May 15, 2020 • 39 mins
After months of silence, Renee Bach appears on Fox News to defend herself. A few days later, we receive an invitation to meet her in Virginia, face-to-face.
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Episode Transcript
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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 My Friend Napocosa went to View
with Jesus. She told the story of Napocosa basically all
(00:22):
about how this girl was so neglected and abused her
whole life until you know, Renee came in and saved her,
and her fundraising took off on the back of that story.
But this is God's perfect end of her story, and
the story is not mine to write. The Musunglus that
found Napocosa, they're saying that she was neglected, that they
were trying to starve for Yeah, that's yeah, She's saying,
(00:47):
you know, to us in Ducks, we are lying. A
Christian missionary is finding to clear her name tonight, following
accusations by two mothers in Uganda and a group called
No White Saviors that the Virginia woman contributed to the
deaths of they say, hundreds of babies by treating them
without a medical license. Renee, that is a serious allegation.
(01:09):
How do you respond? First off, I have never represented
myself as a medical professional or health worker of any type. UM.
The organization serving his children hires UH medical professionals that
are Ugandan, UM, local and national folks, and UM I
have assisted our medical team in emergency settings and in
(01:31):
crisis situations. UM, but I have never practiced medicine, and
I have never adorned or put on any sort of
The segment is about five minutes long. Renee Box wearing
a ruffled blouse, her blonde hair formally swept back behind
her ear children and personal growth. I realized, and she
looks nervous. I wasn't even needed. She swivels in her
(01:51):
chair and her eyes darted around looking at someone off screen.
And so these accusations are incredibly disappointing, as I've spent
a majority of my adulthood UM serving in Uganda. It
was the first anyone had seen of Box since she
left Uganda in late two thousand eighteen, a couple of
months before the lawsuit was filed. And you've gotten in court.
(02:12):
Renee's attorney, David Gibbs, was split screen to Ansuer. So, David,
I know that you have said, UM, you believe this
group is potentially defaming her. They may be libelious and
slandering her. Would you consider legal action in return? Do
you think your case is strong enough? Well, Shannon, absolutely,
the case would be strong enough. The problem with these
(02:33):
reputational terrorists on the internet putting out information it's not
fact based, and it's very sad when a missionary, humanitarian
or any individual from the United States or any developed
nation wants to go into a third world or a
health crisis somewhere like da Uganda and they come under
these attacks with no way to really defend yourself affectively.
(02:55):
For months, I thought I was on a fool's errand
Renee was somewhere in Virginia according to our best guests,
unwilling to talk, and then she popped up on Fox News.
But it was my role on the team to understand
Renee's version of what happened and to interview her closest defenders,
which I was finding was going to require a lot
more patients and imagination than I anticipated. So there definitely
(03:19):
is a movement right now and the white savior complex
or white saviorism or kind of hot button topics um
at least in the world that I come from. In
association with I Heart Media I'm Malcolm Burnley, I'm Rogie Gola,
I'm Hollema Condi, and this is the Missionary episode three,
Good Samaritan. I've spoken to David Gibbs less than a
(03:46):
week before this interview aired in June. My only other
outreach to Renee had been through her mother, Laurie. She
took my calls for about six months until she eventually
stopped responding and texted me a number I longed to Gibbs.
It turns out Gibbs has a history with Fox News.
David Gibbs joins us. He was the attorney for Terry
(04:08):
Shivo's family, and he's now President and General counsel of
the National Center for Life and Liberty. David, thanks for
joining us, Shannon. It's a joy to be with you
on this Sunday, all right, So, Michael Shivo. If the
name Terry Shivo rings a bell, that's because her case
was a big deal. Back in the early two thousands.
Shivo quite simply redefined life and death in America, along
(04:29):
with the government's role in each of those things. The
ongoing debates over vaccines, abortion coverage, and the line between
individual freedom and public health in this pandemic they all
called back to Shiva. It was a war of ideas,
and Gibbs was on the front line. Is Governor Bush
was not trying to decide whether Terry Shiva lived or died.
(04:51):
He just wanted to make sure that fair new profit.
Shivo was a woman who had been comatose for fifteen
years when her husband us to pull life support. The
case made headlines and quickly became political. Everyone from the
Pope to President George W. Bush weighed in. Shivo had
no hope for improvement, according to doctors. Gibbs represented the
(05:14):
parents who wanted to keep her alive. We knew ultimately
her life was in the hands of God, but the
concern was that here was this woman who had no lawyer,
The judge never came to see her, and she was
going to die in this painful way. Shivo became a
martyr for pro life causes, and Gibbs was her apostle.
(05:34):
He wrote a book, Fighting for Dear Life when it
was all over, then founded a legal ministry that quote
serves to protect and defend Bible based values. Gibbs got
famous by asserting a woman's right to life, and now
he was defending a woman accused of taking life away.
(05:57):
We were originally contacted by a pastor in the Virginia
area that was familiar with Renee and her mom and
dad and also was one of the supporters of serving
as children. Our goal has been to help them as
they have worked through, you know, a very complicated media universe.
(06:18):
In the first two episodes, you heard a lot of
the accusations about Renee's medical involvement. In a five hundred
fifty page response to the lawsuits, she denies practically everything,
wearing a white coat, experimental dosing, even the blood transfusions.
And so I think I thought Gibbs might try to
overwhelm me with the details, plucking apart the allegations in
(06:38):
the lawsuit. She wasn't going in and doing surgeries, cutting
people open, you know, doing hearts or brains or I
mean things that obviously you need a lot of medical expertise,
and you need sophisticated training as well as staff. They're
providing nutrition services to combat a crisis that literally the
(07:00):
hospitals and others were unable to handle just due to
the volume. But mostly he focused on Renee's character and
he painted with a broad brush. Gibbs told me that
Renee was a good Samaritan. He said that she had
nothing to be sorry for it at all. Um. I
saw Renee's work and what she had done over her
time in Uganda is something that should be encouraged and
(07:22):
lifted up. And I was watching her be, you know,
literally crucified for trying to do the right thing. These families,
when you're desperate, they know their daughters dying, Renee is,
they're willing to help, and they're seeking help. The Renee's
of the world and others like her should be allowed
to provide help. According to her lawyer, Renee's story wasn't
(07:46):
about death, it was about life. Renee went to Uganda
looking to preserve it and fight for it, just like
Gibbs did with Shiva. They're ignoring the fact that thirty
six hundred children had their lives saved. What Sir Ring
his children did with a medical team there in Uganda
and under Renee's leadership, was truly remarkable. A lot of
(08:06):
people would walk away from a scene like that in Uganda,
maybe donate a few dollars, share a link on social media,
but they don't usually lean in like Renee two Gibbs.
That's commendable. If you're on an airplane and you've got
a dying child and you walk up to someone that's
say can you help me? And the person says, I
think I can. You're in in the Good Samaritan emergency situation,
(08:30):
and do we want to get to the point where
the doctor on the airplane says, you know what, I
don't want my name and reputation ruined. I don't want
to get sued. I don't want to get accused of
killing this guy. I think I'm just gonna stay in
my seat, buckled in, and whatever happens happens. But what
if on that plane during that emergency, some do gooder
pulls out a stethoscope from the overhead and pretends to
(08:53):
be a doctor. That's more like what Renee is accused of.
After that Fox interview, I figured what the hell? I
just drive to Renee's hometown. Bedford, Virginia is six hours
(09:14):
away from Philly. I let Gibbs know that I was
heading there, but as I got closer, something unexpected happened.
