May 15, 2020 • 39 mins
Renee Bach was 19 when she decided to follow God's calling to Uganda. Ten years later, she's accused of impersonating a doctor and she's blamed for the deaths of more than 100 children. We look into the allegations and talk to Renee's accusers.
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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. Amen. Amen, Now, Renie,
before you go, obviously, I'm praying that there's gonna be
some young people listening going maybe the Lord wants me
to do something like that. But I don't want to
(00:20):
put words in your mouth. What's on your heart today
as we sit here? Well, you know, um, I moved
to Ganda and I was really young. Prior to leaving
and moving, there was a lot of fear. Am I
going to fail? Am I going to be that person
that you know said I was going to do this
thing for the Lord and just couldn't do it and
didn't have the strength or didn't have the knowledge, or
(00:41):
couldn't rally their resources. That was a real fear for me.
But the Lord just continued to bring to mind that
if you trust in him, even your failures can be
made beautiful. And I think that that was renee Bach
did trust in the Lord with all her heart her
whole life. She listened to him, saw his wisdom, followed
(01:03):
his lead, and he led her from a small town
in Virginia all the way to Uganda, where she started
a charity to help malnourished kids. Renee was entrepreneurial, inspiring.
She was the perfect local girl does good story. Here
she is on a Virginia Christian radio station called equipm FM.
We just launched a campaign this past month called Cycle Breakers.
(01:27):
We really do believe that Malnatician is a cycle um
and then it really can be broken, and we need
people just like you to help us break that cycle.
We are completely funded by generous owners. Renee was a
modern missionary. She didn't work for institutions like the Seletian
Sisters or the International Mission Board. Instead, she ran her
(01:47):
ministry like a tech startup, raising money through blogs, marketing
through YouTube videos, and doing church tours and radio interviews
like this one. And that's when I found it serving
his children. How old were you? I was nineteen nineteen.
That's just when I read that piece in the paper
about your ministry, I'm thinking that is crazy because I
wasn't thinking about starting ministries at nineteen years old. So
(02:10):
obviously the Lord really had a special plan for you.
And and still does. I mean you're you're so if
God had a plan for Renee Bach, then why did
he lead her to where she is today? Tonight at six,
a Betverord woman is facing disturbing allegations about her nonprofit
in Uganda. Essentially, a U s Citis been with no
(02:32):
medical training set up a medical clinic in Uganda serving
his children was actually shut down and five children died
at an unlicensed treatment center for malnourished kids in Uganda
is being sued in Ugandan court. This girl going into
this situation just the savior complex on our own. It's
closed to people's lives. I'm Rogi Gola, I'm a journalist
(02:56):
and I moved to Uganda last year. Just five days
after I got there, I received a message on WhatsApp.
It was about Renee Back and it was one of
the wildest leads i'd ever heard, probably the most severe
case of the Savior complex we've ever seen. Hundreds of
children have died as a result. The message came from
(03:19):
Kelsey Nielsen, one of the founders of an activist group
called No White Saviors. She was a former missionary. She'd
seen the inside of that world and now she was
speaking out. Kelsey told me that Renee wasn't just feeding
or ministering to kids. She was playing god, she was
masquerading as a doctor, and hundreds of kids had died
(03:42):
because of her actions, and that Renee was back home
in Virginia living scott free most of the time. If
you're white and have money and access to the right resources,
you're not You're going to be able to get away
with whatever you want to. And I think know Kelsey
and here you've gone, and co founder Olivia Alasso, we're
helping to file a case against Renee in Uganda's High
(04:03):
court fields like, finally someone will pay four hundreds of
kids deaths that have been written off as good deeds
um for so long, that just because of some spiritual
bypassing in some God complex, that someone can come and
practice medicine without a medical degree. No White Saviors had
(04:24):
been sounding the alarm about Renee on Instagram for months.
It was the centerpiece of their advocacy. People in the
comments called Renee a serial killer, an angel of death.
At first, I was skeptical. Hundreds of dead kids, and
the more I looked into the story, the more the
accusations piled up that she'd been stealing children from hospitals
(04:45):
and villages, experimenting on them. The children were like, it
was like a science lab where everyone will touch and
you know, try to inject, try to do that. So
for me, there's no excuse for that. There were allegations
of murder, government conspiracies. It is shocking the medical profession
after one of their own was gunned down in Iganga
(05:07):
District Friday night, Bribery, blackmail, even cannibalism. The father of
Patricia alleges that he was bribed to tell the courts
that Renee cut off the skin of Patricia's face and
kept in the fridge so she could eat it. Oh boy,
(05:28):
I knew right away that it would be tough to
pick apart rumors from facts. This wasn't a story about
just one victim, one event, or one crime. It was
a saga that stretched over ten years, to continents and
touched thousands of lives. So I pulled together a team
Malcolm Burnley in Philadelphia and Helimakkandhi and Kenya, and together
(05:51):
we spent the next year investigating Renee's story. We ended
up interviewing over a hundred people, and almost no one
could agree on what kind of person Renee Bach was
or if she'd done anything wrong at all. Just a
few months ago, this story might have felt distant, But now,
as we're all caught in a deadly battle between arrogant
(06:14):
ignorance and a desire for authority, we can trust it's
closer than ever. In association with I Heeart Media, I'm
Roger Gola. I I'm Malcolm Burnley, and this is the
missionary episode one the Lord's Work. Before we dive in,
(06:46):
let's get you situated. Our story takes place in the
town of Jinja in Uganda. Pull up a map of
Africa and find the mouth of the Nile River where
Egypt meets the Mediterranean. Then trace it all the way
down through Sudan, past South Sudan and into Uganda. And
right there underneath your fingertip, that's Ginger. It's a small
(07:10):
town on the lip of Lake Victoria, a lush, tropical
paradise built on the banks of the world's longest river.
Gingers become known as the adventure sports capital of East Africa.
Tourists from around the world come to Ginger for its
world famous rapids, bungee jumping, mountain biking and hiking. All right,
let's get going. I had Arthur Wassawa take me through
(07:31):
town one afternoon. As a professional tour guide, he spent
years working with Westerners, or as they're called here, Mazungos.
A lot of actually a lot of people who write
to me or emailed me about inquiries. They have read
about the country and they're very educated about the country.
Other people think it's the jungle, most especially missionaries who
(07:54):
have been a kind of tote that they're going to jungle,
expected jungle. I don't really talk to your Gunmans unless
they're told the space to Ugandon. So it's kind of weird.
Main Street is the heart of Ginger. One side is Ugandan,
full of shops and apartments and street stalls. The other
(08:17):
is for foreigners with upscale hotels, hip coffee shops and
souvenir stalls. I mean, so this part of town, I
mean it seems like it's largely Uganda, not Zongles on
the side. Yeah, there's a there's a sort of divide,
uh them there on the other side and this guy
(08:37):
is there on this side. You know. Yeah, so that
divide does happened in the last year or so. Hold,
this guy doesn't stop. No one stops in traffic here.
