37 Pounds

The first death at Serving His Children wasn't a child, but a 27-year-old woman. Now, no one can agree on how she died, or if she needed rescuing at all.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
What you hear in this podcast does not implicate any
individual or entity in any criminal activity. The views and
opinions are solely those of the individuals participating in the podcast.
Previously on the Missionary I founded Serving his Children, How
old I was nineteen nineteen. Obviously the Lord really had
a special plan for you. You were either pro Renee

(00:22):
and going to stand up for her and you know,
have her back, or you were very much against what
she was doing and just kind of outraged by it.
All and five children died at an unlicensed treatment center
for malnourished kids in Uganda. I used to take the
did Buddhist Renee is being sued and ugand in court
every time a kid dies. You're writing a blog post,

(00:44):
You're getting all its attention. You might become addicted. What
leads Renee to go down this path? She thinks that's
what God wants her to do. Ye Just two days before,
I had heard a horror story. After driving all morning,

(01:09):
I approached a small, half collapsing hut. The home was
littered with trash, animal waste. My mind was reeling. As
I walked closer and closer, a dread came over me,
but also a strong desire to run as fast as
I could to comfort those hurting to fix the problem

(01:32):
at hand. I remained calm. I prayed. As my eyes
adjusted to the dark, I saw a little skeleton of
a child sitting on the dirt floor. Her name was
Naba Cosa, and she wasn't a child. She was a
woman in her twenties. And the woman telling this story

(01:55):
is Renee Bach. She wrote about her encounter with Nabucoza
and Vivid Deep Hill and her blog. We had an
actor read the post and we edited them for clarity.
But this is what Renee wrote back in August of two.
When she saw a movement, she slowly lifted her eyes,
and when I saw a fear, deathlike look in her eyes,

(02:17):
I screamed inwardly. My heart stopped. No one was caring
for her, no one was feeding her, no one was
even looking at her. And that is how Napacosa has
lived every day for the past twenty three years until now.

(02:39):
Renee wasn't the only one in Napocosa has had that day.
Her friend Ashley Laverty was there too. She smelt very
foul and it was just it was horrible. It was really,
really horrible. Okay, As Renee and actually walked closer, they

(03:03):
heard a slow, continuous tapping. Napacosa was holding an empty
mug and using the little energy she had to tap
it on the ground. I feel like she was tapping
that cup to signal that she wanted something to eat
or drink. I had a flask like a travel mug

(03:25):
of tea in the car. It was just black tea
with maybe a little bit of honey or sugar in it,
and I ran and got it and she just started
like downing it, like just gulping it down. Renee and
Ashley wanted to get her out of that hut immediately.
She was a full grown adult woman, but I was

(03:47):
able to like just scooper up in my two arms.
According to her medical documents, Napocoza Wade only thirty seven pounds.
But the needy will not be forgotten, nor the hope
of the afflicted ever perish. Some seen outside, they cleaned her,
wrapped her in a cloth, and held her tight as

(04:08):
if she were a baby. I wanted her to know
that she was loved not only by me, but by
a great, big, huge God, and that he had not
forgotten about her. I wanted her to know that he
was coming to her rescue, but Napocosa wasn't rescued. Within

(04:29):
a few days, Nabocsa would be dead. In the next
few years, there would be one hundred five deaths according
to Serving his Children's own records, but Nabokoza was the
first to die under their roof an association with I

(04:51):
Heart Media. I'm Hellymaca CONDI, I'm Roger Gola, I'm Malcolm Burnley.
This is the Missionary episode two thirty seven pounds. Renee
and Ashley brought Napocoza back to Serving His Children to

(05:14):
try and nurse her back to health. As always, Renee
was hopeful, determined. Renee just started feeding her bryson beans, water.
She would eat as much as she could and drink
as much as she could, and she started to perk
up and like gain more energy. Ashley went home for

(05:37):
the night and left Renee with Nabucoza and a new
volunteer named Shanna, who declined an interview. But according to
Renee's blog, it wasn't long before things got worse. I
felt sure that Nabacosa was going to be with Jesus,
that at any moment she would leave this earth headed
to heaven, where a heavenly host would welcome her with