Gibbs sent me the address to a church. He basically said,
if I wanted to meet Renee, I could h This
(09:35):
was Renee's home court a brick church on a suburban street,
and when I entered the church, I noticed they still
had a flyer for Serving His Children on the bulletin board.
The flyer asked for donations from cycle breakers to help
end malnutrition in Uganda. Renee and Laurie Bach I don't
know if they mentioned that we're gonna be there, said
there's a library. The receptionist was and expecting me, so
(10:01):
she called for the Reverend Maltain Burley. Thank you. At
the top of a flight of stairs, I found a classroom.
The chairs were stocked around the perimeter and the chalkboard
was wiped clean. I do thank you so much. A
woman was waiting for me. She wore a hoodie, jeans
(10:24):
and a half hearted smile when she shook my hand.
Could you just introduce yourself, say your name and my name,
and I guess your affiliation with serving I'm Renee Back,
the founder and former director of Serving his Children. People
ask me if Renee's in jail when I casually bring
(10:46):
up this story. Renee is free to celebrate birthdays with
her two adopted daughters, eat home cooked meals, and isn't
even charged with a felony in the US or in Uganda,
but she seemed tense, perhaps unconvinced this was a good
due to be talking with me. It's hard, but tell
me where you're at right now and what you how
you've been yet. Yeah, it's been challenging for sure. No
(11:09):
one wants to be be said to be, you know, murderer,
but there has been and there will be some pretty
serious counseling after all this. Um, it's been pretty emotionally damaging,
no doubt. I'm not trying to play the victim in
that or anything, but to hear it from her, she's
in a special kind of deal. She isn't working, and
(11:30):
she assumes she may never work again. She says. Strangers
stop her in public and ask if she's the one
people have forgotten that I'm a human, like in a
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
(11:51):
about her. Renee was even in touch with the FBI
regarding death threads. I'm being watched closely, like I'm being
watched in my home I'm being watched everywhere I go.
I feel like people are watching me. I've visited my
sister in California and people were taking pictures in the
airport of me. Renee's sister is an actual doctor, by
the way, you know, the police have put cameras up
(12:12):
at my parents house and all kinds of things like that,
which is very unusual because I grew up in an
environment where like, you go out of town for two
weeks and you don't lock your door because what if
the neighbor needs a cup of sugar, you know, and
just like can wander on over. And that's just a
terrible feeling to feel insecure about your safety and the
safety of your kids and your family. And yeah, it's
been really sad, to be honest. Renee sounded paranoid, which
(12:39):
explained why we were meeting in a clandestine location. I
was asked to keep the name of the church anonymous
gibbs Us on speaker phone. Her mother, Laurie, was taking
notes on a laptop off to the side. They were
all eager to position Renee as a victim of an
online smear campaign. Here's Laurie box Well on social media.
Has facilitated a whole made up story that you know,
(13:03):
you can just say what you want and it's viewed
as the Gospel treat which is scary. World. Yeah, Renee
was playing the victim here no matter what she said,
and this mountain case against her. It was obviously not
fake news. We do uncovered too much already. It was
also true, though, that Renee was getting hammered all over
(13:24):
social media tweets like she's the butcher of Uganda and
her name is Renee Bach and in a parallel universe,
Hollywood will make a billion dollar fictional movie about this,
and somehow managed to paint Renee Bach as a complicated,
tragically flawed, and yet well intentioned woman whispers we inhabit
(13:46):
the parallel universe. Despite this, Renee was optimistic and listening
to Monica Lewinsky's Ted talk. A lot of what she
says really resonates with me. And that like her name
was just put it on like the scandal, you know,
it was like the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and so people
forgot that she was a human being, an evangelical woman
(14:10):
finding solace in Monica Lewinsky. I definitely didn't expect that,
but I understood what she meant once I listened to
Lewinsky's Ted talk, what that meant for me personally was
that overnight I went from being a completely private figure
to a publicly humiliated one worldwide. I was patient zero
(14:34):
of losing a personal reputation on a global scale almost instantaneously.
But the more Renee talked about Lewinsky, the more I
realized she was making a different point entirely. For Renee,
Lewinsky was a story of redemption, like maybe she could
use this unwanted notoriety and channel it into good, into
(14:56):
a form of service. Here's Renee again for good. I
mentioned Monica Lewinski before, but it's been cool to see
her like now really creating this platform and foundation for
you know, anti bullying and cyber bullying and things like that.
I think that, like what a cool testimony of taking
something that was so horrific and so destructive and turning
(15:18):
it into a way to really like resonate with people
in a really hard spot and really help people. So
seeing a few people that have gone through really hilacious
trials um and kept their head up and been honoring
has been a life giving encouragement to me. I'll admit
(15:40):
I was deeply interested in the fall from Grace narratives,
what it was like to be chosen and special in
one moment, exiled in the next. But I never got
what I wanted. I never got the Renee of her
blog posts. Her storytelling and introspection were much less impactful.
In person. Something felt like it was just missing or
(16:01):
it was guarded from me. And then Renee started telling
me why that those blog posts were deeply flawed and
the problem with them was that they had an unreliable
narrator Renee herself and a lot of my years of blogging.
I was young, and I wanted to share, like life
(16:22):
can look so different than what I thought it looked
like as a girl from a rural town in America. Yeah,
so I wanted people to understand that, like, there's this
world outside of yourself that's so amazing and so beautiful
and so raw and like so painful, but like also
can be so beautiful, and like a mural can be
(16:42):
making made out of that brokenness. Um, and I really
did want to convey that to the readers. And I
mean when we first came across the blogs, they felt
like journalistic treasure. Thirty two thousand words that came straight
from Renee. Each passage a fossil on the sand, together
a skeleton for our entire investigation. Now, Renee was claiming
(17:05):
that she had a propensity for stretching the truth in
her writing. And I think I really wrote in first
person a lot um, and so I would say, you know, oh,
this kid came in and then you know, we started
the idea, and how come up to oxygen and did
all these things and um, and I think it really
reads as though I was doing those things personally, And
so I can understand how someone would read and think
(17:27):
like she's just doing all this stuff, like she knows
what she's doing, you know, um, whereas it was really
a team. It was so mind boggling it. Renee was
accused of being a fake doctor, and part of her
defense was to admit to misrepresenting herself in a different way.
You know, I wrote it as this was my experience, um,
(17:48):
and instead of saying like the nurse ran whatever or um, right,
there were several people there that day, um, and so
I was definitely involved in all the activities. Renee says
she kept writing in first person for a simple reason
because people will pay money to support that kind of narrative,
and we did. You know, people are emotional impulse givers,
(18:12):
and so we did receive a lot of you know,
financial support through people who read my blogs. Um, just
reading and realizing the raw need and then feeling like, hey,
I want to be a part of that and would
give monetarily. So yeah, that was really the goal. And
I really we had spent hours occupied by these blogs.
