The Unspoken Truth About Kinship Care & Foster Systems

Starting the podcast for support

SPEAKER_00 0:58

We spend billions trying to fix child welfare programs. But what if the flaw isn't in our execution? What if it's in our framing? When a system counts a success as a closed case, but a grandmother counts it as a night without nightmares, we're measuring two entirely different realities. Today we're joined by Ali Calliando, founder of Foster Kinship and the Kinship Policy Lab. Ali has spent years studying how well-intentioned policies produce unexpected results. Welcome to Grandparents Raising Grandchildren, Nurturing through adversity. In this podcast, we will delve deep into the challenges and triumphs of grandparents raising grandchildren. As we navigate the complexities of legal, financial, and emotional support, I invite you to join us on a journey of exploring thoughts, feelings, and beliefs surrounding this growing segment of our society. Drawing from real stories and expert advice, we will explore the nuances of child rearing for children who have experienced trauma and offer valuable resources to guide you through the intricate journey of Japan. We'll discuss how we can change the course of history by rewriting our grandchildren's future. Open a supportive community that understands the unique joys and struggles. This podcast was made especially for you. Welcome to a community where your voice is heard, your experiences are valued, and your journey is honored. Welcome to the show, Allie. It's so nice to have you here.

SPEAKER_01 3:01

It's so good to be here.

SPEAKER_00 3:02

Great stuff we have to talk about today. We both have been in the kinship care system doing advocacy work for how long?

SPEAKER_01 3:11

How many years have you? I have been sort of exclusively focused on kinship care since 2010.

SPEAKER_00 3:17

Wonderful. And when I began this podcast, of course, the first five years for me have been about desperately seeking help and support, which is why I started the podcast three years ago. Five years ago, when I began taking care of my grandchildren, I had no idea that there were so many people out there raising kin, raising grandchildren. I needed to learn about neurodiversity. I needed to hear about what kind of support systems there were for us as caregivers. And what I have learned over the last five years is that kinship caregivers really are the system. We've become the solution for what you do with kids that they have no room for in the foster care system or with our social workers. We found out, and you've been aware of for a while, obviously, is that there's a lot of outdated information out there. And the illusion is that there's a big gap between policy and reality. What we're trying to do, what you're trying to do, is to update that information. Let's talk about prevention. Let's talk about why agencies are celebrating falling foster care numbers when they're not falling. They're actually rising. It's because caregivers like you and I and the millions of people out there are doing the hard work and we're just not getting supported the way we need to. I'm happy to know there are others like you out there to help us organize ourselves to get the correct information to our policymakers so that we can get the support that we need and not feel so isolated. And it's really not brain science what we're talking about.

SPEAKER_01 5:19

No, it's basic stuff. But I think it's important to sort of diagnose why we're in this situation where there is this hidden system of caregiving that is not, we're not asking the right questions about what families and children need. And that is because the idea of kinship care in the child welfare sense comes from the child welfare system, which has always been more narrowly scoped. And over the last several decades, there's been such a big push from our child welfare system to talk about kinship care, to use kinship care, um, to include family in these things. But it's coming from a space that was never designed for kin, number one. Number two, foster care has always only covered a very small amount of the children who cannot live with their parents. So I like to use the term non-parental care, um, but really just meaning any child who's not able to live with either of their biological parents. The majority of these children are with kin, with their relatives, most of them with their grandparents, you know, their grandma for sure. Um, and most of them are not involved in foster care and have not been involved in foster care. Because the idea of families stepping up to care for children, that that is goes far beyond the idea of a child welfare system. That's just what families have done. And if you look at your family tree, kinship care is there for all of us. And kinship care, I mean, I say it comes for us all. We will all experience it or know someone who has experienced it because it is that common.

