PROGRAM: DATE:   SEPTEMBER 22, 1998
MORNING EDITION

 STATION OR NETWORK: TIME:9:40 AM, EDT
NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO

WELFARE & THE NAVAJO, PART TWO

BOB EDWARDS, Anchor: The federal government's plan to eliminate welfare is based on encouraging or forcing recipients into the labor market. In exchange for monthly cash assistance, state welfare plans across the country require proof that recipients are looking for work. On Indian reservations, jobs are scarce and Indians are wondering how they'll find work before their five year lifetime limit of benefits expires. William Drummond continues a series of reports from the Navajo reservation.
 

PAULINE DURAN, Welfare Recipient: Say your numbers. (Child responds...)
 

WILLIAM DRUMMOND, Reporter: That's Armando Duran, age seven, practicing counting to ten in Navajo. He's learning to master the language in his primary school. Armando lives in the reservation town of Payente with his mother Pauline and his thirteen year old brother Rico in a tribal public housing project. Pauline Duran moved there after living in a traditional dwelling called a hogan in an isolated community up on one of the nearby mesas.
 

DURAN: We'd been living in a hogan, a rundown hogan. We didn't have water, we had to carry water from a distant place and have wood burning. And my youngest one kept getting seizures. And so I took him one day to the clinic here and they did a statement for me. Instead, it took me three years to come and live into this house.
 

DRUMMOND: Pauline says the housing project has its share of drug dealers and bootleggers, but the compound looks neat, tidy, and graffiti free. Here, she has a real luxury item, her own washer/dryer. In Indian terms, Pauline is not doing badly. Having been on assistance for nearly fifteen years, she was able to get valuable work experience for six months. She went through mandatory job training which included receiving her GED but that, she says, was an ordeal.
 

DURAN: There was no teacher available some days. And there was, like, the students...They would be off their assistance or food stamps if they didn't show up. One of my classmates, she got beaten up by her husband. And, I mean, she had to sit in the classroom. She had no excuse.
 

DRUMMOND: So did you get a job out of this?
 

DURAN: I don't have a permanent job at all. And with around here, Payente, you have to have like years of experience before you can get into anything.
 

DRUMMOND: Do you ever foresee a day when you're going to be off assistance and food stamps?
 

DURAN: I look forward to it. (Laughs) Because I'm really trying so hard to get off of it and I do like working. And I have my kids and now they have things that I worked for through the work experience. And they see the changes and they like the changes.
 

DRUMMOND: Navajos like Pauline find themselves frustrated because after going through job training, they still can't find steady employment on the reservation. There are so few paying jobs that half the adults are listed as unemployed. And there's another important factor: Holding onto a job, for many Navajo, is a constant struggle. That's certainly the case for Yurika Benale, another welfare recipient. Benale went through job training, but when she didn't get a job through the program she went out looking on her own.
 

YURIKA BENALE, Welfare Recipient: Didn't really want to stay home and do nothing anymore. So my dad was driving me around and I applied on a Monday here and was hired that same day.
 

DRUMMOND: The new dialysis center in Payente hired her and she had been working there three weeks when we talked. The private firm that owns the dialysis centers is eager to hire Navajo workers, but the Payente center and the fifteen others elsewhere on the reservation all have trouble getting and keeping workers. Yurika's boss is Nadine Flyer, a registered nurse who is the administrator of the dialysis center. She says finding workers on the reservation with previous experience is nearly impossible.
 

NADINE FLYER, RN: I start them at the very low, just a little above, scale and to see if it's going to work. Because there are quite a few that it doesn't work. And then I have to start all over again.
 

DRUMMOND: Cultural taboos are a factor. Navajos want nothing to do with human blood. Navajos avoid contact with people they fear are dying. For the sake of a good job, many Navajos do put the cultural sanctions aside and accept employment, but Flyer says they can't put aside the other facts of reservation life that make holding down a demanding job difficult.
 

FLYER: None of my staff have telephones, but they all have access to a telephone. If they're no call/no show for two days, then I suspend them for an entire week.
 

DRUMMOND: Well, then you have to cover their hours...
 

FLYER: That's right. And sometimes my staffing is so low I can't do that. And when I do do that, I don't really think it's a punishment because they get a week off. They don't care if they get paid or not. I haven't come up with a good answer of how to make it work on the res. We have a large alcohol problem here. We have family that come in and bother the staff.
 

DRUMMOND: It sounds like the workforce is relatively unstable. Is it high turnover?
 

FLYER: That's a good word. Yes. What I have discovered is that the Navajo cherish the family above everything else. When something is going on with the family, that comes first, not the job.
 

DRUMMOND: That's certainly the experience of Yurika Benale. At age twenty-three, she is the principal provider for her seven sisters and brothers. Her mother lives in Phoenix and her father can't work because of a disability. Yurika works three days a week, but still qualifies for assistance. She can't feed seven children and one adult on her $130 a week salary. Nevertheless, holding onto the dialysis center job, she says, is a struggle.
 

BENALE: My dad's car gave out a few weeks ago, so...While I was opening, which meant I would have to be here at 4:30 in the morning and leave from my house about 3 in the morning, so I'd be up at 2:00 getting the kids' clothes ready, trying to figure out what they're going to have. Mostly they've been living on cold cereal. And oh, my Dad's been good. He's been cooking for the kids in the morning. And then there's free lunch at the chapter, at our local chapter house. And they eat there in the afternoon, and then I get home and cook. And so, it's okay.
 

DRUMMOND: So you get docked for a day, right? You get docked a day's pay?
 

BENALE: Yeah. She gets off you for being late.
 

DRUMMOND: Keep in mind that Yurika Benale is what passes for a success story. She's motivated, capable, and has landed a job in the private sector where jobs are rare. Half of the jobs on the reservation are government related; that's much higher than in the outside world. Harvey Butler, a tribal government official himself who works with the job training program, says often it's the tribe - which is a principal employer - that makes it hard for aid recipients to get jobs.
 

HARVEY BUTLER, Tribal Government Official: If we train a person, if we take a person raised on welfare and we train a person for six months into a position, at that six month's time we'd like to hire that person into that position. But when they apply to the tribe, then the personnel officer will say this person does not qualify for that position. So they don't have prospects.
 

DRUMMOND: Even if they were trained to the tribe's satisfaction, it couldn't hire them all. More than 7,000 Navajo adults are on welfare. Leaving the reservation often becomes the only option for many Navajo, but Butler says leaving is often not a solution.
 

BUTLER: We sent around 40 people down to New Orleans for the welding, the shipbuilders down there. And all of them came back after a few months. We interviewed them and said, why did you leave that good, high-paying job down there?" And they said, "Well, I miss my people, I miss squaw dances. I didn't have my traditional ceremonies. I couldn't go to the medicine man," things like that. So there's a lot of ties back here. But then at the same time, you know, there's no jobs so what can you do?
 

DRUMMOND: The economies of the reservations are so distressed that Congress provided an exemption under the Welfare Reform law. Reservations like the Navajo that have more than 50% unemployment get more time to strengthen their economies before the more punitive measures kick in.
 

EDWARDS: Tomorrow, Indians who have beaten the odds and built successful businesses where MBA's feared to tread.
 
 

(END)