(05:58):
open arms. Renee wasn't going to let that happen without
a fight. She bundled Nabucoza in a blanket, loaded her
into a van and took her to the hospital, but
they were turned away. We were driving frantically through the
city of Kampala in the middle of the night, searching

(06:18):
for anyone who would give her a second glance. I
was terrified, hysterical, sad, angry. They tried three more hospitals
but were turned away again and again. In one of
our last attempts, I ran into a hospital barefoot, carrying
Nabucoza in my arms like a small infant. No one

(06:41):
even looked up, and after sitting on a cold floor
for over an hour, the doctor told me to leave
her existing ivy in and take her home. Take her home.
They were out of options, so that's what they did.
They got back to serving his children in the middle
of the night and laid Nabucosa in bed with hot

(07:03):
water bottles. Renee slept by her side to keep her warm,
and then a small miracle happened. Today, Navacosa is awake,
she can sit up, she's eating small amounts of food
and keeping it down, and she can move a little
bit and make noises in response. Today, Nabucosa is very

(07:27):
much alive. Renee and I started off as friends, and
we had similar passions or interests in that, like I
had worked with children suffering from malnutrition. Ashley and Renee
were part of the same missionary community in Ginger. Ashley

(07:49):
says she even volunteered at serving his children, but she
saw herself as radically different from the other missionaries. She
wasn't raised in an evangelical family, and she was well traveled.
Her father was an American diplomat. From the time I
was a little girl, like, I always had dreamt of
coming to Africa. And I don't know if it's because
like I had been to all these other you know,

(08:11):
countries and continents. Um, this is gonna really silly. But
as a child, I really think it's because I was
such an animal lover and like idolized women like Jane
Goodall and Diane Fosse, and like it was the wildlife
that initially attracted me and like the nature. In college,
actually studied health sciences and worked with disabled children before

(08:34):
moving to Uganda was like, but it made her nervous
to see what little experience her peers had. She was
surrounded by young women who felt called to do service
but had never actually studied or worked in these fields,
and felt like they could just figure it out as
they went along. And Yeah, a lot of young girls,
you know, late teens, early twenties, generally not educated beyond

(09:02):
secondary school or high school, never having any work experience
like none, but would then graduate and come over here
to set up their own organization. I'm going to come
and do my own thing so i can be my
own boss and run my own show. That was very, very,
very much a trend, I'll be honest, though. One thing

(09:27):
that I found a bit ironic about this story is
how many of these relatively young white American missionaries were
ready to criticize each other but think of themselves as
the one white person doing it right in Africa. I mean,
how did these young women without any medical training end
up taking care of an incredibly sick woman in the

(09:48):
first place. Back then, in missionary communities like Ginger, experience
was often overlooked. What mattered most was your compassion, your piety,
and your it meant in two thousand ten, serving his
children was feeding hundreds of children every week, sometimes as

(10:10):
many as a thousand. It was also around this time
that Renee started doing more than feeding kids. She began
taking them in. Children who were sick with tuberculosis or
malaria now nutrition. Renee's team would bring them back and
forth to the hospital for treatment, while letting the kids
in their families stay at the center for free. Here's

(10:31):
how Katie Davis, one of Renee's old friends, described her
in a blog back in two thousand ten. We had
a voice actor read this too. Renee lives with purpose.
She is intentional about loving people with the love of Christ.
She stops for one person and loves that person as
if they were Christ himself. In her living room, she

(10:51):
spends her day's nurturing children who we all swear will
surely die back to health, preparing awful smelling high calorie milk,
and mopping vomit off the floor and herself. And she
doesn't complain because she knows she's doing it for Jesus.
My childhood hero was Mother Teresa. By today hero is Renee,

(11:16):
a modern Mother Teresa. That was her reputation back then,
even people who had never met Renee were inspired by
her and wanted to help her play a tiny role
in her mission. In that same blog post, Katie asks
people to help Renee buy a new car for work,
a car that could be used to rescue more people

(11:37):
like Naba Coosa. Renee needs a car, and a good one.
The kind were looking for a cost between ten and
twelve thousand dollars that serving his children currently just doesn't have,
and people in the comments promised to donate. Weeks later,
they got that car, a white Toyota land Cruiser. Navacosa