They were so central to Renee's legend, which meant that
(18:34):
to accept her truth, to accept that broad swass of
her writing were fabrications. Well, then it threw into question
everything we knew about Renee. Regieve. Do you remember what
you thought after spending all that time reading those blogs
to hear that Renee said they were actually exaggerated? Oh man, yeah,
(18:54):
I remember, just not knowing who Renee was anymore. I mean,
I've heard so many things, so much my understanding of
Renee came from the community, came from these blogs, and
everything was just falling out from underneath us, and I
didn't know where we stood. Of course, there was another explanation,
(19:15):
and perhaps a simpler one, that Renee was denouncing her
blog post because well they looked bad. For her case,
no one could prove she didn't exaggerate her writing, so
it was all too convenient. If we wanted to get
to the bottom of who Renee really was, we needed
to go back to the beginning to Bedford, Virginia. Turn
(19:40):
the line onto East Main Street. Signs for US sixty
west US to North Virginia, North Virginia, Bedford. One of
the first things you noticed about Bedford, Virginia are the
lamp posts up and down Main Street. The post carry
the names and faces of the Bedford Boys, the young
bab be faced men who died at the beaches of
(20:02):
Normandy June ninth. The crossfire of German guns still rakes
the shore. The town lost more men per capita on
d Day than anywhere else in the country. Out on
the chunnel, the rescue boats of the Coast Guard are
looking for survivors and aiding damaged vessels, and the hospital
(20:22):
ships are waiting for the Renee grew up among these ghosts.
Their spirit looms over the town. Wounded man has transferred
to another ship, the life saving blood plasma goes with him.
This idea of sacrificing for something that's bigger than yourself
It's easy to see how a young Renee was inspired
(20:42):
by that idea because it drives her family life too.
Here's Renee talking about her childhood on a quip FM
back when Renee was just a feel good story. I
grew up in a family of five and basically lived
all of my young childhood and teenage years right here
in Bedford. I got saved, you could say, when I
(21:03):
was very young. Um, but it wasn't until my high
school in middle school years that I really understood what
having a relationship with Jesus Christ looked like. The box
live on a modest farm with a bunch of animals.
The walls are lined with inspiration passages from philosophers, Bible versus,
even Mumford and Sons lyrics love It will not betray you,
(21:27):
dismay or enslave you, It will set you free. Lorie
homeschooled Renee and her four siblings. She taught them to
take risks and to pursue self mastery in their learning.
When she was ten, her parents started a nonprofit organization,
Many Blessings Farm, where they provided writing therapy for children
(21:48):
with special needs. As a teenager, Renee scheduled volunteers spotted
children on horseback and oversaw barn duty and so that
was a huge part of my middle school in high
school years was doing hippotherapy. So you know, it's kind
of like therapeutic writing. Being able to just take part
in kids that were a little bit different than me
(22:10):
definitely sparked a desire and need to be able to
help people. Um, just because there was one horse named
Sienna who stole Renee's heart. Later on, Sienna developed congenital
eye defects, and treating him meant around the clock care.
Every four hours, someone had to apply a stinging ointment
to his eyes. Lauria wrote to me in an email.
(22:34):
God used Renee's horse to teach her many things. Here's
Lauria again in the alarm, go up every four hours,
and Renee was to get up and get a flash
like the barn and me and home working comes back
and go to Renee was like the valedictorian of her
tiny home school, destined for greater things. Everyone knew it.
(22:57):
Here's Renee's youth pastor rich heart. She always had a
book in her hand whenever she was by herself, and
I think it's one of the ways that she just
she could self, teach herself, learn or you know, if
she didn't know the answer, she could find out. She
had a great imagination and desire for discovery and adventure.
Hopefully you can hear his admiration even with a crappy
audio quality. But it wasn't just her intelligence or drive
(23:20):
that made her stand out in a religious community like
the one Renee grew up in. Greatness is defined by
service to others, and it didn't matter if Renee was
volunteering at her family nonprofit or rebuilding homes after Katrina.
She was different. She was a leader, anointed by the
adults around her, a walking embodiment of selflessness. It wasn't
(23:42):
this arrogance. It was never this condescending like I already
know the answer, you know. I mean, people can come
in with confidence, but it can be abrasive. She never
had that. I mean, it was always a humility coupled
together with that confidence that just I think is what
made her so approachable. And white people were just willing
to be led by her, but wanted to follow her
(24:03):
because they trusted her. I spoke with Gibbs a week
before that Fox interview aired, a week before meeting Renee.
But a week before that, I was sitting in a
coffee shop with, as Gibbs would put it, her very
own reputational terrorist. I think that a lot of white
(24:23):
people fetishize black suffering, were like get off on black suffering,
And I think that's exactly what seeing those pictures of
those like malnourished like Ugandan babies, people love that ship
like it's just like pulling out my heart trees, like
there's something like you kind of like get off on it.
It's like really sick. And so that's why I think
she got as vague and popular as she did within
(24:45):
Virginia community but also outside. That's Kelsey Nielsen of No
White Saviors, who we heard from an episode one. She's
a co founder of the group that's put the spotlight
on Renee and been heavily involved in the lawsuit in Uganda.
It turns out Kelsey is from outside Philly, where I live,
So we met up in person a few times in
(25:06):
a popular black owned coffee shop called Uncle Bobby's her choice.
She wore beaded earrings and has tattoos running up her arm.
And I think people that are very paralyzed by saying
like I want to help but I don't want to
be like a white savior. It's looking at like, okay, well,
if you actually care about the needs, how are you
doing it? Are you doing it for yourself? Are you
(25:27):
doing it for and like do you need recognition for it?
Do you need to post about it? Like I think
that is with the air of social media? Is to Kelsey,
Renee wasn't a good Samaritan or even well intentioned. She
was exploiting a desperate situation for her own gain, pretending
to be a hero. In reality, she was a white savior,
someone scoring points off other people's misery. That's what Kelsey believed.
(25:51):
It's also just knowing that she's not the only one
like this is not Renee is not the only person
doing this, not in Uganda, not globally, and there needs
to be a new standard set. White saviors are an
old trope. Attic is finch in our courts, all equal
(26:15):
the blind side never had them before? What a room
to yourself? But well yeah, well now, whether it's books
or movies, you see these brave heroes taking a stand
for the less fortunate, and part of their bravery is
always crossing a color line. No more colored restaurants. No
(26:36):
more white restaurants. Harry Nasa. We all pay the same color.
The stories perpetuate this myth that black people need saving,
but it's way more insidious than that. The trope allows
white people to see themselves as heroes of their own
good deeds, the protagonists of racial solidarity, even when they're
(26:59):
not always helping. In Tissue, Cole wrote about what he
called the white savior industrial complex. Africa has provided a
space onto which white egos can conveniently be projected. It
is a liberated space in which the usual rules do
not apply. Nobody from America or Europe can go to
Africa and become a godlike savior, or at the very
(27:22):
least have his or her emotional needs satisfied. Many have
done it under the banner of making a difference. Cole
and Kelsey are both describing a fine line. One person's
good Samaritan is another's white savior. And if you're not
asking yourself the difference, especially if you're working in Africa,
(27:44):
you might just be on the wrong side of it.
You're in this microcolumn and bubble of like like white
saviorism isn't just acceptable, it's actually like lifted up is this, Like,
this is what you should be doing as much sacrifice,
as much, the more, the more crazy, the more overworked
entire to you are, the more the more you're doing
(28:05):
outside of your qualifications, the more you're letting this is
the mentality, the more you're letting God use you and
and equip you. Like that's literally what people believe. Renee
(28:30):
was not living under a rock. She was listening to
the criticism, trying to understand her own relationship to race
and white saviors too. She said so in her Fox interview.
