Taking Good Care of Their Own : Elderly: Armenian culture dictates that the young care for the old, but both generations look forward to the opening of the Mission Hills facility, the largest of its kind in the country.

In the Armenian community, putting parents in an old-age home is tantamount to abandoning them. Yet a Southland Armenian organization, Ararat Home of Los Angeles Inc., is running a convalescent hospital that ranks among the best in the nation.

What’s going on here?

In general, Armenians and many other ethnic groups feel it is the responsibility of the parents to care for their children until old age incapacitates them; then the roles reverse, and the children do the parenting. Nursing homes and hospitals usually are not considered as options unless an older person requires constant medical care or doesn’t have any children.

“Armenians are opposed to old-age homes. A 94-year-old man is being taken care of by his adult children. That’s the way it’s done in the Armenian community,” said John Vosbigian of Westchester, who has served on the board of the Ararat Home and its companion convalescent hospital for 25 years.

But Vosbigian is one of a growing number of Armenians that believe in the necessity of an Armenian home for the aging. “We must do for our own,” said Ararat Treasurer Helen Abajian, whose father helped found the home in 1950 near Crenshaw and Adams boulevards in Central Los Angeles. (The convalescent hospital opened 10 years ago.)

Thanks to consistent supporters and a dedicated staff, the Ararat Convalescent Hospital in Eagle Rock is “one of the very finest facilities in the country,” according to the California Assn. of Homes for the Aging, which compared the near-perfect evaluation the federal government gave Ararat this spring with data on homes nationwide.

It is said that care at the Ararat Convalescent Hospital is so good that the patients, many of them in their 90s, live to see many more birthdays than their doctors and children expected.

While that’s something to be proud of, it has created a major problem: The waiting list to get into the 42-bed convalescent hospital is very long, and often some people on the list die before a space opens up.

Because of Southern California’s growing Armenian community, which now numbers between 250,000 and 300,000, there’s an urgent need for more space for the aged. The Ararat Convalescent Hospital and home turn away dozens of elderly Armenians each year for lack of space.

Now, after years of saying, “I’m sorry, we have no room,” the administrators of the hospital and the home are looking forward to the long-awaited completion of a large home for the aging in Mission Hills.

The first phase--a 130-bed board and care facility, kitchen and 24,000-square-foot community center--is scheduled to open in August. Completion of the second phase, an adjacent 99-bed convalescent hospital, is expected by the fall of 1992. Both will be owned and operated by Ararat Home of Los Angeles, a nonprofit organization set up 40 years ago to provide care for Armenian elderly.

When completed, the Ararat Home and Community Center will be the largest Armenian institution for the elderly in the country. The complex will include a multipurpose community center with a free-standing chapel, a museum, a gallery with a stage for performances and lectures, a banquet hall with a seating capacity of 650 and a picnic area that will accommodate 3,000 people.

The board of directors of Ararat Home included the community center, museum and gallery to draw people of all ages to the facility. “With the museum and the stage, younger people will come to the community center and will come in contact with the elderly. That’s good for the old people because they get to see fresh faces,” said Ararat Home Chairman Robert Shamlian of Glendale.

The board’s long-range plans include the expansion of the residence and the convalescent hospital to house 600 people. Board members also hope they can raise enough money to build a row of condominiums for elderly couples who want to live in a retirement community.

The 10.6-acre site of the complex was purchased several years ago at a good price, board members said. But the property has one major drawback: It sits on an earthquake fault.

One of the facility’s architects, George Kirkpatrick, said: “The complex is structurally designed with that consideration in mind. The parking lot is directly over the fault. The building is more heavily reinforced.”

The property is on a picturesque knoll overlooking the San Fernando Valley. Coincidentally, behind the site are two hills reminiscent of the twin peaks of Mt. Ararat, a symbol of national pride for the Armenian people.

After the Mission Hills complex is built, some Ararat Home board members believe they will need to open homes for the elderly in Hollywood, Orange County and other Southern California communities with burgeoning Armenian populations.

Areg Abramian of Redondo Beach and his brother struggled with the idea of placing their mother in the home four years ago.

“It was a very difficult decision--and it still is. Our background being Armenian, with the old mentality it’s a disgrace to not care for your parents and put them in a home,” Abramian said.

But Abramian, his brother and their spouses are restaurateurs who couldn’t give their mother, then 84, the constant care she needed. “It’s the way of life in America. The husband and wife are both working, or the wife is running errands all day,” Abramian said.

Ultimately, his mother helped them make the decision. Having attended the Ararat Home’s monthly luncheons with her husband when he was alive, she had made friends at the home and agreed to live there.

Like the Abramians, many Armenians find difficulty in deciding who will care for an elderly parent or a childless aunt or uncle who no longer can live alone. Of the 70 current Ararat Home residents, almost one-third have no children.

The Armenian homes are among several in California built by specific ethnic groups to accommodate their elderly members, according to the Assn. of Homes for the Aging. There are Jewish, Chinese and Japanese groups, among others, operating homes for the elderly in Southern California, noted Dean Shetler, president of the association.

“When an ethnic community decides that a larger community doesn’t represent its needs, they go about creating their own” centers for the elderly, he said.