Discussing kinship care challenges

SPEAKER_01 6:58

But the lens in which we're talking about policy for caregivers is coming primarily from the child welfare system. And that is why the solutions developed and the conversation is just hitting such a small slice of us because most of us are not in that system. So the solutions, the resources, the money, the numbers, it's it's so not representative of the majority of work that kinship families are doing and what children need. Now, one thing I think is true is that children who can't live with either of their parents, that if you look at it from the lens of a child, their needs are very similar. Whether or not they have wound up in formal foster care or not, the children in all of these homes, the needs are similar. So if we're starting to reframe what is foster care, I think kinship families need to what do children who can't live with their parents need. Now we can have a conversation that is more inclusive of all of us doing this caregiving work. We need to bring the hidden caregiving system into visibility and it cannot be framed and reframed

Inclusive conversation on caregiving

SPEAKER_01 8:10

by child welfare. We who are doing the work have to frame it for our decision makers and our communities for two reasons. One, that's where most of us are outside the system. And two, our child welfare system is not incentivized to bring in the rest of us into this conversation because frankly, it would collapse that system if they truly were going to say, yes, children who can't live with their parents for these safety reasons need and deserve support. How? How is that going to happen? So we can't let them drive that conversation.

SPEAKER_00 8:45

What would you say are the relative numbers between children that are in the foster care system and children that are being raised by kin?

SPEAKER_01 8:53

So it is a very small percentage of children in non-parental care are actually formally in our foster care system. You know, every state is a little bit different. I know Generations United has done some really good work on for every one child raised by kin in foster care. They can tell you how many children are being raised by kin outside of foster care. Every state is different. I think the average might be 19. So for every one child in foster care, there might be 19 outside the system. In Nevada, where I'm located, we have about uh 2,000 to 3,000 children in kinship foster care. So, you know, formally placed with kin in our foster care system, but 30,000 are outside the system. So, you know, 10% or so are in the system, and another 90% are outside the system. And that's, you know, remarkable because those outside the system, a lot of them, and I know you all know this, have been separated. Those children have been separated by our foster care system, by CPS getting involved and saying, hey, Aunt Allie, go do this guardianship, or else we're gonna bring your nephew into foster care. That's what happened in my case. And so we think it's not just all, you know, families who haven't been touched by child welfare who are doing this work. A lot of us have been touched by child welfare, have been formed and created by child welfare's involvement, but have zero resources from a child welfare system because we are preventing foster care, which only benefits the foster care system. It does not help us.

SPEAKER_00 10:32

No. And let's talk about that term prevention. It's one of the points that you've raised that system metrics label kinship care as prevention simply because the child avoids non-relative foster care. But family separation still occurred. So how does this definition erase the reality that the family hasn't prevented trauma, they've merely absorbed it? Yes, that's exactly right.

SPEAKER_01 10:58

And I think it it goes to the sense, you know, I did some research on this when I was studying um what every state was doing for kinship care. A lot of child welfare workers, when you ask them, they'll consider placing or reunifying a child with their parent the same thing as with grandma. And so there's this concept in child welfare that family is family, and we're not looking at the difference for the child's perspective to I'm living with my mom versus I'm living with my grandma. So we have this idea that by keeping children with their kin, and now we can define kin in a lot of ways too, and every child welfare system does. So sometimes these kinship families don't even know the child themselves, right? But by keeping children with kin, we have prevented, we have prevented some sort of number one, maybe it's a foster care entry. So we're preventing foster care entry or preventing a child from living with someone that they don't know. Um, but we are not preventing parental separation. And that is really important because from a child's point of view, there are two very different things growing up with your parents, growing up with a relative, growing up with a foster home. Those are different experiences from the child's point of view. And we cannot consider all family the same. It's just not. And so kinship families step up to prevent foster care placement. But the child has been separated from their parents, the child has experienced whatever abuse, neglect, trauma, prenatal exposure,

Challenges faced by kinship families

SPEAKER_01 12:29

we we could list it all. There's really no good reason that children are separated from their parents. There's something traumatic has happened. And when can are only seen as prevention, there are no resources for us to be able to intervene in the life of that child for the trauma they have experienced. If we are fighting to get Medicaid for the child, to be able to access mental health care, to even be able to put food on the table, I'm not sure what we're really preventing from the perspective of the child's experience. We are just working for free to reduce the numbers of foster care, and our systems aren't even counting us anywhere. They consider it a win because the children are with family or home. And that's not the same thing as a child gets to live with their parents.

SPEAKER_00 13:17

Right, right. You mentioned a good point because when I got my grandchildren and child protective services, had the kids, they said if you don't take them, they're gonna go into foster care and they will be separated. And we don't want that to happen. But we never realized that as a grandparent, I'm not receiving any financial help or emotional support. It's just like all of a sudden one day I was handed two children and gone through trauma, and it was my job to figure out how you take care of a kid that's gone through trauma. So there are no current incentives to reward states for walking away rather than sustaining our grandfamilies or kinship caregivers.