I have to say that when I went to Uganda
the first time, I was a young American woman boarding
a plane to Africa, and I definitely had a white
(28:50):
savior complex. Um. I mean, my desire to go to
Uganda was was to help people and to serve. And
I think that oftentimes anyone coming from a culture such
as America or a culture where we would say we've
had great privilege, um, going into a culture that is
stated to be, you know, underdeveloped, with a lack of resources,
(29:12):
anyone could be considered a white savior in that environment.
And I was not immune to that myself. I am
proud to after that meeting at church. Renee gave me
another interview and another We spoke again at the church,
then every few weeks by phone, and it took a while,
but we eventually talked about her chronology in Uganda. She
(29:34):
first arrived in Uganda in September two thousand seven alone.
She never traveled abroad before. My goal and purpose and
going was to work for an orphanage. They had a
very well established volunteer program. I didn't know anyone there
or really have any other connection or draw except for
the fact that they seemed to have a good program.
(29:58):
They kind of catered to younger girls who wanted more
of like an exposure experience than anything. Really. That orphanage
was called a money baby cottage. It was a popular
launching pad for young missionaries in Uganda. Kelsey Nielsen got
her start at the same orphanage just a couple of
years after Renee. It was like the gateway drug. It's
(30:20):
smoking need for like white Samerism, and then like they're
on heroin now everyone all of us are there and
that's one by like a fundamentalist Christian. The running joke
about a money within missionary circles is that Americans find
it solely because it's at the top of volunteering lists.
Its initials are ABC. So I did a lot of
(30:41):
things like folded laundry and served meals, and based a
lot of babies because they bade their babies like eight
times a day, um, and you know, organized storage closets
and cleaned toys just ever was needed. The problem was
(31:04):
it was just busy work. Back in the US, Renee
was used to being in control. She was a leader
in her youth ministry, but here at the orphanage she
was non essential. So she began working for other nonprofits
in her free time. The founders of one of these
NGOs left abruptly, so they turned to Renee with the keys.
(31:25):
It was kind of ridiculously crazy. I mean I had
known them for maybe six weeks, very casually, and they
were like removing you our program for us. Here's our
credit card and our house and our car keys, and
just like here the things you need to do. And
I was like, well what, I moved into their house
(31:46):
started running their programs for them. I really had no
idea what I was doing. They just kind of gave
me a breach tutorial and then we're like me out.
This happened Within just a few months of her arrival,
Renee go to peek at the local hospital. Through her
work at this NGO, her first glimpses of the Ugandan
medical system horrified her. I mean, when I first moved
(32:08):
to Uganda, the quality of care was well, it was bad.
It was bad. They had moved past reusing needles, but
like they weren't far past it and still to this day.
I mean, in busy seasons there are people lining hallways
and corches and there's you know, rats and cockroaches. But
(32:29):
when I moved there there was a mentality of you
have two patients, and which one has a better chance
of life? This one than this one? You pick and
this one you leave. It's like you were, you know,
color coding people on like a warfield, you know, like
red tag like don't even bother, you know, and it
(32:51):
sounds horrible and crass and just like disgusting, But it's
what they had to do, you know, they could choose
to be. This was over a decade ago. Renee was
impressionable searching for her own path, and what she found
was that the doors of the Uganda medical system were
wide open for her as long as she could stomach
what she saw. After this short trip to Uganda, Renee
(33:14):
was planning to apply to college, but a turning point
came in December two thousand seven. It was her first
Christmas away from home. Renee drove along one of the
tributaries to the Nile River, a massive waterway of its own.
She drove a diesel power advance of the hospital in Ginger,
carrying a load of mangoes, flatbreads, and snacks. She walked
(33:35):
into a room with narrow rows of metal cribs holding
sleeping newborns, including five belonging to a woman named Dorothy Namunana.
The quintuplets were two weeks old and they all weighed
less than three pounds. The doctors wanted to monitor the babies,
so Dorothy was stuck in the hospital. This is from
(33:56):
another phone call I recorded with Renee kids for a
long time when she had the babies, her husband's like
basically took off because he was freaked out. Um and
so the way she explained, it's like he ran into
the hurricane field and he never came back. Like she
(34:17):
was just exhausted. She never slept and at the time
she didn't really have anyone of the hospital, staying with
her to help her, And so she was just stuck
in that like scorching hot room all the time, fading
her babies because it took so long for them to
eat such a little bit. They were just so tiny.
I'd never seen a baby down tiny before. Renee visited
(34:37):
Dorothy nearly every day for weeks, bringing her fresh clothes
and food and helping her feed the newborns. The babies
were doing well despite being so small. During one of
her regular visits, she brought her friend Katie, but when
they entered Dorothy's room, they noticed one of the little
girls was coughing. Renee picked up the baby and felt
(35:00):
her belly. It was tight, her breathing was slow, and
then the baby stopped breathing entirely. Renee thought about doing
CPR and the baby, but she feared it would crush her.
Katie ran to get help. In a blog post, Renee wrote,
by the time Katie got back ten minutes later, with
(35:22):
no doctor, she had already died in my arms. Katy
and I declared her dead. Not a single doctor or
nurse had come when we left forty five minutes later.
No one knows why she died. I guess that Jesus
wanted that baby with him. You just think, like, oh,
when someone dies, it's like this huge traumatic thing that
(35:43):
like you know, everyone's like scrambling and trying to like
save this person. But like no one was scrambling. No
one was trying to save that baby. I mean, other
than my friend nine, we're looking for a doctor to Renee,
the situation didn't have to be so desperate. She saw
at the hospital a lack of willpower, a reluctance to
help or even pay attention, and the dead child she
(36:06):
held in her arms. She became a call to action.
I definitely felt that sense of responsibility to like fight
on behalf of those parents who felt like they didn't
have any energy left to fight or that no one
would hear them. Renee set out to create a place
for more Dorothy Nominanas, a place where families would be loved,
(36:26):
where no baby would die neglect. A lot of people
would say, oh, why did you do this or why
did you do that? And it's like, have you ever
been put in a situation like that? Do you know
what you would do? Because like it's a tough call,
and sometimes you have like minutes to make it, and
you have to live with yourself with the answer of
that for the rest of your life. In a crisis,
(36:51):
when the experts and systems are failing around you, it's
natural to want to do something, to pitch in to
help flatten the curve. H Now imagine your Renee interpreting
this very human desire as something more as a call
from a higher power. Doing nothing at all is sometimes
the best thing to do. We know that all too
(37:14):
well these days. But you never hear about God compelling
people towards inaction, do you. Recently? It's been like, well,
is everything I did just a total lie and like
not meaningful in any way? And why would I feel
so called to have been in this place for really
my entire adulthood and then just have it all crashing down?
(37:38):
What is the purpose? Renee was starting to open up,
but it was easy to confuse that access for trust.
About a month after meeting Renee, Laurie called me to
let me know that they no longer be participating in
the podcast. They'd heard some things about my co host
Bgive and what he'd been up to in ginger the
(37:58):
Deception in the story. It was about to get much darker.
We could see a web of conspiracies building around the
margins of our investigation, and slowly but surely, we were
being pulled into it ourselves. That's next on The Missionary.
(38:34):
The Missionaries, produced in association with I Heart Media. It's
written and reported by Roger Gola, Helemage Condi and Malcolm Burnley.
It's produced by Michelle Lands and Ryan Murdoch. Mark Lotto
is our story editor. Our executive producer is Mangish Thicketter.
