“CASTLEGAR NEWS, February 6, 1983 STEOMANS 331 Columbia Ave. Castlegar 365-7366 THE FAMILY STORE WITH THAT HOMETOWN ~ Bring This Coupon jor $ f 2.00 OFF ANY PAIR OF RUNNING SHOES STEOMANI 1 WEEK SPECIALS © ¥%," G.1.S. Plywood STUDS 2x4,2x6,2x8,2x10 &2x 12 mixed species Aside. from: fulfilling these qualifications, the homemaker must take an-orientation course. She also goes through.a 10-week provincial upgrading program held ‘periodically at Selkirk College. She is trained in First Aid and CPR, nutrition and home care procedures. © The companionship that often occurs - between homemaker .and client’ is a: precious, but. often ized part of the prog “Our tell us they have gained so much -wisdom ‘from these elderly people,” says Anne. And Laura adds, “Some have told us they have learned to cook all sorts of differaiit'food from their clients.” Because she is there all the ‘time, the homemaker is quick’to pick up subtle changes in the physical_or mental health of a client. “Sometimes a homemaker can convince a lent to see a doctor,” says. Lovette, ~ In ‘some, places in B.C., homemakers are rotated ’ around to different client's homes, but the staff here in Castlegar don’t, believe in that. Laura says, “You're always taught not to get personally involved with your client, Well, we just don’t believe in that here! We don’t rotate ‘our homemakers.” “Therefore, homemakers are matched to clients in a pretty special way. form between client and homemaker. A homemaker will tell us, ‘She’s-just: like my mom,’ and a client will say, . ‘She's just like my daughter.’ It'g hard to put into words. They're not just house cleaners, they're homemakers. Housecleaners arc just janitors, but we are more than that. “You can tell we really believe in homemakers in this office,” says Laura and the others nodded in assent. “We really believe that people have « right to live at home if they want. They have a right to be at risk.” “If you think about it,” added Anne, “we all live at risk. We never know if we might go out and break a leg. Maybe we should all be in hospitals.” She sat back, laughed, then continued, “If you forget something, that’s CLEANING UP . . . Homemake Vera Zaytsoff — “like family.” “ OK, but if Gramma forgets something we say ‘Oh, she's getting senile.’ But we all forget things, | that’s why all of us make lists. We all do that.”"” E “To be a part of something like this in the community is very rewarding,” says, Lovette. Even with all of this “emphasis on home care, many especially the elderly, are reluctant to ask for a home- maker. “They've been independent all their lives,” says Anne, “and they're somehow afraid that if we're going to | .. try to put them into a home.” I visited with three homemakers; Maureen Saliken, Vera Zaytsoff, and Debbie Briggeman. Maureen has been homemaking at the Jonkman’s home for a little over a year. While she stood at the sink peeling potatoes she told me, “I really love older people.” And to Mrs. Jonkman, who celebrated her 86th birthday last week, “She is such a help. If I had to do it myself, I could not do it.” . Vera Zaytsoff has been homemaking for seven years and has 10 clients, among them.Mrs, Wallace who told me, “I don't know what I'd do without her.” Vera enjoys her work and said, “I just love o]d people.” Mrs. Wallace adds, “She's so nice to me, like my own family." “Like my own family,” is the theme I heard over and over again as I talked with both homemakers and clients. Mrs. Mary Krall said that many of her previous homemakers return to visit her. “They're my little girls,” she told me. Debbie Briggeman, her present homemaker, has been with her for about eight months, and is currently enrolled in the Selkirk College upgrading rogram, “T like helping people,” she said, “and you make such friends. You really become part of the family.” 7 to have a strong army, to be superior,” said Grij 5, a leading figure in the Mescow dissident movement in the 19603 and 1970s. - Grigorenko was interviewed in his modest apartment in Long Island City, an industrial district of New York. He has lived there since 1977, when he came to the United States , for medical treatment and was stripped of his citizenship by the Soviets. His book Memoirs, recently published in an English- language edition by W.W. Norton and Co., recounts a life full of activism and hardship. :” Asa young man, he wasa deeply-committed Communist and in the Second World War, he commanded combat units against the Germans. But in the 1950s, as a senior faculty member at Mescow's military academy, he grew disillusion- ed and in the early 1960s, he campaigned for democratization and against abuses of power. CALLED MENTALLY ILL He was put into jails and peychlatric prisons for a total of six years. Once he was di: as it later found him to be mentally sound. b some official myths about Kremlin leaders, ‘such as the late Leonid Brezhnev. Although Brezhnev was adulated as a war hero for his work as an army political commissar, Grigorenko, who served with him, writes that in truth, he avoided the battle- front, “but they still depict, things as if Brezhnev, had himself led an attack.” Grigorenko never met Brezhnev's successor as Com- munist party chief, Yuri Andropov. But Grigorenko's wife, Zinaida, once tangled with him in 1972, when Andropov was head of the KGB secret police. She had asked for an appointment to appeal for her husband's release. When she arrived at KGB offices, she was met by a man she recognized as Andropov, but who identifi ied himself as Yuri A ich Yuriev. She d him ae “very sly, very smooth.” ia “with the p of reformist ideas.” hres ko says he expects Andropov to continue to crack pi on the dissident movement, as he did as KGB "chief, although he might free some jailed dissidents asa gesture to the West. The former general, stooped with age and illness but alert and speaking forcefully, was asked whether he agreed with Reagan's assessment that the Soviet Union is militarily superior to the United States. “In quantity, the Soviet Union is ahead in nuclear ical weapons and —air forces, tanks, artillery and in the number of troops,” he said, _ speaking through an interpreter. “But the United States is ahead technologically, in the quality of weapons. And the United States is ahead in the quality of soldiers. I don't want to give the impression all Soviet soldiers are no good. But if the command structure is destroyed, the army could disintegrate like a strand of beads.” - He said the American political-economic system “is the best that mankind has found to date.” “I don’t mean to idealize it. It has deficiencies. But I wish my people could live in an ‘American hell,' rather than a 8 ‘Soviet paradise.’