SPEAKER_01 14:01

I've talked to a lot of people who have not necessarily experienced kinship care themselves, but have done a lot of family separation into kinship care arrangements. And there's this sense that either because you're family, you should just do this. It's your obligation, it's your duty. Um, you know, kind of like, I can't believe you're asking for help.

SPEAKER_00 14:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:21

And also that like love is enough that because you have this relationship, the child knows and loves you and is safe with you, that suddenly you as the adult are going to be, you know, a PhD in trauma and understand, oh, actually, I know how to deal with a child who has been born drug and alcohol exposed. All of a sudden I've just been given this knowledge because I have a relationship. Um, that's nonsense to me, but it is very common that, well, it's family, so you're not going to have the same needs as a traditional foster parent. Our needs, I think, are almost greater because we are starting from a place of family disruption as well. So we're dealing with all sorts of big emotions about what's going on in our own family system. We're not necessarily signing up as a traditional foster parent to do something and getting trained and paid ahead of time. I mean, we are just dropped into it. And then there are very few resources given, especially for those of us who are truly in hidden foster care prevention. We don't access the foster care system.

SPEAKER_00 16:25

So why do you think legal definitions continue to dictate which caregivers receive help to feed, clothe, or take care of a child?

SPEAKER_01 16:35

I think there's probably a few things happening. I mean, at this point, I think it's money conversation for the majority of this because it is very, very expensive to acknowledge how many children are not living with their parents and what did those children need. People that I've worked with in our child welfare systems here, there was a time when I was bringing to

Discussing child welfare challenges

SPEAKER_01 16:56

light some of the diversion practices that were happening in Clark County. And a leader at the time, she said, Well, you know, is this happening to like one or two children, one or two families? I said, I have a list of 300 just in the last year alone. And she said, Allie, don't tell me anymore. I can't know this. So I think it's it's overwhelming to think about. And also, you know, backing up, should we even expect child welfare to solve this for us? And I think, no, we don't want child welfare to solve this for kinship families. So I'm not putting the responsibility of fixing this on our child welfare system, but I do think that they haven't been great partners in bringing to light the practices that create all of our families, kind of out of like, do this or else. I do think that that's that needs to be called out. But I think our society as a whole needs to decide what do we owe to those who say yes? What do we owe those who step up and say yes and keep these children out of our system? I think we owe something to our families to make sure that these children can survive, can thrive, um, and have better outcomes. And so where that comes from, it's going to be a money conversation, but it doesn't necessarily need to come from child welfare funding, which is, as we know, pretty limited as it is.

SPEAKER_00 18:16

If we take the numbers, the differences between who is being supported by child welfare versus how many kids are being raised in non-parental families, then even though we're saving the system money essentially by doing what we're doing, if we were acknowledged, then that means the funds have to come from somewhere to help. Right.

SPEAKER_01 18:40

Um, and I think, you know, our family safety net just in general in this country has deteriorated. So it's harder to access just general supports for families right now. We should be looking at the TANF program, we should be looking at child care subsidies, we should be looking at Social Security. Um, we should definitely be, you know, ensuring that all children who are unable to live with their parents have access to Medicaid. That feels like a no-brainer. And a lot of states, this is true now, but not in every state. Um, so we there are things that we can do, but you know, the argument is if it's not me doing this, then what happens to this child? Right. And some people will say, well, then the parents would figure it out. I think those of us who are doing this know if that was true, like we would be the first ones to cheer that on and to make that happen and to support our family members. So when you really talk to caregivers, the reality is if it's not a kinship caregiver, then this child will end up needing child protection through foster care. So we have to acknowledge that there is a trade-off there. And what does that look like in terms of making sure if we believe that children should be with their family, what does it look like to make sure that that family is supported and not require higher levels of intervention through government systems such as child welfare?

SPEAKER_00 19:55

Just thinking about how many children are kept from incarceration because there's somebody that cares about them, someone that's loving them and looking over them. Are there statistics on what happens to a child if they are not raised by a nonparental family member?