Our fact checker is Austin Thompson. Mixing by Josh Rogison,
voice acting by Taylor Kaufman and special thanks to equip FM.
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 My Friend Napocosa went to View
with Jesus. She told the story of Napocosa basically all
(00:22):
about how this girl was so neglected and abused her
whole life until you know, Renee came in and saved her,
and her fundraising took off on the back of that story.
But this is God's perfect end of her story, and
the story is not mine to write. The Musunglus that
found Napocosa, they're saying that she was neglected, that they
were trying to starve for Yeah, that's yeah, She's saying,
(00:47):
you know, to us in Ducks, we are lying. A
Christian missionary is finding to clear her name tonight, following
accusations by two mothers in Uganda and a group called
No White Saviors that the Virginia woman contributed to the
deaths of they say, hundreds of babies by treating them
without a medical license. Renee, that is a serious allegation.
(01:09):
How do you respond? First off, I have never represented
myself as a medical professional or health worker of any type. UM.
The organization serving his children hires UH medical professionals that
are Ugandan, UM, local and national folks, and UM I
have assisted our medical team in emergency settings and in
(01:31):
crisis situations. UM, but I have never practiced medicine, and
I have never adorned or put on any sort of
The segment is about five minutes long. Renee Box wearing
a ruffled blouse, her blonde hair formally swept back behind
her ear children and personal growth. I realized, and she
looks nervous. I wasn't even needed. She swivels in her
(01:51):
chair and her eyes darted around looking at someone off screen.
And so these accusations are incredibly disappointing, as I've spent
a majority of my adulthood UM serving in Uganda. It
was the first anyone had seen of Box since she
left Uganda in late two thousand eighteen, a couple of
months before the lawsuit was filed. And you've gotten in court.
(02:12):
Renee's attorney, David Gibbs, was split screen to Ansuer. So, David,
I know that you have said, UM, you believe this
group is potentially defaming her. They may be libelious and
slandering her. Would you consider legal action in return? Do
you think your case is strong enough? Well, Shannon, absolutely,
the case would be strong enough. The problem with these
(02:33):
reputational terrorists on the internet putting out information it's not
fact based, and it's very sad when a missionary, humanitarian
or any individual from the United States or any developed
nation wants to go into a third world or a
health crisis somewhere like da Uganda and they come under
these attacks with no way to really defend yourself affectively.
(02:55):
For months, I thought I was on a fool's errand
Renee was somewhere in Virginia according to our best guests,
unwilling to talk, and then she popped up on Fox News.
But it was my role on the team to understand
Renee's version of what happened and to interview her closest defenders,
which I was finding was going to require a lot
more patients and imagination than I anticipated. So there definitely
(03:19):
is a movement right now and the white savior complex
or white saviorism or kind of hot button topics um
at least in the world that I come from. In
association with I Heart Media I'm Malcolm Burnley, I'm Rogie Gola,
I'm Hollema Condi, and this is the Missionary episode three,
Good Samaritan. I've spoken to David Gibbs less than a
(03:46):
week before this interview aired in June. My only other
outreach to Renee had been through her mother, Laurie. She
took my calls for about six months until she eventually
stopped responding and texted me a number I longed to Gibbs.
It turns out Gibbs has a history with Fox News.
David Gibbs joins us. He was the attorney for Terry
(04:08):
Shivo's family, and he's now President and General counsel of
the National Center for Life and Liberty. David, thanks for
joining us, Shannon. It's a joy to be with you
on this Sunday, all right, So, Michael Shivo. If the
name Terry Shivo rings a bell, that's because her case
was a big deal. Back in the early two thousands.
Shivo quite simply redefined life and death in America, along
(04:29):
with the government's role in each of those things. The
ongoing debates over vaccines, abortion coverage, and the line between
individual freedom and public health in this pandemic they all
called back to Shiva. It was a war of ideas,
and Gibbs was on the front line. Is Governor Bush
was not trying to decide whether Terry Shiva lived or died.
(04:51):
He just wanted to make sure that fair new profit.
Shivo was a woman who had been comatose for fifteen
years when her husband us to pull life support. The
case made headlines and quickly became political. Everyone from the
Pope to President George W. Bush weighed in. Shivo had
no hope for improvement, according to doctors. Gibbs represented the
(05:14):
parents who wanted to keep her alive. We knew ultimately
her life was in the hands of God, but the
concern was that here was this woman who had no lawyer,
The judge never came to see her, and she was
going to die in this painful way. Shivo became a
martyr for pro life causes, and Gibbs was her apostle.
(05:34):
He wrote a book, Fighting for Dear Life when it
was all over, then founded a legal ministry that quote
serves to protect and defend Bible based values. Gibbs got
famous by asserting a woman's right to life, and now
he was defending a woman accused of taking life away.
(05:57):
We were originally contacted by a pastor in the Virginia
area that was familiar with Renee and her mom and
dad and also was one of the supporters of serving
as children. Our goal has been to help them as
they have worked through, you know, a very complicated media universe.
(06:18):
In the first two episodes, you heard a lot of
the accusations about Renee's medical involvement. In a five hundred
fifty page response to the lawsuits, she denies practically everything,
wearing a white coat, experimental dosing, even the blood transfusions.
And so I think I thought Gibbs might try to
overwhelm me with the details, plucking apart the allegations in
(06:38):
the lawsuit. She wasn't going in and doing surgeries, cutting
people open, you know, doing hearts or brains or I
mean things that obviously you need a lot of medical expertise,
and you need sophisticated training as well as staff. They're
providing nutrition services to combat a crisis that literally the
(07:00):
hospitals and others were unable to handle just due to
the volume. But mostly he focused on Renee's character and
he painted with a broad brush. Gibbs told me that
Renee was a good Samaritan. He said that she had
nothing to be sorry for it at all. Um. I
saw Renee's work and what she had done over her
time in Uganda is something that should be encouraged and
(07:22):
lifted up. And I was watching her be, you know,
literally crucified for trying to do the right thing. These families,
when you're desperate, they know their daughters dying, Renee is,
they're willing to help, and they're seeking help. The Renee's
of the world and others like her should be allowed
to provide help. According to her lawyer, Renee's story wasn't
(07:46):
about death, it was about life. Renee went to Uganda
looking to preserve it and fight for it, just like
Gibbs did with Shiva. They're ignoring the fact that thirty
six hundred children had their lives saved. What Sir Ring
his children did with a medical team there in Uganda
and under Renee's leadership, was truly remarkable. A lot of
(08:06):
people would walk away from a scene like that in Uganda,
maybe donate a few dollars, share a link on social media,
but they don't usually lean in like Renee two Gibbs.
That's commendable. If you're on an airplane and you've got
a dying child and you walk up to someone that's
say can you help me? And the person says, I
think I can. You're in in the Good Samaritan emergency situation,
(08:30):
and do we want to get to the point where
the doctor on the airplane says, you know what, I
don't want my name and reputation ruined. I don't want
to get sued. I don't want to get accused of
killing this guy. I think I'm just gonna stay in
my seat, buckled in, and whatever happens happens. But what
if on that plane during that emergency, some do gooder
pulls out a stethoscope from the overhead and pretends to
(08:53):
be a doctor. That's more like what Renee is accused of.
After that Fox interview, I figured what the hell? I
just drive to Renee's hometown. Bedford, Virginia is six hours
(09:14):
away from Philly. I let Gibbs know that I was
heading there, but as I got closer, something unexpected happened.
