Caitlin Riely Art

Hey guys!

Back in good ole NC, ready to start more portraits! (I've already taken over Little Bro's bedroom as my studio)

Be sure to check out caitlinrielyart.blogspot.com

And feel free to email me any order requests! caitlinriely@gmail.com

Last day at Voices

I came to Voices for Children a year ago, eager and excited, and with only a vague idea about what I was going to be doing. I was new to Nebraska, new to the Unicameral, and new to behavioral health.

In my first week, I was thrown into a flurry of movement around Medicaid regulations for PRTFs. "What the heck is a PRTF?" was my first though. Yet my ignorance of the complexities of out-of-home treatment became as asset as I worked with some amzaing people at BOys Town to tell the story of how changes in Medicaid were really affecting kids. We created Johnny's Journey to explain to an outsider (in this case, me) what was really going on.

Johnny's Journey didn't make everyone happy.  But I was assured that that meant I must be doing something right.

As legislative session began, I dusted off my old college textbooks on "how a bill becomes a law" (Schoolhouse Rock might have been played a few times as well). I was impressed at how all of Voices for Children's decision making was rooted in data and driven by the same question each time, "How will this affect kids?"

I learn that it's not just the story that's important, but HOW you tell the story. It was a fun challenge to take big, complicated systems, and distill them down into easy to understand concepts that could be quickly explained to an outsider. Deciding if my Grandma could understand what I was talking about in five minutes was always a good rule of thumb.

But I think the most important thing I have learned is that advocacy isn't about standing on your soapbox and yelling at people to understand why you are right and why they are wrong. I've learned that being a true advocate means you have to listen. You have to listen to your community, to the research, to the opposing arguments. Sometimes that means working together to compromise, and sometimes that means taking a stand and being firm in what you believe is best for kids and best for Nebraska.

I am incredibly grateful to have had the opportunity to work at Voices where I was challenged to always think critically and creatively. Carolyn, our Executive Director, likes to say that "at Voices for Children, we are telling the whole story." I feel honored to have been able to help tell that story this year.

Reflection on Forgiveness

The first time I traveled without my family was a summer study abroad in college to Rwanda. And much like many of my endeavors, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. We were there to study the genocide that happened in 1994, to walk the dirt paths where blood was spilled, to meet Rwandans whose families were murdered by machete in front of them by their neighbors, to meet those neighbors who did those unspeakable acts.

I remember one day hanging out with my classmates eating pizza in a café. We were laughing and joking and taking pictures of each other. Someone mentions how no one besides us would understand our jokes and the mood instantly changes. Because we all know that while no one will be able to understand our jokes, no one will be able to understand our experience at all—the funny, the difficult, the horrifying, the beautiful.

A wave of silence passes over the table—we all know what we are all thinking—the churches we visited the day before. The churches where Tutsi fled for refuge, believing their attackers would not commit murder in a sacred place of God. Instead, the priests sought out the killers and together they slaughtered everyone in the church—on alters, pews, the lawn, everywhere. The experience of even just witnessing the place years later is impossible to describe—like when you take a picture of a beautiful landscape but when you print it doesn’t fully reflect what you saw. The colors are less intense, the particular way the sunlight shines in the sky isn’t shown and the overall feeling of the experience is lost. I don’t often talk or write about these experiences because I don’t have the right words, but neither does anyone else.

I spoke at length with a priest who has a church in Kigali for survivors. We talked forever about me. About my life, what I was doing in Rwanda, about MY anger and MY frustrations about what happened in his country, about why this could have ever happened and how on earth his country could ever heal. 

He pauses. Then he begins to tell me how his wife and daughters and nephews were killed in front of him, how he only survived by hiding in a closet for three days.  He says what kept him alive was praying to God, and finding chocolates on the top shelf of the closet—which he knew were sent by God—kinda like chocolate manna.  When he was in the midst of losing everything, God was still there. He was never alone.

His congregation—mostly women—have similar and sometimes even more horrifying stories. Stories of being raped with broken glass soda bottles-or by men who knew they were infected with HIV, stories of lost children and husbands, stories of streets filled with blood and dogs running around with human limbs in their mouths. The trauma and the horror is undeniable.

I asked him what his views on forgiveness are. After another long pause, he explains that forgiveness can be part of the healing process, but that it can take a long time. That he forgives the people who did this because it was the Devil inside them—the sin and evil inside them does not mean that there is not God and good inside them too. He said, “Because God forgives me for the sins I commit, I therefore must forgive others for the sins committed against me. I still weep for my family every day. But I forgive because I must and I’m not angry anymore.”

I didn’t understand that day what he meant. It felt simplistic and foolish. You forgive because you must? 

Why?

Because some religion which was complicit in the murder of your family says that God says you have to forgive them? What happened to the God that will smite my enemies? Sometimes, I think that God would be a good one to have around.

Even to this day I am only beginning to understand—that yes, forgiveness in some ways is simple, but surely never foolish. “I forgive because I must” he said.