Everyone has right away. If you take the Ugandan side
of main Street all the way down, you end up
(08:59):
on a pothole road that follows the shore of like Victoria.
The road is lined with factories and warehouses and a
fish processing plant that stinks up the whole neighborhood. On
the other side is Messesse, where Renee set up shop
in two thousand nine. And Messesse is kind of like
the slum of our area. And so I was advised
(09:19):
several times by by folks in Uganda, like I don't
know if it's a good idea, you being like a
Western girl by yourself moving to Missess. But I just
felt so strongly that's where the Lord had us, and
he used among shacks made of scrapwood and tin roofing.
Rene's house was easy to spot. It was a two
story brick building with a wrap around porch and clean
white banisters, almost like a New England bed and breakfast,
(09:43):
and it served double duty. It was Renee's home and
the headquarters of her new NGO. Serving his children. Serving
his children took a single action, a single choice, and
it was bold enough to cause others to do the same.
Save a life. The goal of the NGO was to
fight child malnutrition, a daunting task, especially in a place
(10:03):
where thirty of the population faces chronic food in security.
The Lord just allowed me to see that malnutrition is
such an issue in Uganda that's often really hidden in
dark places, and families are ashamed of having children that
are malnourished. And it wasn't a need that other ministries
in our area were meeting. And by all accounts, serving
as children was an early success. Twice a week, hundreds
(10:26):
of kids would line up with empty bowls and wait
their turn for beans and rice. I think it was like, Wow,
she's serving a thousand children lunch out of her yard.
Like that's Ashley Laverty, one of Renee's first friends in Ginger.
And again it was kind of like a tourist attraction.
People would come on those specific days specifically to go
(10:47):
serve rice and beans to the kids of messssy and
like photo op, like serving these poor kids around the world.
There these global hotspots for missionaries like poor to Prince
and Haiti and San Jose and Costa Rica. Similarly, Jinja
is home to hundreds of NGOs and just as many
young eager people following their calling and even in the
(11:10):
community like that, Renee stood out. She was just twenty
years old, the director of her own organization, helping thousands
of people. Here's Jackie Kramlick, one of Renee's old volunteers.
Anyone who would have been in Ginger around that time
with Renee would remember a time where, you know, she
(11:30):
get a call in the middle of church or in
the middle of the party or whatever and just grab
her stuff and run out the door. And she, I
think really liked that. Being the kind of the emergency person,
she always felt like there was something more that she
could do. Like when I remember Rene, she just always
wanted to be doing the next thing. It's just kind
(11:51):
of her personality is just always very much focused on
like the next project she was going to start. In
terms of people who just like plan on conquering everything,
I mean, I would definitely consider her a very ambitious person.
That ambition led Renee to transform serving his children from
a simple feeding program into a full on rehabilitation center
(12:15):
with impatient services and professional medical equipment. That decision would
eventually split open the entire missionary community. Again, Ashley Laverty,
there was just a lot of strength. I mean, there
was a very clear divide. You were either pro Renee
and going to stand up for her and you know,
have her back, or you were very much against what
(12:38):
she was doing and just kind of outraged by it all.
Last January, I made my first trip to Ginja. I
(13:00):
wanted to be there as Kelsey Nielsen from No White
Saviors and her Ugandan co founder Olivia Alasso filed the
case against Forna in Jina's High Court. It feels like
I don't know Christmas for me today, like I'm just
just bringing the paperwork here. Seems like a victory for
both of them. I'm just fitting to alive. I'm checking
(13:20):
right now. But I think this is like what we've
waited for, Like this comes to the world right now
that the kiss has been filed, it's on record. Yeah.
When I started reporting this project, it felt like No
Waight Saviors was the story. It was a charismatic premise,
two young women, one American the other Ugandan fighting for
(13:42):
justice and trying to radically change their communities from the inside.
I think being a white person and it all involved
in this is like again totally like there is no
me being the hero or me doing It's literally the
things we should be doing like we should be holding
each other accountable, and we should be doing what we
know is right instead of just pretending these things don't exist.
We should be using our access to resources to rectify
(14:06):
these situations that, otherwise injustice would have just continued. Kelsey
and Olivia spoke so passionately it was hard not to
get carried away. They made it clear that this fight
wasn't just about Renee and tied it to bigger issues
of racism and colonialism. They made it feel like this
case really was a historic milestone. They made me want
(14:28):
to believe in their fight as much as they did.
No Weight Saviors have been effective at using Instagram to
draw attention to Renee's story, but they've been hard at
work on the ground as well. For months, Kelsey and
Olivia had been gathering evidence and tracking down witnesses to
file a core case against Serving his children. Once they
had the funding, they hired a Yuganian law firm to
(14:49):
file a civil case on behalf of the two grieving mothers,
one was Gimbo Zoo Beta. In her affidavit, she says
that in she lets Serving his children take her malner
three year old to Lali to Ginger for treatment. Three
days later, Gimbo was told that her son was dead.
She received to Lali wrapped in a white sheet and
(15:10):
fifteen dollars as a condolence. The other mother's name was
Kakai Rose. Her one year old son, Elijah Kawa Gambe,
had been diagnosed with TB. She says, us serving his
children worker insisted that she admit her son to the facility.
After a few days, they were sent home without any
(15:31):
information or medication. Elijah died three days later. Those are
our future leaders in this country that died, future lawyers
and doctors. She shut at their gems by not giving
them a chance to live. The mother's demands are simple
compensation for their loss and the permanent shutdown of serving
(15:53):
his children. For Kelsey, a former missionary with her own NGO,
there was something personal about the moment. It's a civil
rights case, and I think for me, being a white
person who has done work in this town for several years,
being a recovering white savior, as I say myself, this
is going to go down in history. We're definitely not
(16:13):
the heroes of the story. The families who have stood
up and said I'm going to fight for justice for
my children. It's an honor to even be at all
part of this and to to see them and their courage.
(16:33):
After hanging around the courthouse all afternoon, the court registrar
finally gave us a hearing date March twelve. Over the
coming months, that date would be pushed back again and again,
first to January, then to February, then March. But I
jumped into my investigation right away. The cornerstone of the
(16:58):
case against Renee is a handful of her Yugandan employees.
They worked with Renee for years but were fired in
twenty seventeen over a pay dispute. In their affidavits, they
claimed to have seen hundreds of dead children, gross medical malpractice,
and that they suffered from racist and discriminatory treatment. We
are recording this for a radio documentary. Kelsey set up
(17:21):
a meeting for me with some of the former employees
in Ginger and the information you provide. We met at
a hotel early in the afternoon and took seats in
the sunny courtyard away from the other guests. They sipped
cokes and fantas and told me their stories from their
years with Renee. My name is Lana Jays, I worked
with serving his stidren from two thousand thirteen tooth and seventeen.
