Becky
“My grandfather was from here. My mom was from here. This is home. The elders made it my home by accepting me, teaching me, showing me how to care for others. My grandmother said to me: ‘You take care of your elders and you listen to them and respect them. Treat them the way you’d want to be treated.’”
“If you had asked me 50 years ago if I’d be moving out here, I would have said, ‘No, I’m not gonna live on the Reservation.’ I would have thought that back then,” Becky says, sitting in her office at the K'awaika Senior Center on the Pueblo of Laguna. “But you heard your grandparents tell you, ‘Go away, learn the western way, come back and give back to your community.’”
It took years for Becky to find her way back to Laguna. She grew up in California, spending summers as a child visiting her grandparents who lived on the Pueblo of Laguna. Years later, Becky’s parents, wanting a peaceful and quiet retirement, left California to enjoy their final years on the Pueblo, where they knew the community looked out for one another.
On Thanksgiving Day in 2004, Becky moved from California to New Mexico to be closer to her elderly father after her mother passed away; she landed first in Taos before settling back on her family’s land in Mesita, one of the six villages on the Laguna Reservation (the others are: Laguna, Paguate, Seama, Paraje, and Encinal).
Her father had always told her that if she moved back to Laguna, she would find a job. Though her background was in early childhood education, Becky was offered the job as Social Services Director at the Laguna Rainbow Corporation’s Elder Care Center. “When I started working in special education,” Becky explains, “I just fell in love with the kids. The first day, I called up my husband and said, ‘This is what I want to do for the rest of my life.’ But the day I stepped into the nursing home and started working with the elderly, I knew teaching just prepared me to work with the elderly. I understood the cycle of life.”
Working with the elders opened a path for Becky’s identity, with many elders welcoming her back to a community she never fully knew she was part of. “At first you come in, kind of feeling like an outsider. You know, I didn’t grow up here,” Becky says. “And then once you tell the elders who your grandfather was, then they tell you the stories of way back when. They would tell me who I was related to. ‘This is your clan mother. This is your clan sister. We’re all related somehow.’ So, I learned the culture once I started working at the Rainbow Center.”
Today, Becky is the Senior Director of the K'awaika Senior Center, which provides congregate meals, home delivered meals, homemaker and caregiver services, non-emergency transportation, health and wellness education, wellness calls and information, and referral services for elders living on the Pueblo. When the threat of COVID began looming, the staff at the Center started hanging signs about handwashing and encouraging seniors to wear masks. So much was still unknown – until Becky attended a Tribal Emergency Response Committee meeting and the science clearly showed just how vulnerable the elders were to this virus. That night, March 11, 2020, was the night the Center shut down all of its services. Almost a year later, the white board in the activities room still reads, “March 11, 2020,” as a reminder of the day everything changed for the elders. The date will remain on the board, Becky says, until the Center is open again and the elders can celebrate being together – and remember those whose lives were lost.
As a reminder of the last day in-person services were provided, March 11, 2020 will stay on the white board until the Center reopens.
After March 11, the Center began focusing on increased home meal delivery, wellness calls to help break the unrelenting isolation so many seniors faced, provided craft boxes and opened a drive-thru service that offered meals, masks, COVID pamphlets and puzzles – all the while offering seniors some sense of connection. For many seniors who already lived primarily alone, when the drive-thru closed in mid-November due to increased COVID cases among staff, the hardest phase of isolation finally took root. “One elder called me up crying because she was so lonely,” Becky says. “This was her place to come and when we stopped the drive-thru, that’s when it really hit her. She said, ‘At least I’d see all of you, smiling faces, got my great meal that I normally get here and during the drive-thru, I waved at everybody and they waved back.’”
When the drive-thru closed, the Center increased home food delivery – preparing boxed meals for the elders and leaving them outside of houses. During the holidays, the meals included gift cards for the local market so elders could purchase any items – food or otherwise – essential items or simple luxuries, like chile or flour tortillas, that they may have missed for months.
Compared to other Reservations in New Mexico, the Pueblo of Laguna has managed fairly well through the pandemic; an immediate lockdown and a series of coordinated offices working together and communicating quickly and consistently prevented an early spread. For the first six months of COVID, cases remained relatively low. But in November with the onset of All Saints Day celebrations, cases rose rapidly with over 500 cases reported and 18 deaths at the time of writing. With twice a week testing for essential workers and vaccinations on the rise, Becky expects to see the food drive-thru open again sometime in the Spring of 2021 – a small, but important, sign of hope and recovery.
And, when the Center does reopen, Becky says she’ll be waiting to hug everyone as they walk through the doors. The bingo games will start up once again – albeit with people sitting a little farther apart, and conversations will continue as they once had. As hard as this pandemic has been for so many, Becky thinks about how the elders have made their way through:
“We always say how vulnerable the elderly are because on the outside they look very fragile. But they’re stronger than we think. They’re very wise. They’ve seen this coming – maybe they’re unaware of it – but they’ve seen riots, they’ve seen wars break out that we haven’t. One elder told me, ‘We’re not supposed to be scared of this virus. We’re supposed to welcome it in. Let it do what it’s supposed to do. Us Pueblo people are not afraid of it.’”
