Cat Pollock Writes

I don't know how many people actually know this, but I was a drama club member in high school (and student government and, by the end of school, my high school's honor society and Academic Decathlon). It probably isn't a big surprise if you know me, or even just know something about the creative mind at work. So drama wasn't the first outlet I found for my creativity. That honor belongs to writing, and I will always be thankful to the first teacher to encourage me to keep up with it. It was, however, one of my favorites at a time when I was very much trying to figure out who I was and who I wanted to be. Trying out new identities with the flip of a script? Yes, please. It was a delight, then, on our last day of ministry to have brothers and sisters join us from a church nearby to share a drama during Sunday morning services. I haven't collaborated on or acted in or even seen a church skit/drama/etc put together by adults for adults to act out since my World R

The moment I heard her story, I knew it was going to be the first one I shared about my time in Kenya on this blog. Once the shock of receiving the news about my father’s heart attack wore off, I knew that was going to be one of the last ones. Not one of the last ones on this blog – just one of the last ones specifically about Kenya. It’s a hard story to tell, though. Even as I sit at my dining table, tapping at the keys on my laptop in that familiar stop, start, backspace, pause playlist shuffle of sounds, I’m reflexively reaching for the cell phone I just turned off to check it. What should take me almost no time at all is going to take an eternity to accomplish. The tears that are never far away when the thought of what she went through replays in my mind… yeah, they’re stabbing sharply into my eyelids right now. I wish I could say that it’s the first story I’ve heard of violence against women at the hands of a Muslim, but it isn’t. It isn’t even the first time I’ve met a