(11:59):
is a proving tremendously. It is nothing short of a miracle,
and no doubt, due to Renee and Shannon's devoted around
the clock care and a God who is more awesome
than I can fathom, Nabacosa's recovery wouldn't last. Within a

(12:20):
couple of days, her health took a turn for the worse.
I do remember coming back and she was lying in
there hooked up to I v S that had been
administered by Renee. She was very uncomfortable and she was groaning,
and there was just like a very foul smell coming

(12:42):
from her and that room. I just remember just being
in shock by all of it. She wasn't in a
medical facility, she was just being treated from the center.
She wasn't getting any better despite having you know, a
so called treatment plan and and food and water, and

(13:04):
then just declined so rapidly. My friend Napocosa went to
be with Jesus. God decided that it was time for
her to come home, to leave her earthly pain behind
and come worship Him for the rest of eternity. Now

(13:28):
I have to say, this is not the way I
wanted things to happen. I had other plans. I had
a different end to her story and mind. But this
is God's perfect end to her story, and the story
is not mine to write. Renee told a moving story,

(13:51):
and as we'll see, she'd keep telling it. But here's
the thing. From the beginning, actually doubted Renee's version of events.
A blog of her running through these hospitals barefoot. I
feel like that was maybe for exaggeration purposes. Ashley wasn't
with Rani that night, but she did know about Ugandan hospitals.

(14:12):
She had fostered dozens of kids and often had to
navigate Uganda's complex health care system, so actually doubted that
Renee Nabucoza would be turned away like that again and again.
The details just felt off to her. I don't know
what kind of doctor would prescribe treatment for somebody that's sick,

(14:34):
send them home and say you can just continue this
treatment from home, you who has no medical training. Like
that is shocking to me. I mean, it would be
one thing if all she needed was a dose of antibiotics.
But like when somebody is dying, starting to death and
rotting from a host of infections, you don't just give

(14:55):
a list of instruction to say, take her on home.
She can be managed for him home. As Renee tells it,
Nabokoza fought to live until the very end until God
decided it was her time to go. But Ashley says
she was there when Napocosa died, and she remembers a
completely different version where Nabacosa's death wasn't dignified, wasn't peaceful

(15:20):
at all. At this point, she had been allowed to
go outside and she was sitting on the veranda, and
I believe she had been eating lunch, and all of
a sudden she took a turn for the worst. She
just like the eyes started rolling back in her head,

(15:42):
gurgling as if she was like gonna, you know, possibly
faint or honestly die. And Renee ran into the house.
She had her own little pharmacy set up, and she
grabbed a medication, came outside and injected her with it,

(16:08):
and then she died, but fell backwards. In Ashley's description
is so alarming and almost violent. We were left wondering
how much had Renee's faith blinded her. Did Renee call

(16:29):
us the death of the woman she set out to save.
It's not like she was held by Renee As she
peacefully slipped away. It was like, oh my gosh, like
something is happening with her. I'm going to run inside,
come back out, jabber, and then bool, she's dead. Nama
Coosa's death spelled the end of Ashley and Renee's friendship.

(16:53):
Nine years later, Ashley would write an affidavit against Renee,
accusing her of illegally practicing medicine in and she would
use Nabokoza as her primary example. You get it, y'all.

(17:26):
Get Missionaries weren't just something I read about in history books.
They were something I grew up hearing about for years.
My family comes from a place called Tuntumu, a two
hour drive from Nairobi. Yeah, it's a beautiful town, nestled

(17:49):
in the rolling hills and highlands of central Tania. I
live in the US now, but when I first heard
about Renee, I was living in Kenya. I moved there
back into I was and eighteen, mostly to be a
freelance reporter. But I also wanted to travel the country
with my cousins and spend time with my grandmother or
show show, as we say in cuckoo you or native language.