And I think what he meant was that I forgive for my own humanity. I forgive because there is no other way to continue going without letting go. I forgive because I must.

My story does not end with a happy anecdote about how a Tutsi survivor and Hutu perpetrator come together, understand their differences, forgive and are forgiven, and now live in harmony as neighbors.  Although I did meet people who lived in a “reconciliation village,” that is not my story.  The forgiveness I witnessed was the healing process of the individual—how personal reflection with their own spirituality and community of other victims created a loving place for pain and anger to be expressed, to be witnessed to, and to be let go. To wake up each day and choose to live without anger.

For a long time after I returned home, I was frustrated with myself about the pain in my own life—because it felt so insignificant in comparison to what Rwandans had experienced. How can I allow myself to be upset when my roommate destroys our kitchen when people’s families were murdered? How can I be up at night crying because a friend hurts me when women were raped and infected with HIV? Why do I struggle with forgiveness when Pastor Richard is able to?

A part of me begs to cling to the hurt in my life. I hate everything that is wrong in my life and in others. I hate my own weaknesses and flaws and I’m frustrated and hurt by the flaws in others. When I let the pain control me, I become angry.

I am comforted by the words of Archbishop Desmond Tutu who said, “To forgive is not just to be altruistic. It is the best form of self-interest. It is also a process that does not exclude hatred and anger. These emotions are all part of being human. You should never hate yourself for hating others who do terrible things: the depth of your love is shown by the extent of your anger.”

The depth of your love is shown by the extent of your anger.

I know the hurt in the world, particularly in Rwanda, is certainly far greater than anything I have faced in my own sheltered and privileged life.  I have not felt the sharpness of the pain inflected with the machete. I have not traveled to the depths of evil from which rises the anger to take another’s life.

What happened in Rwanda—and Sierra Leone, and Liberia, and Armenia, and South Africa, and Indonesia, and throughout the world and history—is beyond human understanding.  And the fact that people everyday choose to forgive is also beyond human understanding. But each day, both happen—even for us, albeit not in a violent or characteristically evil way.

Henri J.M. Nouwn wrote, “Forgiveness is the name of love practiced among people who love poorly. The hard truth is that all people love poorly. We need to forgive and be forgiven every day, every hour, increasingly. That is the great work of love among the fellowship of the weak that is the human family.”

Oh the places you'll go

I haven't written in a long long while. It's nice to be back.

This weekend at our monthly Snack and Yak, we are going to be talking about discernment and our futures. Normally, talking about the future is a taboo subject. The often feared "what are you going to do with your life" question is right up there with religion and politics when it comes to conversation starters.

So I guess it makes sense that we're going to talk about it in LVC. We like taboo subjects.

While I'm sure every generation--and every individual--has its own unique set of obstacles, I think people my age and my level of privilege have a lot of conflicting goals and expectations to balance. We have the luxury to take time to discover for ourselves what our true passions are, to travel and see the world, and still have our parents pay our phone bills. We want to be adults and do great things, but we still have a lot of growing up to do. It doesn't help that well paying jobs are hard to find, and things like the Peace Corps (and LVC...) is the sexy cool alternative to buckling down and grinding through the work day at an entry level position.

A lot of times, it feels like this:  http://whatshouldwecallme.tumblr.com/post/23043795178/after-graduation-when-anybody-asked-if-i-had-gotten-a

And I don't mean to sound overly critical of these kinds of experiences. Because let's be real--I'm a walking example of it. And I wouldn't trade my experiences abroad or my minimally-paid jobs and volunteer positions for anything. They have been life changing and incredibly fulfilling. These kinds of jobs have allowed me to better understand my goals for the future.

But it's a tricky balance. It's hard not to look back sometimes and think, "Did I just waste 6 months that I could have been working towards something bigger?" "When will I actually get a 'real' job?" "This kind of life isn't sustainable. I can't keep being a summer intern forever!"

After this exceptionally great experience working at a non profit child advocacy organization in Nebraska, I am moving back home for a year before starting law school. And this makes me nervous. Not that I'm afraid my parents will treat me like a child and I'll have a 9:30 curfew, but I'm worried I'll be "wasting" another year. Repeating the cycle of starting over; trying to find a job that is meaningful work, yet knowing I'll be gone in a year.

In the push and pull and inevitability of growing up, where does volunteerism or back packing across Asia fit into real life? Is it simply an escape from responsibility in the name of exploration and personal growth? Or can they be the avenues to finding fulfillment?

I had an amazing professor who talked about 2 year plans. Have an idea for what you are doing for two years, and let the rest of the future fall into place. Don't plan your life for the next 10, 15, or 20 years. It will either blind you to the new and wonderful opportunities you could never have planned for, or set you up for incredible disappointment.

Yet I'm still excited. I'm still incredibly young with lots of opportunities to take and mistakes to be made. To practice being an adult, with a solid safety net to catch me if I fall. Even though I'm not planning on falling anytime soon.