Gibbs sent me the address to a church. He basically said,
if I wanted to meet Renee, I could h This
(09:35):
was Renee's home court a brick church on a suburban street,
and when I entered the church, I noticed they still
had a flyer for Serving His Children on the bulletin board.
The flyer asked for donations from cycle breakers to help
end malnutrition in Uganda. Renee and Laurie Bach I don't
know if they mentioned that we're gonna be there, said
there's a library. The receptionist was and expecting me, so
(10:01):
she called for the Reverend Maltain Burley. Thank you. At
the top of a flight of stairs, I found a classroom.
The chairs were stocked around the perimeter and the chalkboard
was wiped clean. I do thank you so much. A
woman was waiting for me. She wore a hoodie, jeans
(10:24):
and a half hearted smile when she shook my hand.
Could you just introduce yourself, say your name and my name,
and I guess your affiliation with serving I'm Renee Back,
the founder and former director of Serving his Children. People
ask me if Renee's in jail when I casually bring
(10:46):
up this story. Renee is free to celebrate birthdays with
her two adopted daughters, eat home cooked meals, and isn't
even charged with a felony in the US or in Uganda,
but she seemed tense, perhaps unconvinced this was a good
due to be talking with me. It's hard, but tell
me where you're at right now and what you how
you've been yet. Yeah, it's been challenging for sure. No
(11:09):
one wants to be be said to be, you know, murderer,
but there has been and there will be some pretty
serious counseling after all this. Um, it's been pretty emotionally damaging,
no doubt. I'm not trying to play the victim in
that or anything, but to hear it from her, she's
in a special kind of deal. She isn't working, and
(11:30):
she assumes she may never work again. She says. Strangers
stop her in public and ask if she's the one
people have forgotten that I'm a human, like in a
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
(11:51):
about her. Renee was even in touch with the FBI
regarding death threads. I'm being watched closely, like I'm being
watched in my home I'm being watched everywhere I go.
I feel like people are watching me. I've visited my
sister in California and people were taking pictures in the
airport of me. Renee's sister is an actual doctor, by
the way, you know, the police have put cameras up
(12:12):
at my parents house and all kinds of things like that,
which is very unusual because I grew up in an
environment where like, you go out of town for two
weeks and you don't lock your door because what if
the neighbor needs a cup of sugar, you know, and
just like can wander on over. And that's just a
terrible feeling to feel insecure about your safety and the
safety of your kids and your family. And yeah, it's
been really sad, to be honest. Renee sounded paranoid, which
(12:39):
explained why we were meeting in a clandestine location. I
was asked to keep the name of the church anonymous
gibbs Us on speaker phone. Her mother, Laurie, was taking
notes on a laptop off to the side. They were
all eager to position Renee as a victim of an
online smear campaign. Here's Laurie box Well on social media.
Has facilitated a whole made up story that you know,
(13:03):
you can just say what you want and it's viewed
as the Gospel treat which is scary. World. Yeah, Renee
was playing the victim here no matter what she said,
and this mountain case against her. It was obviously not
fake news. We do uncovered too much already. It was
also true, though, that Renee was getting hammered all over
(13:24):
social media tweets like she's the butcher of Uganda and
her name is Renee Bach and in a parallel universe,
Hollywood will make a billion dollar fictional movie about this,
and somehow managed to paint Renee Bach as a complicated,
tragically flawed, and yet well intentioned woman whispers we inhabit
(13:46):
the parallel universe. Despite this, Renee was optimistic and listening
to Monica Lewinsky's Ted talk. A lot of what she
says really resonates with me. And that like her name
was just put it on like the scandal, you know,
it was like the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and so people
forgot that she was a human being, an evangelical woman
(14:10):
finding solace in Monica Lewinsky. I definitely didn't expect that,
but I understood what she meant once I listened to
Lewinsky's Ted talk, what that meant for me personally was
that overnight I went from being a completely private figure
to a publicly humiliated one worldwide. I was patient zero
(14:34):
of losing a personal reputation on a global scale almost instantaneously.
But the more Renee talked about Lewinsky, the more I
realized she was making a different point entirely. For Renee,
Lewinsky was a story of redemption, like maybe she could
use this unwanted notoriety and channel it into good, into
(14:56):
a form of service. Here's Renee again for good. I
mentioned Monica Lewinski before, but it's been cool to see
her like now really creating this platform and foundation for
you know, anti bullying and cyber bullying and things like that.
I think that, like what a cool testimony of taking
something that was so horrific and so destructive and turning
(15:18):
it into a way to really like resonate with people
in a really hard spot and really help people. So
seeing a few people that have gone through really hilacious
trials um and kept their head up and been honoring
has been a life giving encouragement to me. I'll admit
(15:40):
I was deeply interested in the fall from Grace narratives,
what it was like to be chosen and special in
one moment, exiled in the next. But I never got
what I wanted. I never got the Renee of her
blog posts. Her storytelling and introspection were much less impactful.
In person. Something felt like it was just missing or
(16:01):
it was guarded from me. And then Renee started telling
me why that those blog posts were deeply flawed and
the problem with them was that they had an unreliable
narrator Renee herself and a lot of my years of blogging.
I was young, and I wanted to share, like life
(16:22):
can look so different than what I thought it looked
like as a girl from a rural town in America. Yeah,
so I wanted people to understand that, like, there's this
world outside of yourself that's so amazing and so beautiful
and so raw and like so painful, but like also
can be so beautiful, and like a mural can be
(16:42):
making made out of that brokenness. Um, and I really
did want to convey that to the readers. And I
mean when we first came across the blogs, they felt
like journalistic treasure. Thirty two thousand words that came straight
from Renee. Each passage a fossil on the sand, together
a skeleton for our entire investigation. Now, Renee was claiming
(17:05):
that she had a propensity for stretching the truth in
her writing. And I think I really wrote in first
person a lot um, and so I would say, you know, oh,
this kid came in and then you know, we started
the idea, and how come up to oxygen and did
all these things and um, and I think it really
reads as though I was doing those things personally, And
so I can understand how someone would read and think
(17:27):
like she's just doing all this stuff, like she knows
what she's doing, you know, um, whereas it was really
a team. It was so mind boggling it. Renee was
accused of being a fake doctor, and part of her
defense was to admit to misrepresenting herself in a different way.
You know, I wrote it as this was my experience, um,
(17:48):
and instead of saying like the nurse ran whatever or um, right,
there were several people there that day, um, and so
I was definitely involved in all the activities. Renee says
she kept writing in first person for a simple reason
because people will pay money to support that kind of narrative,
and we did. You know, people are emotional impulse givers,
(18:12):
and so we did receive a lot of you know,
financial support through people who read my blogs. Um, just
reading and realizing the raw need and then feeling like, hey,
I want to be a part of that and would
give monetarily. So yeah, that was really the goal. And
I really we had spent hours occupied by these blogs.