(17:43):
Asa Joyce Alana worked with Renee for four years, and
she was proud of the work she did. I was contented.
I loved what I used to do. I was like,
if I'm to leave this work, is there someone who
is going to come and do the exact thing I'm doing?
How was like, let me be ready. Toself Joyce told
(18:04):
me that Renee performed medical treatments on children, but she
assumed Renee knew what she was doing. In fact, I
thought she's a nurse or a medical expert. Also where
because I saw her she introduced that myself to me
as a director and I saw her doing medical practices,
(18:28):
doing other things, So myself I concluded that she's a
medical expert. Yeah. But the longer she was there, the
more trouble she became. The thing which which had me.
Most children dying all of a sudden, you find you
reach home, they call you this one has died. Even
(18:48):
in the morning. At times you come and you find
the bad is empty, as what happened to this child?
They will tell you that the child has died. Sometimes
I used to take the dead buddies to dead villages.
Charles Alwaeny was the oldest of the crew, and he's
in his early fifties, short and bald, and has the
(19:09):
leathery hands of a farm worker. At different points he
worked as a driver, program manager, and security guard for
serving his children. In his affidavit, Charles wrote that he
would see anywhere from seven to ten dead children every
week now as I take the dead buddies, I was
always given the task of explaining how these children were daying,
(19:34):
and it was really hard for me. I couldn't explain
anything because one, I'm not a medical doctor, and I
don't know what caused the death of the child? What what?
It was something that I had for me. And I
was almost seven to ten a week. If that was true,
(19:55):
the death toll would get into the thousands in just
a few years. I hunt Buffalo, so I brought my
(20:16):
rifle into the country with me legally, and I kept
it at the police station. Elizabeth Nicholson was one of
the older missionaries in town. Were chuffed this this silly
little woman went this big giant rifle. I had heard
that she was the wild white lady in Ginger. When
I finally met her. I wasn't disappointed. I go hunting
(20:37):
when I want to kill some person, then I go
out into the bush and get out my aggressions. Elizabeth
was a real estate agent in California in a previous life,
but she heard God calling her to Uganda ten years
ago and she hasn't looked back since. She saw a
place with institutions that were struggling to keep up, and
(21:00):
she wanted to support them. Children and the children's hospital
now La Fania were three sometimes four to a bed,
or they were on the concrete floor in the corridor.
The children of malnutrition are very vulnerable, so I ended
up building another mini hospital on the government hospital grounds.
(21:22):
It was an attritional unit. You had a free place
for the malnourished children to be and to stay as
long as they needed. Elizabeth and Renee were both dealing
with malnourished kids, which means Elizabeth ran into Renee at
the local hospital on a regular basis. At first, she
thought Renee was just another young, pretty missionary. But then
(21:43):
something strange started happening. I noticed that well, there would
be malnourished children and then one day they'd be gone.
What happened? Why? Each time this happened, Elizabeth assumed the
worst that the child had died in hospital, or maybe optimistically,
(22:03):
that the kid had recovered and gone home. But it
turns out it was neither what I was told. She
was paying a couple of the nurses to let her
know every time a malnourished child came, and then she
would come to the hospital and she would talk to
the parents into signing out and then taking the child
(22:25):
to her, which I thought was wrong. It was something
the former employees had written about in their affidavits as well.
Renee called them referrals. Others called it kidnapping. I'd begun
to get nervous about all the children that were ending
up with her. She didn't make sense when they had
(22:46):
the government free hospital and free food. So I decided
that I would least like to go and check and
see what it was like. When I went there, Renee
wasn't there. She was in America. She had I think
three volunteers who are about eighteen years old, weren't trained
in anything medical, and they had like children. I found
(23:08):
it appalling. Elizabeth had good reason to be frustrated. She'd
been fighting child malnutrition for a decade. In her mind,
she's been doing it the right way, following the rules
and letting doctors take the lead. I mean, my understanding
is she has her high school g e d. She
didn't even finish regular high school. She didn't at the
(23:30):
time have any medical I think now she only has
um like Red Cross stuff. And she was doing things
that we're not only out of her capabilities, but we're painful,
not nice easy things, um, taking jiggers out of toes okay, fine,
(23:56):
but emptying somebody's kidneys with a long syringe no, I'm sorry,
and slitting their chest to get into their lungs. There's
a lot of doctors that won't do this and know
we need a specialist for that to be clear. Elizabeth
didn't actually see any of this firsthand, but these were
the rumors that have been floating around Ginja for years.
(24:21):
Eventually Elizabeth would even get the police involved and try
to get Renee shut down. I heard a lot that
she was stubborn, She wouldn't listen to anybody. She looked
down on yuganden professionals, didn't take advice from anybody. What
leads Renee to go down this path? She thinks that's
(24:41):
what God wants her to do. Although the idea that
God would want her to operate on children which she
has no training, and there's a hospital ten minutes away,
it's a little hard to swell. I don't know, I
don't know. It's incomprehensible to me. It was such an
(25:02):
outstandingly evil thing. So many children were dying, and it
was getting bigger and bigger. Honestly, from the get go,
(25:26):
I had my doubts about the case of success. Holding
the filing in my hands, it was flimsy, maybe a
hundred pages, front to back, printed double sided. Yes, there
were strong affidavits from Ashley Jackie and the former employees,
but the evidence, that's where the trouble was. It was
mostly anecdotal. There were a few photographs of malnourished children
(25:49):
and some Health Ministry protocols and registration documents, and sure
there were a couple of photos of Renee inserting IVY lines,
but that's a procedure anyone could be trained to do,
and didn't speak to the more severe allegations of medical misconduct.
Without much more, it would be difficult to keep this
case from getting into he said, she said, So we
(26:10):
set out to look for those details, but we also
needed to hear from Renee herself. In the court documents
and all around town. There was something that kept coming up,
Renee's blogs. Blogging was huge among young missionaries, heroic stories
of service in far flung corners of the world and
(26:32):
pictures of children suffering starvation and disease who needed your
help in your prayers, So send money now. They were
the millennial version of those old Sally Struthers ads where
she holds a starving, sick child in her arms and
asks you for donations while a number flashes underneath. It's
enough to make the angels cry. No. I can't get
(26:55):
used to this any more than you could. But we
can get rid of it. Yes you can. Your seventy
cents will put one of these otherwise doomed boys or
girls into a clean and bright to Elizabeth. The blogs
are proof of Renee's insincerity, that she cared more about
her image than actually helping kids. It was on her
website and her blog or what, but that she had
(27:17):
to do these medical things and are to save these
children because help was so far away and so expensive.