SPEAKER_01 20:16

So the hard part when you look at the academic research, and it's gotten slightly better over the last six years, but it's very challenging because we don't count and define the different populations of children in nonparental care. So we have foster care, we have kinship care, and as you know, that's a big

Challenges in defining child care populations

SPEAKER_01 20:36

Venn diagram with a large circle of kinship care and a smaller circle of foster care, and there's that intersection. So studies that have been done on children in foster care, children in kinship care have not done a good job specifying are they in formal kinship foster care and they're licensed, so these caregivers are trained and paid. Are they in unlicensed care, so they're not getting paid? Is it hidden foster care? Is it completely private? We don't really know how children are doing because we don't define the populations well enough in the research. So that's challenging. I will say there's been a study, there was one study, I think it was 2013, of children in nonparental care that show children who are unable to live with either parent are 33 times more likely to have four or more adverse family experiences than children living with at least one parent. So to me, what this shows is that children who are unable to live with either parent are at very high risk of negative outcomes later in life. We have to be intervening, whether that's strengthening support for foster care and for kinship care for all these different categories. But right now, we can't say conclusively that children are doing a lot better in either one of these arrangements because we don't really know and define is this hidden foster care? Those kids, I mean, can have a really hard time, not because they're not with someone who knows and loves them, but because that family has no support. Whereas kinship foster care, you have the benefit of more support, right? So there's some studies that show those children do better than children in traditional foster care. But it also depends in the literature on the variable that we're looking at for the outcome. So whether it's a child feeling loved or a child doing well in school or a child having access to family resources, so not growing up in poverty, all those things look different in these different spaces. So long-winded answer. We have to do better about defining and bringing to light these different populations and what they have access to so that our research can be more precise and that we can get better data on the importance of kinship care and why it is a good return on investment. Um, but right now the return on investment is it's basically free for a lot, you know, it's it's cheaper, it's free, and we're not looking at the long-term costs of what that child needs over the course of their life and how intervening with a little bit more support for all children who can't live with their parents when they're young will really improve long-term outcomes for them down the road. So I think we need to be

Investing in kinship care benefits

SPEAKER_01 23:19

thinking about more investment when children are younger, if they are unable to live with either parent. That to me is now we need to intervene. What does that look like?

SPEAKER_00 23:29

What I hear from so many grandparents raising grandchildren is that there is some support for grandparents if they're very poor. But there's a big gap for families like myself that are in the middle income uh definition and they're not getting the support they need financially, or the kids aren't. But that also there is very there's no support from the very beginning for that grandparent. No support. psychological support. And even if if it's a foster care family, um I think uh I think that it's it's my understanding that there's one person that is assigned to a family for a certain period of time to give that parent care, but there's very little support for the rest of the family.

SPEAKER_01 24:19

Well there's no support for kinship caregivers even if they are in the foster care system because the caseworkers are yes assigned to the parents and really following that parent's plan. So the caregivers tend to be very much isolated no matter what bucket they end up falling in. And you're right, if you don't qualify as a household for programs such as child only TANF or SNAP, there is no sort of middle income benefit for caregivers. There's your retirement, there's go back to work, you know, there's make it happen. Send your home, sell your home. Sell yeah, you know, take out these loans. I we've seen just so many challenging situations and I don't want to take away from what caregivers are doing. But one of the things that happen is our system knows and relies on caregivers making it work and making it happen. Because the alternative of having to lose the child to foster care or to not keep going is not something that most caregivers do. So they endure incredible hardship on behalf of these children. And our system either allows it or looks the other way because they know that they'll keep doing it. So if all of us as caregivers decided one day and said, hey, we're not doing this without support, I mean support would come because the systems would collapse. But caregivers are not going to be able to do that because the risk is too great and the systems are too dangerous. So I do see a lot of well we know grandma can't afford it, but she's going to make it work.

SPEAKER_00 25:57

So not much to hear um when I spoke with a group in Illinois that there are many, many grandparents who are homeless raising their grandchildren under bridges in the woods because they get kicked out when they're seniors and have a live in a senior living community. That's right. And they bring their grandkids in. I hadn't I wasn't even aware of that until recently.

SPEAKER_01 26:25

Yeah housing is a huge need and we have to be able to say if you're in senior housing on a fixed income and you're a kinship caregiver, our policies have to allow for these things. We see way too many families in these dire situations because they're in subsidized housing and they can't add the grandchild it is heartbreaking. One of the things that I did at Foster Kinship was develop some funding to make sure that we could rehouse and locate kinship families who were put in those situations because they said yes to a child. You know, so for stepping up and saying yes, we should as a community step up and support that's that family. But you we had to work hard to get that funding and a lot of it was through private dollars.