They were so central to Renee's legend, which meant that
(18:34):
to accept her truth, to accept that broad swass of
her writing were fabrications. Well, then it threw into question
everything we knew about Renee. Regieve. Do you remember what
you thought after spending all that time reading those blogs
to hear that Renee said they were actually exaggerated? Oh man, yeah,
(18:54):
I remember, just not knowing who Renee was anymore. I mean,
I've heard so many things, so much my understanding of
Renee came from the community, came from these blogs, and
everything was just falling out from underneath us, and I
didn't know where we stood. Of course, there was another explanation,
(19:15):
and perhaps a simpler one, that Renee was denouncing her
blog post because well they looked bad. For her case,
no one could prove she didn't exaggerate her writing, so
it was all too convenient. If we wanted to get
to the bottom of who Renee really was, we needed
to go back to the beginning to Bedford, Virginia. Turn
(19:40):
the line onto East Main Street. Signs for US sixty
west US to North Virginia, North Virginia, Bedford. One of
the first things you noticed about Bedford, Virginia are the
lamp posts up and down Main Street. The post carry
the names and faces of the Bedford Boys, the young
bab be faced men who died at the beaches of
(20:02):
Normandy June ninth. The crossfire of German guns still rakes
the shore. The town lost more men per capita on
d Day than anywhere else in the country. Out on
the chunnel, the rescue boats of the Coast Guard are
looking for survivors and aiding damaged vessels, and the hospital
(20:22):
ships are waiting for the Renee grew up among these ghosts.
Their spirit looms over the town. Wounded man has transferred
to another ship, the life saving blood plasma goes with him.
This idea of sacrificing for something that's bigger than yourself
It's easy to see how a young Renee was inspired
(20:42):
by that idea because it drives her family life too.
Here's Renee talking about her childhood on a quip FM
back when Renee was just a feel good story. I
grew up in a family of five and basically lived
all of my young childhood and teenage years right here
in Bedford. I got saved, you could say, when I
(21:03):
was very young. Um, but it wasn't until my high
school in middle school years that I really understood what
having a relationship with Jesus Christ looked like. The box
live on a modest farm with a bunch of animals.
The walls are lined with inspiration passages from philosophers, Bible versus,
even Mumford and Sons lyrics love It will not betray you,
(21:27):
dismay or enslave you, It will set you free. Lorie
homeschooled Renee and her four siblings. She taught them to
take risks and to pursue self mastery in their learning.
When she was ten, her parents started a nonprofit organization,
Many Blessings Farm, where they provided writing therapy for children
(21:48):
with special needs. As a teenager, Renee scheduled volunteers spotted
children on horseback and oversaw barn duty and so that
was a huge part of my middle school in high
school years was doing hippotherapy. So you know, it's kind
of like therapeutic writing. Being able to just take part
in kids that were a little bit different than me
(22:10):
definitely sparked a desire and need to be able to
help people. Um, just because there was one horse named
Sienna who stole Renee's heart. Later on, Sienna developed congenital
eye defects, and treating him meant around the clock care.
Every four hours, someone had to apply a stinging ointment
to his eyes. Lauria wrote to me in an email.
(22:34):
God used Renee's horse to teach her many things. Here's
Lauria again in the alarm, go up every four hours,
and Renee was to get up and get a flash
like the barn and me and home working comes back
and go to Renee was like the valedictorian of her
tiny home school, destined for greater things. Everyone knew it.
(22:57):
Here's Renee's youth pastor rich heart. She always had a
book in her hand whenever she was by herself, and
I think it's one of the ways that she just
she could self, teach herself, learn or you know, if
she didn't know the answer, she could find out. She
had a great imagination and desire for discovery and adventure.
Hopefully you can hear his admiration even with a crappy
audio quality. But it wasn't just her intelligence or drive
(23:20):
that made her stand out in a religious community like
the one Renee grew up in. Greatness is defined by
service to others, and it didn't matter if Renee was
volunteering at her family nonprofit or rebuilding homes after Katrina.
She was different. She was a leader, anointed by the
adults around her, a walking embodiment of selflessness. It wasn't
(23:42):
this arrogance. It was never this condescending like I already
know the answer, you know. I mean, people can come
in with confidence, but it can be abrasive. She never
had that. I mean, it was always a humility coupled
together with that confidence that just I think is what
made her so approachable. And white people were just willing
to be led by her, but wanted to follow her
(24:03):
because they trusted her. I spoke with Gibbs a week
before that Fox interview aired, a week before meeting Renee.
But a week before that, I was sitting in a
coffee shop with, as Gibbs would put it, her very
own reputational terrorist. I think that a lot of white
(24:23):
people fetishize black suffering, were like get off on black suffering,
And I think that's exactly what seeing those pictures of
those like malnourished like Ugandan babies, people love that ship
like it's just like pulling out my heart trees, like
there's something like you kind of like get off on it.
It's like really sick. And so that's why I think
she got as vague and popular as she did within
(24:45):
Virginia community but also outside. That's Kelsey Nielsen of No
White Saviors, who we heard from an episode one. She's
a co founder of the group that's put the spotlight
on Renee and been heavily involved in the lawsuit in Uganda.
It turns out Kelsey is from outside Philly, where I live,
So we met up in person a few times in
(25:06):
a popular black owned coffee shop called Uncle Bobby's her choice.
She wore beaded earrings and has tattoos running up her arm.
And I think people that are very paralyzed by saying
like I want to help but I don't want to
be like a white savior. It's looking at like, okay, well,
if you actually care about the needs, how are you
doing it? Are you doing it for yourself? Are you
(25:27):
doing it for and like do you need recognition for it?
Do you need to post about it? Like I think
that is with the air of social media? Is to Kelsey,
Renee wasn't a good Samaritan or even well intentioned. She
was exploiting a desperate situation for her own gain, pretending
to be a hero. In reality, she was a white savior,
someone scoring points off other people's misery. That's what Kelsey believed.
(25:51):
It's also just knowing that she's not the only one
like this is not Renee is not the only person
doing this, not in Uganda, not globally, and there needs
to be a new standard set. White saviors are an
old trope. Attic is finch in our courts, all equal
(26:15):
the blind side never had them before? What a room
to yourself? But well yeah, well now, whether it's books
or movies, you see these brave heroes taking a stand
for the less fortunate, and part of their bravery is
always crossing a color line. No more colored restaurants. No
(26:36):
more white restaurants. Harry Nasa. We all pay the same color.
The stories perpetuate this myth that black people need saving,
but it's way more insidious than that. The trope allows
white people to see themselves as heroes of their own
good deeds, the protagonists of racial solidarity, even when they're
(26:59):
not always helping. In Tissue, Cole wrote about what he
called the white savior industrial complex. Africa has provided a
space onto which white egos can conveniently be projected. It
is a liberated space in which the usual rules do
not apply. Nobody from America or Europe can go to
Africa and become a godlike savior, or at the very
(27:22):
least have his or her emotional needs satisfied. Many have
done it under the banner of making a difference. Cole
and Kelsey are both describing a fine line. One person's
good Samaritan is another's white savior. And if you're not
asking yourself the difference, especially if you're working in Africa,
(27:44):
you might just be on the wrong side of it.
You're in this microcolumn and bubble of like like white
saviorism isn't just acceptable, it's actually like lifted up is this, Like,
this is what you should be doing as much sacrifice,
as much, the more, the more crazy, the more overworked
entire to you are, the more the more you're doing
(28:05):
outside of your qualifications, the more you're letting this is
the mentality, the more you're letting God use you and
and equip you. Like that's literally what people believe. Renee
(28:30):
was not living under a rock. She was listening to
the criticism, trying to understand her own relationship to race
and white saviors too. She said so in her Fox interview.
