s “only” difficulty is a bit of a mischaracterization – they live every day of their lives in a culture built by and for hearing people who communicate through sound. If they’re lucky enough to live in a town of any size they will have access to a community of other deaf people to communicate with, but otherwise virtually everyone they meet, from cashiers to judges to mothers to friends, will not understand them or be understood by them. Also, because most of the social and emotional aspects of human communication are non-verbal and visual, they will be able to pick up on the annoyance, confusion, impatience, or pity in hearing people they try to communicate with.


This is unfortunate because no matter how competent a person is otherwise, a stumbling block this size can have drastic effects on their self-esteem and confidence, and once those are taken away self determination becomes almost impossible. Almost impossible and completely impossible aren’t the same however, and the Partnership is one of many groups across the country that offers services to help deaf people find employment, live independently, and regain and maintain confidence in their own abilities.

One such case is Olga Olegovna Sidlinskiy, a 17-year old daughter of a family of Russian immigrants, and one of nine children. She is the only member of her family who is deaf but even so, when her father became unemployed and her working-age siblings got jobs to support the family, Olga – who had never worked before - decided that it was only right to pitch in. However, she wasn’t sure what to do or how to do it until a staff member at the Harvest Christian Academy for the Deaf in Ringgold directed her to Sharon Bryant and the Partnership’s deaf services program.

It’s important to remember that deaf services, just like all of the Partnership’s other programs, works first and foremost to make it so that people won’t "need" help – empowering people to build better lives again. It would probably be easier (and cheaper) to hand people like Olga a proverbial fish and send them on their way, but they need to be fed for the rest of their lives. So Sharon opened her tackle box and got to work.

She helped Olga put together a resume, explained how the interview process works, and helped facilitate communication between Olga and her potential employers. Olga then went on, despite the abysmal state of the job market, to find work at an Olive Garden where her manager has nothing but praise for her and she is actually teaching her coworkers some signing. Like the other 36+ clients Sharon has helped in her two and a half years with the Partnership, Olga now has more than a job. She has something that most of the rest of us take advantage of every day: self determination.

*Speaking slower and louder works about as well on a deaf person as it does on, say, a Parisian, and it generally elicits the same reaction.