(18:13):
I wanted to know her and record her history my
never days like me. When I wasn't practicing my cuckoo you,
I was walking in the family farm, picking mangoes and
avocados straight from the trees, or playing fetch with the

(18:37):
dogs and saying hide my uncle's cows path. But whenever
I walked through it, I also felt like I could
feel the weight of history on my shoulders. Britain has
brought much good to Kenya. A standards of living are
growing still higher as more of her people learn the
lessons that the white man has to teach. More than

(18:59):
a hundred years ago, Tumutumu became one of the very
first missionary outposts of the Church of Scotland and across
the ridge from our home, that's where the Catholic missionary
set up. Down the street were the Anglicans. Mister Littleton
lens of the maumas threats on the lives of Catholic missionaries,
and in the Nyanza province he talks with elders of

(19:21):
the Kukuyo tribe from which the Maumau drew hundreds of recruits,
many of whom have not been arrested. You can see
the presence of missionaries everywhere. They established one of the
very first hospitals in the region to Mutumu Hospital, and
one of the best schools to Mutumu Primary School where

(19:43):
my father went. He The one thing my grandmother would
talk about proudly was her lifelong membership in the church
as women's Guild. It was a point of pride for
her and in our town. It made her a respectable woman.

(20:03):
What does she want us to remember? I might remember then,
which it tell us about the women's guild? He give them.
On the day I recorded her, she was wearing her
favorite light blue bandanna. It read p C E A
Presbyterian Church of East Africa and If you ask some

(20:26):
of the older Kenyons about missionaries, this is what they
talk about. The good things. For her generation. The church
represented a new Africa with a brand new set of opportunities.
When my grandmother died last year, dozens of women from
the guild came to the church. They wore the same

(20:49):
blue bandana that my grandmother always wore. Together, they carried
my grandmother's coffin out of the church, her bandanna draped
over it. To me, you can't talk about missionaries without

(21:15):
talking about colonialism. The missionaries had come with promises to
educate and convert Kenyon's, but they were also complicit in
the theft of their land and their resources. But whenever
I asked her about the other side of that history,
the dark side, how the British detained tens of thousands
of cuku Are tribe and forcibly relocated people to barbed

(21:39):
wire camps, burned down homes, set up curfews, all to
keep them down. I always had the sense that my
grandmother just didn't want to speak about those things. To her.
The British had done terrible things, but the missionaries had
done God's work. They brought hospital is to save children, schools,

(22:01):
to bring opportunities, and I get that when I think
about Renee Boch. The question isn't whether or not all
missionaries are bad, but I do wonder what would the
you Gonde and she encountered say. That's what has driven
me throughout this entire podcast actually hearing the you Gonde
on side of the story. Would they see her as

(22:24):
my grandmother did, doing God's work by bringing hospitals and schools,
or would they see her as a harbinger of something darker,
an enabler of something more dangerous, something so terrible that
no one could speak about it now. A lot of

(22:47):
things Renee wrote in her blog are hard to believe.
Did she really run barefoot through a hospital? Did a
doctor actually tell her to manage a patient herself? But
what grabs my attention the most is something that Renee
implies again and again in her blogs, this idea that
you Gondan families didn't care enough and that was why

(23:09):
their children were starving, as if love could heal any
amount of poverty. After Nabacosa died, Renee wrote this, you
should know that thousands of people are praying for you
and your family. I know your mom is feeling so
sad about the past twenty three years. I told her
you forgave her. One of the only things Renee and

(23:31):
Ashley agree on is that Naubakoza was neglected, had been starved.
In fact, in her affidavit, Renee says that one of
Nabucoza's relatives told her they put her in a room
to wait for her to die. Sweet Nabucosa lived a
life full of incredible pain and suffering. She lived a
life of neglect, a life of abuse. She was even

(23:54):
denied the right to be loved by her own mother.
Can you even begin to imagine what that would be, La,
I can't. After Renee posted Navacosa's story, it spread like
wildfire from one Christian blog to another, the parable of
poor Nabacosa, who had never received love until the day

(24:15):
she was rescued by these two young white women. Here's
some of what they wrote. She was in her awful
state only because no one had cared for her, No
one had loved her, no one had even given her
a second thought. That she survived as long as she
did in the care of Anti Renee is a miracle
in itself. I've never held a starving person in my arms,

(24:36):
her dry skin warm against mine, and prayed she lived.
Renee has it was just too easy, too convenient to
cast off Nabacosa's family as these silent villains in Renee's
heroic story, a cheap plot device that was eerily familiar,

(24:58):
like the casual mention of fly is swarming around an
African child's head. But what would Nabucoza's family say. We
needed to hear in their words what happened. So Regiv
went to go find them. I set out early one

(25:21):
Sunday morning, all right. I headed north from Gina for
about an hour, following the Nile downstream along the same
dirt roads that Renee would have taken when she found
Nabucoza ten years earlier. I'm on the back of a
motorcycle with smy my translator, and fix her. I'm holding
the recorder in one hand and the seat would together.

