For Elderly in Rural Areas, Volunteers Step In
Growing older in America’s smaller towns and remote areas is often a struggle amid shortages of health professionals and other needed services
CAVALIER, N.D.—Bev and Roger Jaster, both in their 80s, live in this rural town in the house they built. They raised their three children here, the oldest now in Oklahoma, the middle in South Carolina and the youngest in Canada.
Mr. Jaster still drives but only in town and during the day. Volunteers take his wife to weekly dialysis treatments in Grand Forks, N.D., an 180-mile round trip. “I probably wouldn’t be here without them,” Mrs. Jaster says of the volunteers in the local group Faith in Action.
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