SPEAKER_00 27:09

It's just not something that we're doing right now automatically for families and we should be looking at our HUD policies and we should be looking at these things and saying how ridiculous if this family is stepping up and keeping the child out of foster care, of course we're going to allow them to add that child to the lease how do we shift state level benchmarks away from administrative compliance towards measuring and improved quality of life for kids for for caregivers. How do we do that, Allie?

SPEAKER_01 27:38

We have to do two things I think we have to start framing our questions from the child's point of view. So if a child is experiencing nonparental care, what do those children need? And we have enough experts to tell us what children who've experienced trauma, abuse and neglect need and how to make sure that families have access to that support. So instead of framing everything from how many children do we have in foster care, we need to say what do children who can't live with their parents need and now we need to figure out how to get that out there. So we we can no longer measure success by oh we have fewer children in our foster care system. That to me is only a win if we have more children who are remaining home with their parents. If we just are shifting fewer children in foster care, but more children over here in hidden kinship care, we have failed massively because that is even more risky than knowing and supporting these families through our available systems. So that's the first thing and then we really need to start

Counting child separations vs. removals

SPEAKER_01 28:42

looking at long term what do children need as they reach adulthood, as they break these cycles and looking at those things instead of just saying it's the same to me that you're with your mom or with your grandma, we need to start measuring the health of that family. We need to start measuring the health of the caregiver. So if the caregiver is now in poverty because they've taken on this child, you know, they're evicted, they're dealing with potential housing issues, they aren't able to feed themselves or take themselves to the doctor anymore because everything goes to that child, I think that's a real family well-being issue and we are failing. We are failing the people who step up and say yes. So we have to look at the health of the whole family and and reframe it from what does the child need? That child needs a healthy family and healthy caregivers and how do we get there? We don't get there by just looking the other way and saying well grandma's got it.

SPEAKER_00 29:41

Grandma's got it because we don't we don't always have it no we don't we're trying and one this is the beginning of the conversations that we're going to have more of this year. When a grandparent or a caregiver who is nonparental sits down with a caseworker, a judge, a legislator what specific framing questions should they use to push back against this outdated logic that we've been subscribing to and believing is going to change miraculously somehow, um, which I realize is not unless people like you and I and many others bring a more modern language to the situation and talk about the reality of what's really going on.

SPEAKER_01 30:31

Yeah I think as caregivers we need to always push back and talk about what happens if I can't do this, what resources do I have for this child legally, financially for the community what can I access? What support will you provide and be part of the conversation and the decisions that are made about our families instead of just sort of operating out of fear like if I don't do this, then I guess they're going to take the child because ultimately when we find our voices, we're going to start seeing change. But right now we have to encourage us to to find those voices.

SPEAKER_00 31:06

So like you said, the start of this conversation. That's why we're here. Well I have some important questions I also want to add into the chapter of the book that I'm writing, which will include this conversation I have a systematic question for you. If you were appointed United States Secretary of Health and Human Services tomorrow, what's the single metric you would eliminate and what metric would you put into place to accurately value kinship families?

SPEAKER_01 31:32

Would one be requiring states to do their best to count the number of children that are separated as a result of child welfare intervention? I do think we need to count separation as opposed to removal removal is the legal term that gets us those foster care numbers but separation is CPS came out and investigated and this child's address changed as a result of that investigation. So I would be just reframing you know what changes in terms of family composition as a result of our government intervention and then making sure that we could match services to families who have said yes to being prevention or foster care resources for that child. Whether you're separated as a child or removed from your parents either way that experience is the same.

SPEAKER_00 32:19

And if that happens as a result of our government intervention, then we need to be following it up with government resources one of the unspoken truths that we talk about is that child welfare systems rely on people like grandparents. We've been talking about that today because doing so saves the state budget billions of dollars. But how do we shift the narrative so that all these caregivers are recognized not as an economic loop, but as essential partners entitled to equitable resources an important word equitable resources.