People really liked that this wonderful woman who's sacrificing, and
I think that was her thing. I don't think she
was doing what was best for the children. I think
(27:38):
she was doing what was exciting and powerful for Renee,
and getting an awful lot of money for it. Kelsey
from No White Saviors painted and even darker picture. Every
time a kid dies, you're writing a blog post, You're
getting all its attention. You might become addicted to, like
child death. You might become addicted to like the attention
(28:01):
and the like the rush you get from it. I
hope that's not the case, but I don't think we
can weigh that out. Renee took her blogs down a
few years ago, and they're only a handful in the
case filing. So I did some googling and managed to
find over a hundred of her old posts. I printed
them all out and spent an entire weekend hold up
in my room reading through them. At first, I was
(28:23):
looking for evidence against Renee, proof that she was doing
what Elizabeth Kelsey and the former employees were telling me,
and I found some examples easily enough. There were blogs
about kids hooked up to medical equipment in a red
room that served as an ic you for serving his
children there are plenty of stories about kids being brought
over from the local hospital to miss Essay, and there
(28:46):
were more than a handful of eulogies that Renee had
written to children who had passed away over the years.
The truth is I expected to hate Renee. I'd spent
weeks hearing stories about how evil she was, how she'd
been killing kids experimenting on them. But the blogs painted
a totally different picture. Here's one from We had a
(29:07):
voice actor read them and they're edited for clarity. I
am an all or nothing kind of person, and it's
hard for me not to be able to give to everyone.
Mother Teresa once said, you can do no great thing,
only small things with great love. I have to remind
myself of that almost every day, because I believe that
(29:28):
when you have a great love for Jesus, everything else
you do is turned into greatness. So if all you
do in a day is smile at a lady on
the street or feed four fifty hungry orphan children, you
have achieved greatness in God's eyes. But there was something
else about Renee's writing. Her words felt familiar. Then I
(29:52):
read one of her blogs about a woman named Lydia.
So much of her body had been overtaken, consumed by
her si kness. She was scarcely recognizable, but her hands
and her feet they remained the same. She lay in bed,
her skeletal figure almost invisible, underneath a single sheet. Renee
(30:15):
wrote that Lydia was a young woman who sold bananas
in the neighborhood. Her son had been in Renee's malnutrition
program and had gone home healthy. But soon after that,
Lydia discovered that she was HIV positive. I sat down
near her and spoke softly, would you like me to
paint your fingernails? She slowly opened her eyes and barely
(30:39):
nodded in response. Renee helped her get medications, but six
months later got a phone call that Lydia wasn't doing well.
The sickness had eaten away at her. She was just
fifty three pounds. I picked up one of her limp
hands and started to change her dull nails into a
bright shade or bread. I painted each finger nail slowly
(31:04):
with care, praying for God to restore strength, to allow
her the privilege of holding her baby girl again, even
just once more, so that the next time I could
paint her fingers purple. Because purple was her favorite. The
next day, God decided it was time to restore Lydia,
(31:28):
to make her completely whole by taking her to be
with him. I was sad to say goodbye, but I
know I'll see her again dancing in heaven, clothed in
many shades of purple. I felt like I'd been here before.
(32:05):
I had written these exact words in my own journal.
When I was a junior in college, I went to
South Sudan to try my hand as a freelance reporter.
Two weeks in, I heard that a town up north
had been attacked. People were forced to flee their homes
in large parts of town had been burned to the ground.
(32:25):
Many people told the stay don't feel safe to return
to their homes given in Wow Town. When I got there,
it felt like a ghost town. The only people I
saw were soldiers, and the scene felt empty, a certain
kind of hopeless. But then I met Sister Gracie. It
(32:47):
was at the Catholic compound in the middle of town,
where thousands of people had sought refuge. She said, I
reminded her of her nephew back in India, and she
took me in for the next two weeks. I lived
by her side as she dealt with the fallout from
the attack. This is from an interview she did with
BBC's Outwork. Back when I arrived, there was thousands of
(33:10):
people walking towards the town, almost without clothes, just naked,
but just as skeleton and the health of sender was
fitted with. She's been in Wow for decades, building hospitals,
running schools, and helping orphans find families. She was fearless,
staring down soldiers at checkpoints, and she was funny teasing
(33:32):
her former students. She was tireless. She woke up before
I did and was still working long after I fell asleep.
But on some nights when it was just the two
of us, she would cry. She told me she was
filled with doubt. She didn't know if she was really
doing the Lord's work or she was working in vain.
(33:52):
She knew she had to keep helping people, doing what
she thought was right, but what did it all lead to?
It was severe. It's seen many mothers, many babies dying
out of hunger, and it gave me a lot of pain,
and I asked the Lord give me strength to work
for these people until my death. One evening, she took
(34:15):
me to the government hospital. We went to the children's
ward and found a teenage girl lying in bed. She
was so skinny, she just disappeared under the sheets, just
like Lydia. But then I noticed her fingernail polish, a
glittery silver. So often in war, where people are forced
to live in humiliating conditions, it's easy to forget that
(34:38):
people are people. They become statistics and cases and problems
to be solved. But seeing this girl with her nails
painted made her a person again. Before she was in
this bed, she was a kid. She went to school,
she hung out with her friends, and she painted her nails.
It's an image I still see so vividly in my mind.
(35:01):
Sister Gracie asked the girl's family to stand up. They
all held hands, bowed their heads, and she said a
prayer for them. On the way back to the car,
Sister Gracie whispered to me that the girl wouldn't make
it through the night. When I returned to the States,
all I could think about was Sister Gracie. For the
first time I had seen someone who dedicated their entire
(35:24):
life to serving others. I felt like every day I
didn't follow her example, I was taking the easy way
out for a while. I even thought about dropping out
of school to go work by her side, until a
few friends convinced me otherwise. In some ways, I wish
they hadn't. God keeps sending kids, so I keep saying yes.
(35:53):
Who am I to say no? Some people say I'm insane, Well, folks,
I would have to agree with you. Some days I
think I've literally gone insane. What you hear in Renee's
words depends entirely on what you believe so far. Maybe
you hear a woman of good intentions who made some mistakes,
(36:15):
or maybe you hear a predator posing as a saint.
I feel like as Christians, we are called to live
an insane life, a life set apart, a life that
is not normal by any sense of the word, A
life that would cause others to wonder, what the heck,
why on earth would she do that? Now, I'll be
(36:37):
the first to say a life of insanity is sometimes
very exciting. By obeying Christ's call, he blesses you with
many amazing things. I heard myself in those words. Renee
and I made her first trips to the continent when
we were around the same age. Neither of us had
(36:58):
any experience for expertise. We were moved to the core
by what we'd seen and it felt like doing the
right thing was the only thing that mattered, never mind
the cost. But when it came down to it, I
took a step back from the ledge and Renee kept
going this season on the missionary, no one's going to
(37:26):
call out a girl who has like dropped her life
and moved here and it's just serving serving serving to
be like, are you really doing this right? Well, they
look like a huge asshole now. And never witnessed the
blood being in us fuels though, and any kind of
bloody product at the facility. I never witnessed it. I
(37:46):
was watching her be literally crucified for trying to do
the right thing. Have you explained what we're doing here?