(25:45):
So Mom and Nabokoza is still here. No, she's gone already, Okay.
So May was a former employee of serving his children
who had been fired back in over a pay dispute.
Now he's a witness in the case against Renee. So
he's not exactly a neutral party, but he knew the

(26:07):
local language and where Navacoza's village was, and we had
all his translations checked with the third party in full disclosure.
Our team chose to pay some for this work. Anyway,
we got to the village and asked around for Navacoza's mother.
So where are we now? Yeah? Okay, And pretty quickly

(26:30):
we found not her mother but her sister, Lydia. I'm
she was outside of a small brick house cooking over
a fire. Her kids were nearby sorting some nuts. Actually,
does she know anything information? Litia's eyes got big as

(27:02):
she told sam story Ginger masses vunteers in bazoong I
recognized some words ginger Messungu. She's going to the term

(27:25):
as so far as she's the sister to the little
Navakosa and when Navakosa was sick, she's among the people
who escorted Navacoza to the clinic in Gina suburb. In
all of Renee's blog posts about Navocosa, she told the
story of neglect, a story about a woman cast aside

(27:46):
by her own family. She never once mentioned that Nabucoza's
sister was by her side for four whole days did
she believe that these missouis were doctors? Well, you kid,
but no, it is this money. She said, she didn't

(28:13):
know whether they were doctors, but she felt like a
goat being dragged along. I met Navacosa's mom, Jane a
week later at her farm. She had a bundle of

(28:35):
corn husks on her head and wore a tied eye
green tashiki and a long skirt. She sat down the
corn husks and brought a few logs for us to
sit on in her front yard. I wanted to hear
about how Navacosa came to be the way she was.
I brought along another interpreter, Sophie tell Us from Navocosa's birth.

(28:56):
When was Navacasa born and was she healthy as a child? Oh?
Yea as valubuality. Did I have my nine? It did
two and she was a healthy baby, no problems. Jane
said that at age three they noticed Novacosa's hands were

(29:20):
different sizes. One hand was big, another one was small.
That's how it started. And she was speaking normally like
her brand developing like everybody else or how get a balloon?
Jean going to nyog the okay, she could not speak.
I learned that Nabucoza used to walk despite half her

(29:43):
body being paralyzed, but she also regularly had seizures. Nevertheless,
for twenty seven years they got by. When Jane spent
time with her husband, Nabocoza would stay with her grandmother
and they had always done their best to take care
of her. The people, the Missoulus that found Navocosa, they're
saying that she was neglected, that she was not eating,

(30:06):
that they were trying to starve her. That's the way
she's saying, you know, towards in that case, we are lying.
Jane denied neglect. She said Navacosa had been closely cared
for and NGO in the area had even been giving
her anti Caesar medication with a warning never to stop

(30:30):
taking them. Or as Jane put it, it would hit
Navocosa so bad. But when Renee brought Nabucoza back to
serving his children, that's exactly what they did. I can't
a facigated real. They were told to stop the medication
that she was on, so they started giving her that food.

(30:51):
Then I asked Jane the question that had been on
my mind for months. It was the whole reason that
had come all this way to meet her in the
first place, Um, how did Nabucosa pass away? At it?
And I have found it? Went after bathing her, she

(31:14):
was trying to give some food and then she saw
that food was no longer going now carrying her to
put down the bid, she went like that. The way
that Jane spoke, she made it clear that Navocoza wasn't neglected.
She was loved by her family. They were with her

(31:36):
in her last days. That meant Renee had gotten the
story wrong, or at the very least made it her own.
I think Jane impacked my things, But just as I
was about to leave, she asked if I had a
photo of Navocosa. I pulled out my phone and sifted

