Do You Know Where I've Been?
Gary Haugen
October 1, 1998
Here's a simple proposition: If you really want to know someone, you need to know where they've been. The idea is simple enough, but it has radically altered my understanding of what it means to know God—because, frankly, it's hard to hear about where he's been. I myself have been to some pretty horrible places. And those places form part of who I am. In the fall of 1994, for instance, I served as the director of the U.N.'s genocide investigation in Rwanda. As you may recall, during a period of about two months in the spring of 1994, about 500,000 Rwandans were hacked to death by their neighbors. When I arrived in October, my job was to march down a list of about 100 mass grave and massacre sites, deploying teams of investigators to gather evidence. I spent my days sorting through the human carnage that remained, piled knee-high, in the churches where Tutsi women and children had fled for safety. With a bulldozer we turned over mass graves outside churches and stadiums where thousands of dismembered fathers, sisters, and grandmothers had been cast into vast pits of death. I spent hour after hour taking the testimony of those who survived these orgies of murder—many of them children who had seen their entire families butchered before their eyes. Murder investigators begin with corpses and work their way through physical evidence and eyewitness testimony to reconstruct the story of what happened. In these cases, the stories were unspeakably horrific. Hundreds, even thousands, of defenseless Tutsi women and children had huddled in church sanctuaries, schools, and stadiums to seek safety from the Hutu militias and mobs. Often it would take several days of drunken butchery before all of the screams fell silent. I was there for the ...
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