I'm explained to her because she's what it that she
needs to be careful of what she's talking. She grabbed
a medication and injected her with it, and then she
fell backwards died. Black African lives do not matter to
(38:08):
the same level to us as white people. I'm Renee Vach,
the founder and former director of Serving Children. A lot
of people would say, oh, why did you do this
or why did you do that? And it's like, well,
when you explain, the answer wasn't satisfying. And then you
want to say, well, have you ever been put in
(38:30):
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, you know, and you have
to live with yourself with the answer of that for
the rest of your life. The Missionaries produced in association
with iHeart Media. It's written and reported by Roger Gola,
(38:51):
Palima Gakandi, and Malcolm Burnley. It's produced by Michelle Lance
and Ryan Murdoch. Mark Ltto is our story editor. Our
executive producer is at the Good. Fact checker is Austin Thompson.
Mixing by Josh Rogisson, voice acting by Taylor Kaufman and
special thanks to equip FM and BBC HM
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. Amen. Amen, Now, Renie,
before you go, obviously, I'm praying that there's gonna be
some young people listening going maybe the Lord wants me
to do something like that. But I don't want to
(00:20):
put words in your mouth. What's on your heart today
as we sit here? Well, you know, um, I moved
to Ganda and I was really young. Prior to leaving
and moving, there was a lot of fear. Am I
going to fail? Am I going to be that person
that you know said I was going to do this
thing for the Lord and just couldn't do it and
didn't have the strength or didn't have the knowledge, or
(00:41):
couldn't rally their resources. That was a real fear for me.
But the Lord just continued to bring to mind that
if you trust in him, even your failures can be
made beautiful. And I think that that was renee Bach
did trust in the Lord with all her heart her
whole life. She listened to him, saw his wisdom, followed
(01:03):
his lead, and he led her from a small town
in Virginia all the way to Uganda, where she started
a charity to help malnourished kids. Renee was entrepreneurial, inspiring.
She was the perfect local girl does good story. Here
she is on a Virginia Christian radio station called equipm FM.
We just launched a campaign this past month called Cycle Breakers.
(01:27):
We really do believe that Malnatician is a cycle um
and then it really can be broken, and we need
people just like you to help us break that cycle.
We are completely funded by generous owners. Renee was a
modern missionary. She didn't work for institutions like the Seletian
Sisters or the International Mission Board. Instead, she ran her
(01:47):
ministry like a tech startup, raising money through blogs, marketing
through YouTube videos, and doing church tours and radio interviews
like this one. And that's when I found it serving
his children. How old were you? I was nineteen nineteen.
That's just when I read that piece in the paper
about your ministry, I'm thinking that is crazy because I
wasn't thinking about starting ministries at nineteen years old. So
(02:10):
obviously the Lord really had a special plan for you.
And and still does. I mean you're you're so if
God had a plan for Renee Bach, then why did
he lead her to where she is today? Tonight at six,
a Betverord woman is facing disturbing allegations about her nonprofit
in Uganda. Essentially, a U s Citis been with no
(02:32):
medical training set up a medical clinic in Uganda serving
his children was actually shut down and five children died
at an unlicensed treatment center for malnourished kids in Uganda
is being sued in Ugandan court. This girl going into
this situation just the savior complex on our own. It's
closed to people's lives. I'm Rogi Gola, I'm a journalist
(02:56):
and I moved to Uganda last year. Just five days
after I got there, I received a message on WhatsApp.
It was about Renee Back and it was one of
the wildest leads i'd ever heard, probably the most severe
case of the Savior complex we've ever seen. Hundreds of
children have died as a result. The message came from
(03:19):
Kelsey Nielsen, one of the founders of an activist group
called No White Saviors. She was a former missionary. She'd
seen the inside of that world and now she was
speaking out. Kelsey told me that Renee wasn't just feeding
or ministering to kids. She was playing god, she was
masquerading as a doctor, and hundreds of kids had died
(03:42):
because of her actions, and that Renee was back home
in Virginia living scott free most of the time. If
you're white and have money and access to the right resources,
you're not You're going to be able to get away
with whatever you want to. And I think know Kelsey
and here you've gone, and co founder Olivia Alasso, we're
helping to file a case against Renee in Uganda's High
(04:03):
court fields like, finally someone will pay four hundreds of
kids deaths that have been written off as good deeds
um for so long, that just because of some spiritual
bypassing in some God complex, that someone can come and
practice medicine without a medical degree. No White Saviors had
(04:24):
been sounding the alarm about Renee on Instagram for months.
It was the centerpiece of their advocacy. People in the
comments called Renee a serial killer, an angel of death.
At first, I was skeptical. Hundreds of dead kids, and
the more I looked into the story, the more the
accusations piled up that she'd been stealing children from hospitals
(04:45):
and villages, experimenting on them. The children were like, it
was like a science lab where everyone will touch and
you know, try to inject, try to do that. So
for me, there's no excuse for that. There were allegations
of murder, government conspiracies. It is shocking the medical profession
after one of their own was gunned down in Iganga
(05:07):
District Friday night, Bribery, blackmail, even cannibalism. The father of
Patricia alleges that he was bribed to tell the courts
that Renee cut off the skin of Patricia's face and
kept in the fridge so she could eat it. Oh boy,
(05:28):
I knew right away that it would be tough to
pick apart rumors from facts. This wasn't a story about
just one victim, one event, or one crime. It was
a saga that stretched over ten years, to continents and
touched thousands of lives. So I pulled together a team
Malcolm Burnley in Philadelphia and Helimakkandhi and Kenya, and together
(05:51):
we spent the next year investigating Renee's story. We ended
up interviewing over a hundred people, and almost no one
could agree on what kind of person Renee Bach was
or if she'd done anything wrong at all. Just a
few months ago, this story might have felt distant, But now,
as we're all caught in a deadly battle between arrogant
(06:14):
ignorance and a desire for authority, we can trust it's
closer than ever. In association with I Heeart Media, I'm
Roger Gola. I I'm Malcolm Burnley, and this is the
missionary episode one the Lord's Work. Before we dive in,
(06:46):
let's get you situated. Our story takes place in the
town of Jinja in Uganda. Pull up a map of
Africa and find the mouth of the Nile River where
Egypt meets the Mediterranean. Then trace it all the way
down through Sudan, past South Sudan and into Uganda. And
right there underneath your fingertip, that's Ginger. It's a small
(07:10):
town on the lip of Lake Victoria, a lush, tropical
paradise built on the banks of the world's longest river.