I have to say that when I went to Uganda
the first time, I was a young American woman boarding
a plane to Africa, and I definitely had a white
(28:50):
savior complex. Um. I mean, my desire to go to
Uganda was was to help people and to serve. And
I think that oftentimes anyone coming from a culture such
as America or a culture where we would say we've
had great privilege, um, going into a culture that is
stated to be, you know, underdeveloped, with a lack of resources,
(29:12):
anyone could be considered a white savior in that environment.
And I was not immune to that myself. I am
proud to after that meeting at church. Renee gave me
another interview and another We spoke again at the church,
then every few weeks by phone, and it took a while,
but we eventually talked about her chronology in Uganda. She
(29:34):
first arrived in Uganda in September two thousand seven alone.
She never traveled abroad before. My goal and purpose and
going was to work for an orphanage. They had a
very well established volunteer program. I didn't know anyone there
or really have any other connection or draw except for
the fact that they seemed to have a good program.
(29:58):
They kind of catered to younger girls who wanted more
of like an exposure experience than anything. Really. That orphanage
was called a money baby cottage. It was a popular
launching pad for young missionaries in Uganda. Kelsey Nielsen got
her start at the same orphanage just a couple of
years after Renee. It was like the gateway drug. It's
(30:20):
smoking need for like white Samerism, and then like they're
on heroin now everyone all of us are there and
that's one by like a fundamentalist Christian. The running joke
about a money within missionary circles is that Americans find
it solely because it's at the top of volunteering lists.
Its initials are ABC. So I did a lot of
(30:41):
things like folded laundry and served meals, and based a
lot of babies because they bade their babies like eight
times a day, um, and you know, organized storage closets
and cleaned toys just ever was needed. The problem was
(31:04):
it was just busy work. Back in the US, Renee
was used to being in control. She was a leader
in her youth ministry, but here at the orphanage she
was non essential. So she began working for other nonprofits
in her free time. The founders of one of these
NGOs left abruptly, so they turned to Renee with the keys.
(31:25):
It was kind of ridiculously crazy. I mean I had
known them for maybe six weeks, very casually, and they
were like removing you our program for us. Here's our
credit card and our house and our car keys, and
just like here the things you need to do. And
I was like, well what, I moved into their house
(31:46):
started running their programs for them. I really had no
idea what I was doing. They just kind of gave
me a breach tutorial and then we're like me out.
This happened Within just a few months of her arrival,
Renee go to peek at the local hospital. Through her
work at this NGO, her first glimpses of the Ugandan
medical system horrified her. I mean, when I first moved
(32:08):
to Uganda, the quality of care was well, it was bad.
It was bad. They had moved past reusing needles, but
like they weren't far past it and still to this day.
I mean, in busy seasons there are people lining hallways
and corches and there's you know, rats and cockroaches. But
(32:29):
when I moved there there was a mentality of you
have two patients, and which one has a better chance
of life? This one than this one? You pick and
this one you leave. It's like you were, you know,
color coding people on like a warfield, you know, like
red tag like don't even bother, you know, and it
(32:51):
sounds horrible and crass and just like disgusting, But it's
what they had to do, you know, they could choose
to be. This was over a decade ago. Renee was
impressionable searching for her own path, and what she found
was that the doors of the Uganda medical system were
wide open for her as long as she could stomach
what she saw. After this short trip to Uganda, Renee
(33:14):
was planning to apply to college, but a turning point
came in December two thousand seven. It was her first
Christmas away from home. Renee drove along one of the
tributaries to the Nile River, a massive waterway of its own.
She drove a diesel power advance of the hospital in Ginger,
carrying a load of mangoes, flatbreads, and snacks. She walked
(33:35):
into a room with narrow rows of metal cribs holding
sleeping newborns, including five belonging to a woman named Dorothy Namunana.
The quintuplets were two weeks old and they all weighed
less than three pounds. The doctors wanted to monitor the babies,
so Dorothy was stuck in the hospital. This is from
(33:56):
another phone call I recorded with Renee kids for a
long time when she had the babies, her husband's like
basically took off because he was freaked out. Um and
so the way she explained, it's like he ran into
the hurricane field and he never came back. Like she
(34:17):
was just exhausted. She never slept and at the time
she didn't really have anyone of the hospital, staying with
her to help her, And so she was just stuck
in that like scorching hot room all the time, fading
her babies because it took so long for them to
eat such a little bit. They were just so tiny.
I'd never seen a baby down tiny before. Renee visited
(34:37):
Dorothy nearly every day for weeks, bringing her fresh clothes
and food and helping her feed the newborns. The babies
were doing well despite being so small. During one of
her regular visits, she brought her friend Katie, but when
they entered Dorothy's room, they noticed one of the little
girls was coughing. Renee picked up the baby and felt
(35:00):
her belly. It was tight, her breathing was slow, and
then the baby stopped breathing entirely. Renee thought about doing
CPR and the baby, but she feared it would crush her.
Katie ran to get help. In a blog post, Renee wrote,
by the time Katie got back ten minutes later, with
(35:22):
no doctor, she had already died in my arms. Katy
and I declared her dead. Not a single doctor or
nurse had come when we left forty five minutes later.
No one knows why she died. I guess that Jesus
wanted that baby with him. You just think, like, oh,
when someone dies, it's like this huge traumatic thing that
(35:43):
like you know, everyone's like scrambling and trying to like
save this person. But like no one was scrambling. No
one was trying to save that baby. I mean, other
than my friend nine, we're looking for a doctor to Renee,
the situation didn't have to be so desperate. She saw
at the hospital a lack of willpower, a reluctance to
help or even pay attention, and the dead child she
(36:06):
held in her arms. She became a call to action.
I definitely felt that sense of responsibility to like fight
on behalf of those parents who felt like they didn't
have any energy left to fight or that no one
would hear them. Renee set out to create a place
for more Dorothy Nominanas, a place where families would be loved,
(36:26):
where no baby would die neglect. A lot of people
would say, oh, why did you do this or why
did you do that? And it's like, have you ever
been put in a situation like that? Do you know
what you would do? Because like it's a tough call,
and sometimes you have like minutes to make it, and
you have to live with yourself with the answer of
that for the rest of your life. In a crisis,
(36:51):
when the experts and systems are failing around you, it's
natural to want to do something, to pitch in to
help flatten the curve. H Now imagine your Renee interpreting
this very human desire as something more as a call
from a higher power. Doing nothing at all is sometimes
the best thing to do. We know that all too
(37:14):
well these days. But you never hear about God compelling
people towards inaction, do you. Recently? It's been like, well,
is everything I did just a total lie and like
not meaningful in any way? And why would I feel
so called to have been in this place for really
my entire adulthood and then just have it all crashing down?
(37:38):
What is the purpose? Renee was starting to open up,
but it was easy to confuse that access for trust.
About a month after meeting Renee, Laurie called me to
let me know that they no longer be participating in
the podcast. They'd heard some things about my co host
Bgive and what he'd been up to in ginger the
(37:58):
Deception in the story. It was about to get much darker.
We could see a web of conspiracies building around the
margins of our investigation, and slowly but surely, we were
being pulled into it ourselves. That's next on The Missionary.
(38:34):
The Missionaries, produced in association with I Heart Media. It's
written and reported by Roger Gola, Helemage Condi and Malcolm Burnley.
It's produced by Michelle Lands and Ryan Murdoch. Mark Lotto
is our story editor. Our executive producer is Mangish Thicketter.
Our fact checker is Austin Thompson. Mixing by Josh Rogison,
voice acting by Taylor Kaufman and special thanks to equip FM.
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