(31:57):
through Renee's blogs just for a second. Then I handed
my phone to her. It was a photo of Navacosa
lying in a bed with fresh, clean clothes on. Her
eyes are wide open and she's looking right at the camera.
M Jane spent a few quiet moments with a smile

(32:17):
on her face, and I realized that for Jane, it
might have been ten years since she even seen a
photograph of her own daughter. Before Nabucoza died, a story

(32:40):
was already being written about her life in Renee's blogs,
it was a story of unimaginable neglect, of starvation, and
ultimately the origin story of Renee's own heroism. Nine years later,
Ashley uses Navacosa's story too in her case against Renee.
Only this story is a victimization of Napacosa being injected,

(33:03):
stabbed with a syringe by Renee, killed rather than saved.
So why should we trust Ashley's version any more than Renee's.
Of course, he might be thinking, well, what about the
family who says they never abandoned not Pacosa, never neglected her,
hadn't done their best even with few resources. Is it

(33:24):
possible they might not be telling the truth. Yes, of course,
but that's not really the point. The point is that Renee,
in Ashley, and other missionaries in this case that are
too often talking about what did or did not happen
to Ugandan's But except for a few former employees, these
Ugandan voices are largely absent. And keep in mind that

(33:44):
most of the time these missionaries don't even speak any
of the local languages. Who gets to tell the story matters,
and how they tell it matters too. For Renee, not
Beacosa's death could have been an early warning that she
was in over her head, but Renee thought is something different,
an opportunity, a rolling cry. Navacosa's life was not in vain.

(34:12):
God is still using her even today. God has used
her to put a beautiful face and name to the
word starvation, to make the hunger crisis real for people
all around the world. Navacosa's life mattered. Thousands have fallen
in love with this precious woman, have cried over her
pain and spent nights in prayer for her. There are

(34:32):
thousands of navacosa Is all around the world. Now that
you know about it, what are you going to do?
Within two months of Napacosa's death, Renee was back in
the United States, holding fundraising events at local churches from Chattanooga, Tennessee,
to Miskogee, Oklahoma. She would hold silent auctions and sell

(34:53):
beads and other handmade goods from Uganda, and even stage
mock feedings where churchgoers would in their own bulls and
line up for rice and beings, just like the children
in Uganda. And she would tell stories like navacasas show
pictures of children she had supposedly saved. Jackie Crawmlick is
a nurse who volunteered at Serving His Children. She still

(35:16):
remembers one of her name's presentations. She told the story
of Navocosa, the whole story from beginning to end, like
this girl and she was a sack of blaa and
she was like stabbing and crying. The story was basically
all about how this girl was so neglected and abused
your whole life. She was neglected, neglected until you know
Renee came in and saved her, and her fundraising took

(35:38):
off on the back of that story. Navacasa's story was,
no doubt a powerful one. Renee was a gifted storyteller
doing something we do all the time as journalists describe
and vivid details the harsh environments in which people are living,
described their suffering and lyric crazings, and end with a

(35:58):
glimmer of hope a call to action. Renee would continue
to post countless stories and photos of sick children on
her blog and on social media, all part of her
campaign to end child malnutrition. In a few years, Serving
His Children would go from a fledgling nonprofit to something
bigger and NGO with outsized ambitions, collecting more than one

(36:23):
point five million dollars in five years as the list
of donors grew longer, but Nabokoza's name would just be
the first in a different list, A long, somber one.
Next time on the Missionary, we go looking for Renee

(36:45):
Back and we find her sitting at home in Virginia,
her life upside down, wondering why she's an outcast. I
guess how you've been. Yeah, it's been challenging for sure.
No one wants to be be said to be murder.
People have forgotten that I'm a human, like in, a

(37:06):
person with emotions and someone who has children that are
going to grow up one day and google their mom's
name and say, Wow, was my mom a serial killer?
Did she start a genocide? Because that's what people said
about her. The Missionaries produced an association with iHeart Media.

(37:27):
It's written and reported by Roger Gola, Heleemage Condhi, and
Malcolm Burnley. It's produced by Michelle Lands and Ryan Murdoch.
Mark Lotto is our story editor. Our executive producer is
Moi Thicketter. Our fact checker is Austin Thompson. Mixing by
Josh Rogisson and voice acting by Taylor Kaufman.