Gingers become known as the adventure sports capital of East Africa.
Tourists from around the world come to Ginger for its
world famous rapids, bungee jumping, mountain biking and hiking. All right,
let's get going. I had Arthur Wassawa take me through
(07:31):
town one afternoon. As a professional tour guide, he spent
years working with Westerners, or as they're called here, Mazungos.
A lot of actually a lot of people who write
to me or emailed me about inquiries. They have read
about the country and they're very educated about the country.
Other people think it's the jungle, most especially missionaries who
(07:54):
have been a kind of tote that they're going to jungle,
expected jungle. I don't really talk to your Gunmans unless
they're told the space to Ugandon. So it's kind of weird.
Main Street is the heart of Ginger. One side is Ugandan,
full of shops and apartments and street stalls. The other
(08:17):
is for foreigners with upscale hotels, hip coffee shops and
souvenir stalls. I mean, so this part of town, I
mean it seems like it's largely Uganda, not Zongles on
the side. Yeah, there's a there's a sort of divide,
uh them there on the other side and this guy
(08:37):
is there on this side. You know. Yeah, so that
divide does happened in the last year or so. Hold,
this guy doesn't stop. No one stops in traffic here.
Everyone has right away. If you take the Ugandan side
of main Street all the way down, you end up
(08:59):
on a pothole road that follows the shore of like Victoria.
The road is lined with factories and warehouses and a
fish processing plant that stinks up the whole neighborhood. On
the other side is Messesse, where Renee set up shop
in two thousand nine. And Messesse is kind of like
the slum of our area. And so I was advised
(09:19):
several times by by folks in Uganda, like I don't
know if it's a good idea, you being like a
Western girl by yourself moving to Missess. But I just
felt so strongly that's where the Lord had us, and
he used among shacks made of scrapwood and tin roofing.
Rene's house was easy to spot. It was a two
story brick building with a wrap around porch and clean
white banisters, almost like a New England bed and breakfast,
(09:43):
and it served double duty. It was Renee's home and
the headquarters of her new NGO. Serving his children. Serving
his children took a single action, a single choice, and
it was bold enough to cause others to do the same.
Save a life. The goal of the NGO was to
fight child malnutrition, a daunting task, especially in a place
(10:03):
where thirty of the population faces chronic food in security.
The Lord just allowed me to see that malnutrition is
such an issue in Uganda that's often really hidden in
dark places, and families are ashamed of having children that
are malnourished. And it wasn't a need that other ministries
in our area were meeting. And by all accounts, serving
as children was an early success. Twice a week, hundreds
(10:26):
of kids would line up with empty bowls and wait
their turn for beans and rice. I think it was like, Wow,
she's serving a thousand children lunch out of her yard.
Like that's Ashley Laverty, one of Renee's first friends in Ginger.
And again it was kind of like a tourist attraction.
People would come on those specific days specifically to go
(10:47):
serve rice and beans to the kids of messssy and
like photo op, like serving these poor kids around the world.
There these global hotspots for missionaries like poor to Prince
and Haiti and San Jose and Costa Rica. Similarly, Jinja
is home to hundreds of NGOs and just as many
young eager people following their calling and even in the
(11:10):
community like that, Renee stood out. She was just twenty
years old, the director of her own organization, helping thousands
of people. Here's Jackie Kramlick, one of Renee's old volunteers.
Anyone who would have been in Ginger around that time
with Renee would remember a time where, you know, she
(11:30):
get a call in the middle of church or in
the middle of the party or whatever and just grab
her stuff and run out the door. And she, I
think really liked that. Being the kind of the emergency person,
she always felt like there was something more that she
could do. Like when I remember Rene, she just always
wanted to be doing the next thing. It's just kind
(11:51):
of her personality is just always very much focused on
like the next project she was going to start. In
terms of people who just like plan on conquering everything,
I mean, I would definitely consider her a very ambitious person.
That ambition led Renee to transform serving his children from
a simple feeding program into a full on rehabilitation center
(12:15):
with impatient services and professional medical equipment. That decision would
eventually split open the entire missionary community. Again, Ashley Laverty,
there was just a lot of strength. I mean, there
was a very clear divide. You were either pro Renee
and going to stand up for her and you know,
have her back, or you were very much against what
(12:38):
she was doing and just kind of outraged by it all.
Last January, I made my first trip to Ginja. I
(13:00):
wanted to be there as Kelsey Nielsen from No White
Saviors and her Ugandan co founder Olivia Alasso filed the
case against Forna in Jina's High Court. It feels like
I don't know Christmas for me today, like I'm just
just bringing the paperwork here. Seems like a victory for
both of them. I'm just fitting to alive. I'm checking
(13:20):
right now. But I think this is like what we've
waited for, Like this comes to the world right now
that the kiss has been filed, it's on record. Yeah.
When I started reporting this project, it felt like No
Waight Saviors was the story. It was a charismatic premise,
two young women, one American the other Ugandan fighting for
(13:42):
justice and trying to radically change their communities from the inside.
I think being a white person and it all involved
in this is like again totally like there is no
me being the hero or me doing It's literally the
things we should be doing like we should be holding
each other accountable, and we should be doing what we
know is right instead of just pretending these things don't exist.
We should be using our access to resources to rectify
(14:06):
these situations that, otherwise injustice would have just continued. Kelsey
and Olivia spoke so passionately it was hard not to
get carried away. They made it clear that this fight
wasn't just about Renee and tied it to bigger issues
of racism and colonialism. They made it feel like this
case really was a historic milestone. They made me want
(14:28):
to believe in their fight as much as they did.
No Weight Saviors have been effective at using Instagram to
draw attention to Renee's story, but they've been hard at
work on the ground as well. For months, Kelsey and
Olivia had been gathering evidence and tracking down witnesses to
file a core case against Serving his children. Once they
had the funding, they hired a Yuganian law firm to
(14:49):
file a civil case on behalf of the two grieving mothers,
one was Gimbo Zoo Beta. In her affidavit, she says
that in she lets Serving his children take her malner
three year old to Lali to Ginger for treatment. Three
days later, Gimbo was told that her son was dead.
She received to Lali wrapped in a white sheet and
(15:10):
fifteen dollars as a condolence. The other mother's name was
Kakai Rose. Her one year old son, Elijah Kawa Gambe,
had been diagnosed with TB. She says, us serving his
children worker insisted that she admit her son to the facility.
After a few days, they were sent home without any
(15:31):
information or medication. Elijah died three days later. Those are
our future leaders in this country that died, future lawyers
and doctors. She shut at their gems by not giving
them a chance to live. The mother's demands are simple
compensation for their loss and the permanent shutdown of serving
(15:53):
his children. For Kelsey, a former missionary with her own NGO,
there was something personal about the moment. It's a civil
rights case, and I think for me, being a white
person who has done work in this town for several years,
being a recovering white savior, as I say myself, this
is going to go down in history. We're definitely not
(16:13):
the heroes of the story. The families who have stood
up and said I'm going to fight for justice for
my children. It's an honor to even be at all
part of this and to to see them and their courage.