The result--at least in the case of Ararat--is a place that feels like home for an elderly person. At both the Ararat Home and the convalescent hospital, the administrators and most of the nurses and employees are Armenian who speak the language. Most meals are Armenian, as are the cultural events.

“I wanted to come here,” said Dzovinar (Sophie) Kazarian, 79, an Ararat resident. “I heard they’re so good here. They treat the elderly with respect. They feed you well.” After Kazarian’s husband and daughter died, she said, she lived alone for 15 years before choosing to move to the Ararat Home, rather than burden her son or granddaughters.

“I wish I had come earlier. Maybe I wouldn’t have gotten so sick,” said 86-year-old Mary Kachadoorian, who suffered a stroke less than a year ago. “We have the best meals. The help in the kitchen are all kind to us.”

Many residents of the convalescent hospital had similar sentiments. “I’ve been in a few nursing hospitals. I didn’t know English. But here it’s much better. I’m very happy here,” said Anna Shishmanyan, 84.

Language is important in the care of the elderly. The staff needs to be able to communicate with the patients about medication, symptoms and other factors related to their condition, nursing home administrators said.

“A year ago, I surveyed a home in Pasadena,” said Denise Tan Lee, a health facilities surveyor for the Los Angeles County Health Department, which conducts routine surprise checks of convalescent hospitals and reports on their cleanliness and patient care to federal, state and local governing and licensing bodies. “I saw an old man who wouldn’t eat or communicate. He was combative” because he didn’t know English.

“This year,” Tan Lee said, “I saw him when I surveyed the Armenian home. He was so happy. He remembered me. He was eating. He was with his own people.”

“Language is so important. Here, almost everyone speaks Armenian,” said Evieny Janbazian, administrator of the Ararat Convalescent Hospital. “This is the place where they spend their twilight years. We want them to be comfortable here. We try to give them the love and attention they need.”

Tan Lee, whose government-mandated survey and subsequent report to federal authorities earned the hospital an enviable report card last spring, described Ararat as “a small facility with a very warm atmosphere. The residents are happy because they have a lot of Armenian workers there. The dietitian knows what they want.”

Both the convalescent hospital and the home hire non-Armenian employees, as required by law, but most employees are Armenian and have worked for the Ararat organization for 10 years or longer.

There seems to be a spirit of family at Ararat, particularly at the convalescent hospital, because employees there take the time to get to know all about the elderly, their desires and their fears.

“If a patient doesn’t eat her tray of food, the nurse’s aide will go to the kitchen and bring back something else,” Janbazian said.

Activities Director Violette Alajaji organizes outings to such places as Descanso Gardens, invites Armenian schools to bring students to sing and dance for the elderly, and supervises all kinds of in-house activities, including bingo and rhythm bends for exercise.

Sometimes, Alajaji said, she puts on an Armenian cooking video and is amused as many of the women patients critique the recipes. “When they watch the video, they’ll complain, ‘Oh, they put too much salt in the food,’ or something like that.”

But mostly the patients like to talk among themselves, boasting about their children’s and grandchildren’s latest visit or reminiscing about their past in the old country. Often the nurses and aides join in the banter.

“They’re like babies. We take them into our arms and love them,” said Berjouhi Virginia Mardirosian, director of nursing at the convalescent hospital.

Because of the special, loving environment at the convalescent hospital, Ararat board members said they want to keep it open after the Mission Hills complex is built. They plan to sell the home, located in the historic Adams district, because of fears of crime in the area.

The administration of the Ararat Convalescent Hospital and the home is a family affair. Janbazian runs the convalescent hospital, and her husband, the Rev. Hagop Janbazian, is in charge at the Ararat Home.

Then there’s the larger family--relatives and friends of the elderly residents as well as supporters of the Ararat Home. Through donations and money raised by Ararat’s women’s auxiliary and five guilds in the past several years, the board has accumulated $8.5 million to start the first phase of the Ararat Home and Community Center. Jon Sheen of Altadena, an Armenian manufacturer of church furniture, recently donated $800,000 to construct the chapel and museum, and the board is working out the details of a tax-free bond issue to raise the $7 million needed to complete the first and second phases of the center.

Some supporters like Shamlian got involved with the home because they had relatives staying there. “I didn’t know of the existence of the home until my mother had a massive heart attack in 1973 and the doctor recommended a convalescent hospital or old-age facility,” Shamlian said.

“The doctors had given her six months to live. She lived 3 1/2 years at the Ararat home. They took such good care of her,” said Shamlian, who has been a member of Ararat’s board of directors since 1975. Although retired, Shamlian, 67, drives to the home almost every day to handle mass mailings and various other tasks.

Other people with no family connection to the Ararat Home said supporting the organization is their way of serving the Armenian community. Architect Luther Eskijian, an adviser to Ararat Home, has designed the Mission Hills chapel and museum, to which he will donate his collection of Armenian artifacts, including maps and coins.

Most Ararat Home backers would echo building committee Chairman Jack Chalabian’s reason for spending so much time and money to make sure the Mission Hills complex becomes a reality: “I’m building it for my mom and my dad. I heard the massacre stories from my parents, how they survived when 1 1/2 million Armenians were killed by the Turks in 1915. My dad is dead now, but I want my mom and other parents to live happily and in peace in their later years.”