| Home | “As the karmīs become more and more desperate for competent, reliable home health care, the devotees could insist on vegetarian diets for their clients.” |
Currently, the home health care industry has some problems, and these problems are going to get worse, not better. I ought to know. I’ve been working as a home health care aide for the past 5 years.
Some of the problems/proposed solutions are as follows:
PROBLEM #1: Because wages for home health care workers are low, they are generally not very intelligent, and are therefore inclined to do incompetent work. They also tend to be dishonest, lazy, unreliable, uncaring, and untrustworthy. Workers are in short supply because the work is not considered very desirable or prestigious. This problem is likely to get worse as the “baby boomers” begin to need this type of care in larger and larger numbers.
SOLUTION #1: Independent devotees of Kṛṣṇa who are not under pressure from a temple to “make lots of money” should earn their livelihood by doing this kind of work. Devotees are ideally suited because they realize that both themselves and their clients are eternal spirit souls, not their material bodies. They realize that we are all Kṛṣṇa’s dear children, part and parcel of the Supreme. Also, since devotees believe in the law of karma, they will not try to get away with wasting energy or doing inferior work because they know that “As you sow, so shall ye reap.” They know that it’s not possible to get away with even the smallest wrongdoing. Therefore, they will be honest, energetic, reliable, caring, and trustworthy.
PROBLEM #2: Because of the current mood in America of always trying to find someone to blame for our problems, and therefore suing someone over every little thing, liability insurance for home health care organizations is very high. Senior citizens, who are usually the ones who need this kind of care, are usually not very wealthy. Also, government agencies who pay for such care are very stingy about how much they are willing to pay.
SOLUTION #2: Home health care workers should form a loosely knit cooperative, and should use an Internet site similar to Ebay to communicate with each other and with the clients. Clients could use the Web site to post employment opportunities and workers could use it to fill them. This would eliminate the need for liability insurance, especially for devotees, who are only interested in “keeping body and soul together” so that they can simply serve Kṛṣṇa in a simple, humble, straightforward way. Also, the Web site, like EBay, would allow comments to be left by clients about workers and vice versa, and for the percent of positive, negative, and neutral comments to be kept track of. Therefore, clients would be motivated to “be good,” otherwise serving them would be “bid up” to higher salary levels. Workers would be motivated to “do a good job” because then they would be more in demand and could demand higher salaries.
PROBLEM #3: Doctors take advantage of people, especially the disabled / infirm / elderly, by prescribing medications which are unnecessary or which even cause more harm than good. They do this out of ignorance, in responce to pressure from the drug manufacturers, and/or in order to “fatten their own wallets.” They also, out of ignorance or prejudice, prescribe unhealthy diets.
SOLUTION #3: Devotees know that medicines are a temporary measure, meant for curing diseases, and that they should not be taken for the rest of one’s life or even for a long period of time, like a common drug addiction. Also, devotees know that a vegetarian diet is most beneficial to the clients’ health. As the karmīs become more and more desperate for competent, reliable home health care, the devotees could insist on a vegetarian diet for their clients, especially after the “word got around” about the superior qualities of the devotee caregivers and how a vegetarian diet helped the health and wellbeing of a growing number of clients. They could also preach to their clients about the dangers of taking unneccessary medications.
PROBLEM #4: People requiring home health care tend to become depressed, thinking that they are their defective material bodies, and that this miserable material world is all that there is.
SOLUTION #4: Devotee caregivers could preach to their clients, telling them that they are not their bodies, but that they are eternal (without beginning or end), blissful, spirit souls, eternally youthful, part-and-parcel of the Supreme Soul, that the Supreme Lord is like a loving father, always hoping that the wayward son will come back to Him, and that there is an eternal, blissful spiritual world where we can go, at the time of the death of this temporary material body.
Sometimes I tell my client, “Suppose that a man is driving his car and someone smashes into him. He gets out of his car and says, ‘You hit me!’, but this is nonsense, because ‘The driver of the car is not the car.’ Similarly, we are not these material bodies. We are simply the drivers of these bodies.”
My client is very much interested in who, among the rich and famous, have died, so I tell him, “For one who is born, death is certain, and for one who has died, birth is certain.”
CONCLUSION: When I first joined the ISKCON Detroit temple in 1970, the temple was maintained by the devotees going downtown, six days a week, distributing Spiritual Sky incense, Back to Godhead magazines, and Śrīla Prabhupāda’s books. Kṛṣṇa always provided just enough for the temple and the devotees to be maintained nicely. There was not very much left over for the devotees to do very much traveling, except to go as a group to outdoor “Woodstock” type rock concerts to distribute prasādam in exchange for donations.
The same sort of thing could be done today without the need to get much in the way of donations because many of the devotees could work full or part time as home health care aides. Other devotees, who are so inclined, could work full or part time teaching children (See: http://pratyatosa.com/FreeNonsectarianReligiousSchools.htm)
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