(16:33):
After hanging around the courthouse all afternoon, the court registrar
finally gave us a hearing date March twelve. Over the
coming months, that date would be pushed back again and again,
first to January, then to February, then March. But I
jumped into my investigation right away. The cornerstone of the
(16:58):
case against Renee is a handful of her Yugandan employees.
They worked with Renee for years but were fired in
twenty seventeen over a pay dispute. In their affidavits, they
claimed to have seen hundreds of dead children, gross medical malpractice,
and that they suffered from racist and discriminatory treatment. We
are recording this for a radio documentary. Kelsey set up
(17:21):
a meeting for me with some of the former employees
in Ginger and the information you provide. We met at
a hotel early in the afternoon and took seats in
the sunny courtyard away from the other guests. They sipped
cokes and fantas and told me their stories from their
years with Renee. My name is Lana Jays, I worked
with serving his stidren from two thousand thirteen tooth and seventeen.
(17:43):
Asa Joyce Alana worked with Renee for four years, and
she was proud of the work she did. I was contented.
I loved what I used to do. I was like,
if I'm to leave this work, is there someone who
is going to come and do the exact thing I'm doing?
How was like, let me be ready. Toself Joyce told
(18:04):
me that Renee performed medical treatments on children, but she
assumed Renee knew what she was doing. In fact, I
thought she's a nurse or a medical expert. Also where
because I saw her she introduced that myself to me
as a director and I saw her doing medical practices,
(18:28):
doing other things, So myself I concluded that she's a
medical expert. Yeah. But the longer she was there, the
more trouble she became. The thing which which had me.
Most children dying all of a sudden, you find you
reach home, they call you this one has died. Even
(18:48):
in the morning. At times you come and you find
the bad is empty, as what happened to this child?
They will tell you that the child has died. Sometimes
I used to take the dead buddies to dead villages.
Charles Alwaeny was the oldest of the crew, and he's
in his early fifties, short and bald, and has the
(19:09):
leathery hands of a farm worker. At different points he
worked as a driver, program manager, and security guard for
serving his children. In his affidavit, Charles wrote that he
would see anywhere from seven to ten dead children every
week now as I take the dead buddies, I was
always given the task of explaining how these children were daying,
(19:34):
and it was really hard for me. I couldn't explain
anything because one, I'm not a medical doctor, and I
don't know what caused the death of the child? What what?
It was something that I had for me. And I
was almost seven to ten a week. If that was true,
(19:55):
the death toll would get into the thousands in just
a few years. I hunt Buffalo, so I brought my
(20:16):
rifle into the country with me legally, and I kept
it at the police station. Elizabeth Nicholson was one of
the older missionaries in town. Were chuffed this this silly
little woman went this big giant rifle. I had heard
that she was the wild white lady in Ginger. When
I finally met her. I wasn't disappointed. I go hunting
(20:37):
when I want to kill some person, then I go
out into the bush and get out my aggressions. Elizabeth
was a real estate agent in California in a previous life,
but she heard God calling her to Uganda ten years
ago and she hasn't looked back since. She saw a
place with institutions that were struggling to keep up, and
(21:00):
she wanted to support them. Children and the children's hospital
now La Fania were three sometimes four to a bed,
or they were on the concrete floor in the corridor.
The children of malnutrition are very vulnerable, so I ended
up building another mini hospital on the government hospital grounds.
(21:22):
It was an attritional unit. You had a free place
for the malnourished children to be and to stay as
long as they needed. Elizabeth and Renee were both dealing
with malnourished kids, which means Elizabeth ran into Renee at
the local hospital on a regular basis. At first, she
thought Renee was just another young, pretty missionary. But then
(21:43):
something strange started happening. I noticed that well, there would
be malnourished children and then one day they'd be gone.
What happened? Why? Each time this happened, Elizabeth assumed the
worst that the child had died in hospital, or maybe optimistically,
(22:03):
that the kid had recovered and gone home. But it
turns out it was neither what I was told. She
was paying a couple of the nurses to let her
know every time a malnourished child came, and then she
would come to the hospital and she would talk to
the parents into signing out and then taking the child
(22:25):
to her, which I thought was wrong. It was something
the former employees had written about in their affidavits as well.
Renee called them referrals. Others called it kidnapping. I'd begun
to get nervous about all the children that were ending
up with her. She didn't make sense when they had
(22:46):
the government free hospital and free food. So I decided
that I would least like to go and check and
see what it was like. When I went there, Renee
wasn't there. She was in America. She had I think
three volunteers who are about eighteen years old, weren't trained
in anything medical, and they had like children. I found
(23:08):
it appalling. Elizabeth had good reason to be frustrated. She'd
been fighting child malnutrition for a decade. In her mind,
she's been doing it the right way, following the rules
and letting doctors take the lead. I mean, my understanding
is she has her high school g e d. She
didn't even finish regular high school. She didn't at the
(23:30):
time have any medical I think now she only has
um like Red Cross stuff. And she was doing things
that we're not only out of her capabilities, but we're painful,
not nice easy things, um, taking jiggers out of toes okay, fine,
(23:56):
but emptying somebody's kidneys with a long syringe no, I'm sorry,
and slitting their chest to get into their lungs. There's
a lot of doctors that won't do this and know
we need a specialist for that to be clear. Elizabeth
didn't actually see any of this firsthand, but these were
the rumors that have been floating around Ginja for years.
(24:21):
Eventually Elizabeth would even get the police involved and try
to get Renee shut down. I heard a lot that
she was stubborn, She wouldn't listen to anybody. She looked
down on yuganden professionals, didn't take advice from anybody. What
leads Renee to go down this path? She thinks that's
(24:41):
what God wants her to do. Although the idea that
God would want her to operate on children which she
has no training, and there's a hospital ten minutes away,
it's a little hard to swell. I don't know, I
don't know. It's incomprehensible to me. It was such an
(25:02):
outstandingly evil thing. So many children were dying, and it
was getting bigger and bigger. Honestly, from the get go,
(25:26):
I had my doubts about the case of success. Holding
the filing in my hands, it was flimsy, maybe a
hundred pages, front to back, printed double sided. Yes, there
were strong affidavits from Ashley Jackie and the former employees,
but the evidence, that's where the trouble was. It was
mostly anecdotal. There were a few photographs of malnourished children
(25:49):
and some Health Ministry protocols and registration documents, and sure
there were a couple of photos of Renee inserting IVY lines,
but that's a procedure anyone could be trained to do,
and didn't speak to the more severe allegations of medical misconduct.