SPEAKER_01 32:56

I think it's a it's a long-term return on investment and the equation has to be more explicit for our lawmakers but kinship care will save money down the road from like you said a children's involvement with other systems as adults. So as we move from a reactive community where we're investing in very expensive interventions to treat homelessness and incarceration, all of these things that happen downstream and start investing upstream in early intervention and support for these children, we're going to get those cost savings later because when we can intervene when a child is young, we're going to save a lot of money for more expensive, less effective interventions down the road. We just have to make that case and push some of that funding from downstream to upstream now so that we can ultimately all of us will benefit our society will benefit children, families, but we all will when we're not investing so heavily in ineffective things downstream because it's almost now we'll never say things are too late, but it's more effective to intervene early. We just have to flip how we're thinking about funding. It shouldn't be that challenging it's just it's it's hard to pull from one bucket to another but we have to focus on early intervention.

SPEAKER_00 34:15

I love the the concept of investing upstream. Yes. So for the leader or policy director that might be listening today to this episode, what is one administrative choice being made right now that keeps kin givers we'll call them nonparental families raising children and how do we fix that scale?

SPEAKER_01 34:37

Yeah so I think you know first of all we have to start acknowledging acknowledging that our own practices may be contributing to where children end up and the resources that they are able to receive or not able to receive and the best thing you can do as a policy leader or director now is to really learn what

Understanding interconnected child welfare systems

SPEAKER_01 34:57

happens in systems that you don't own. So if I'm a child welfare leader, I am very pleased that I'm reducing the number of children in my system because that is how I am motivated and incentivized. But if I don't understand what happens to children who are not touching my system that I have kept out of the system, it's easy for me to claim that success without fully understanding what's happening to them. So if I educate myself on what happens in the school district with welfare, with childcare subsidy and really learn, okay, if my goal is to help children and by doing this larger diversion I am actually potentially harming in some ways, helping in some ways, but the more I understand about the larger systems that touch mine, the more I can help families make really informed decisions and improve policy as a community. So if all of the leaders in these different systems started to learn about how their systems connect and what families can access outside of what they own, we can start measuring success at the community level instead of just the individual system level. So the first thing that I recommend that anyone does who wants to do better for kin is just learn what's going on outside of your own system, how they work together and what children and families are experiencing and start talking to kinship caregivers. Start really talking and listening to kinship caregivers because they will tell you what is happening. And I think a lot of times it's just we're not listening and then we're not asking the right questions.

SPEAKER_00 36:23

Great point all of them thank you Allie thanks so much for your time today and for clarifying some of these issues and questions for all of us caregivers will be following up with you in the future.

SPEAKER_01 36:35

Look forward to it.

SPEAKER_00 36:36

Thank you Laura Ali Calliando left us with truths today that demand a complete rewrite of how child welfare is run in America. The system loves to celebrate dropping foster care numbers but those numbers are hiding a painful reality. Fewer children in foster care doesn't mean fewer children separated from their parents it often just means other adults are absorbing the crisis in silence. Most kids raised by kin are completely outside the foster care system, rendered functionally invisible to the very programs that should be helping them we have to be clear kinship care is not prevention. It is a family stepping up to absorb a crisis. Yes our love is real but love alone doesn't pay for trauma care, food or housing and if we want a system that actually works we have to invest upstream. Upstream funding isn't cheaper because it's smaller, it's cheaper because it gets there earlier before a family is fractured. It's time to stop asking how to reduce foster care and start

Interview with kinship caregiver

SPEAKER_00 37:44

asking what children actually need. The real metric isn't removal it's separation and the real unit of policy can no longer be just the child alone. It must be the entire family if we only measure foster care we miss the real system. As the invisible CEO of your home hold on to these truths this week and use them to change the conversation next week on the 2.7 million project we're taking this fight directly from policy theory to the front lines of the clinic and the living room. I'm sitting down with Michelle Hyatt. Michelle is a licensed clinical social worker and a kinship grandmother she lives at the powerful intersection of having the professional language to diagnose where the child welfare system is broken and the lived experience of the second cradle to feel the pain when it fails. And how we move from fighting case by case to demanding a universal standard of stability for every grand family in America. You won't want to miss episode 131. Thank you for tuning in to Grandparents Raising Grandchildren Nurturing through adversity remember you are not alone together we can find strength and hope in the face of adversity. Peace be with you and I pray that you find some time this week to listen to your inner wisdom amongst the noise and the pandemonium of this world.