“Excuse me, friends, but did you know that less than forty-eight hours ago I was standing in the middle of several thousand corpses in a muddy mass grave in a tiny African country called Rwanda?”*
These were the words Gary A. Haugen wanted to tell his neighbors on a D.C. Metro bus in 1994. And the product of that thought, coupled with those experiences, is what I went to see at a benefit dinner earlier this month.
Say hello to the International Justice Mission.
Founded in 1994, by Haugen, whose academic and professional pedigree is as blue blood as it comes, IJM is an “organization [that] makes available a corps of Christian public justice professionals (lawyers, criminal investigators, diplomats, governments relations experts and the like) to serve global Christian workers when they encounter cases of abuse or oppression in their communities.” IJM “documents the abuses and seeks relief for the victims either directly or in partnership with indigenous advocacy groups or through other international human rights organizations.”
Color me skeptical about any human rights organization. As a barely Gen-X’er, I’m admittedly the product of an overwhelmed, desensitized, skeptical and apathetic generation. To hear someone speak in broad terms and unfathomable numbers of death, slavery, and rape is common, even expected from our lovely news sources. Perhaps that’s why I haven’t picked up a paper or turned on a news cast in years. Why bother? The world is trying to beat death by killing itself first. I got the memo.
But then I heard about IJM. And I didn’t hear numbers. I heard a story. A story about one person, their struggles, their pain, and their suffering. And I heard how humanitarians, missionaries, and everything in between couldn’t relieve it. In this story, the slaves didn’t need food or water. They needed their freedom. Then I heard how a group of lawyers, investigators, government liaisons, and a myriad of other brave souls in a small community stopped being skeptical and jaded. They stopped accepting things. And they fought. And here’s the thing. They won.
So at this benefit dinner, the IJM reps told the over 1,000 attendants to turn off their phones, cameras, and recording devices. The names, faces, and places were not for publication or blogging. They were to show us what 13 years of trying can do. What happens when pedophiles who go to Southeast Asia because they think they won’t be caught, are, and prosecuted. What happens when families enslaved in brick factories in Africa are set free and given emancipation papers. Things like that. Things we don’t have to deal with in America. And then a woman spoke through a translator. She told us that she and her family had been freed after thirty years of slavery in a rice mill. And the immaculate suits, and pressed ties, and black dresses, and white table clothes, and emptiness of D.C. suddenly were uglier than the clay dirt of Africa.
As I left and pulled yet another parking ticket off my car, the jaded side of me automatically asked, so what if one person is saved. What difference does it make in a world of six billion disasters? The other part answered. If I was that one person, wouldn’t it make a difference? And maybe even more importantly, perhaps it’s not about making a difference Sarah.
It’s about trying.
*Taken from Good News About Injustice, by Gary A. Haugen.