Without much more, it would be difficult to keep this
case from getting into he said, she said, So we
(26:10):
set out to look for those details, but we also
needed to hear from Renee herself. In the court documents
and all around town. There was something that kept coming up,
Renee's blogs. Blogging was huge among young missionaries, heroic stories
of service in far flung corners of the world and
(26:32):
pictures of children suffering starvation and disease who needed your
help in your prayers, So send money now. They were
the millennial version of those old Sally Struthers ads where
she holds a starving, sick child in her arms and
asks you for donations while a number flashes underneath. It's
enough to make the angels cry. No. I can't get
(26:55):
used to this any more than you could. But we
can get rid of it. Yes you can. Your seventy
cents will put one of these otherwise doomed boys or
girls into a clean and bright to Elizabeth. The blogs
are proof of Renee's insincerity, that she cared more about
her image than actually helping kids. It was on her
website and her blog or what, but that she had
(27:17):
to do these medical things and are to save these
children because help was so far away and so expensive.
People really liked that this wonderful woman who's sacrificing, and
I think that was her thing. I don't think she
was doing what was best for the children. I think
(27:38):
she was doing what was exciting and powerful for Renee,
and getting an awful lot of money for it. Kelsey
from No White Saviors painted and even darker picture. Every
time a kid dies, you're writing a blog post, You're
getting all its attention. You might become addicted to, like
child death. You might become addicted to like the attention
(28:01):
and the like the rush you get from it. I
hope that's not the case, but I don't think we
can weigh that out. Renee took her blogs down a
few years ago, and they're only a handful in the
case filing. So I did some googling and managed to
find over a hundred of her old posts. I printed
them all out and spent an entire weekend hold up
in my room reading through them. At first, I was
(28:23):
looking for evidence against Renee, proof that she was doing
what Elizabeth Kelsey and the former employees were telling me,
and I found some examples easily enough. There were blogs
about kids hooked up to medical equipment in a red
room that served as an ic you for serving his
children there are plenty of stories about kids being brought
over from the local hospital to miss Essay, and there
(28:46):
were more than a handful of eulogies that Renee had
written to children who had passed away over the years.
The truth is I expected to hate Renee. I'd spent
weeks hearing stories about how evil she was, how she'd
been killing kids experimenting on them. But the blogs painted
a totally different picture. Here's one from We had a
(29:07):
voice actor read them and they're edited for clarity. I
am an all or nothing kind of person, and it's
hard for me not to be able to give to everyone.
Mother Teresa once said, you can do no great thing,
only small things with great love. I have to remind
myself of that almost every day, because I believe that
(29:28):
when you have a great love for Jesus, everything else
you do is turned into greatness. So if all you
do in a day is smile at a lady on
the street or feed four fifty hungry orphan children, you
have achieved greatness in God's eyes. But there was something
else about Renee's writing. Her words felt familiar. Then I
(29:52):
read one of her blogs about a woman named Lydia.
So much of her body had been overtaken, consumed by
her si kness. She was scarcely recognizable, but her hands
and her feet they remained the same. She lay in bed,
her skeletal figure almost invisible, underneath a single sheet. Renee
(30:15):
wrote that Lydia was a young woman who sold bananas
in the neighborhood. Her son had been in Renee's malnutrition
program and had gone home healthy. But soon after that,
Lydia discovered that she was HIV positive. I sat down
near her and spoke softly, would you like me to
paint your fingernails? She slowly opened her eyes and barely
(30:39):
nodded in response. Renee helped her get medications, but six
months later got a phone call that Lydia wasn't doing well.
The sickness had eaten away at her. She was just
fifty three pounds. I picked up one of her limp
hands and started to change her dull nails into a
bright shade or bread. I painted each finger nail slowly
(31:04):
with care, praying for God to restore strength, to allow
her the privilege of holding her baby girl again, even
just once more, so that the next time I could
paint her fingers purple. Because purple was her favorite. The
next day, God decided it was time to restore Lydia,
(31:28):
to make her completely whole by taking her to be
with him. I was sad to say goodbye, but I
know I'll see her again dancing in heaven, clothed in
many shades of purple. I felt like I'd been here before.
(32:05):
I had written these exact words in my own journal.
When I was a junior in college, I went to
South Sudan to try my hand as a freelance reporter.
Two weeks in, I heard that a town up north
had been attacked. People were forced to flee their homes
in large parts of town had been burned to the ground.
(32:25):
Many people told the stay don't feel safe to return
to their homes given in Wow Town. When I got there,
it felt like a ghost town. The only people I
saw were soldiers, and the scene felt empty, a certain
kind of hopeless. But then I met Sister Gracie. It
(32:47):
was at the Catholic compound in the middle of town,
where thousands of people had sought refuge. She said, I
reminded her of her nephew back in India, and she
took me in for the next two weeks. I lived
by her side as she dealt with the fallout from
the attack. This is from an interview she did with
BBC's Outwork. Back when I arrived, there was thousands of
(33:10):
people walking towards the town, almost without clothes, just naked,
but just as skeleton and the health of sender was
fitted with. She's been in Wow for decades, building hospitals,
running schools, and helping orphans find families. She was fearless,
staring down soldiers at checkpoints, and she was funny teasing
(33:32):
her former students. She was tireless. She woke up before
I did and was still working long after I fell asleep.
But on some nights when it was just the two
of us, she would cry. She told me she was
filled with doubt. She didn't know if she was really
doing the Lord's work or she was working in vain.
(33:52):
She knew she had to keep helping people, doing what
she thought was right, but what did it all lead to?
It was severe. It's seen many mothers, many babies dying
out of hunger, and it gave me a lot of pain,
and I asked the Lord give me strength to work
for these people until my death. One evening, she took
(34:15):
me to the government hospital. We went to the children's
ward and found a teenage girl lying in bed. She
was so skinny, she just disappeared under the sheets, just
like Lydia. But then I noticed her fingernail polish, a
glittery silver. So often in war, where people are forced
to live in humiliating conditions, it's easy to forget that
(34:38):
people are people. They become statistics and cases and problems
to be solved. But seeing this girl with her nails
painted made her a person again. Before she was in
this bed, she was a kid. She went to school,
she hung out with her friends, and she painted her nails.
It's an image I still see so vividly in my mind.
(35:01):
Sister Gracie asked the girl's family to stand up. They
all held hands, bowed their heads, and she said a
prayer for them. On the way back to the car,
Sister Gracie whispered to me that the girl wouldn't make
it through the night. When I returned to the States,
all I could think about was Sister Gracie. For the
first time I had seen someone who dedicated their entire
(35:24):
life to serving others. I felt like every day I
didn't follow her example, I was taking the easy way
out for a while. I even thought about dropping out
of school to go work by her side, until a
few friends convinced me otherwise. In some ways, I wish
they hadn't. God keeps sending kids, so I keep saying yes.
(35:53):
Who am I to say no? Some people say I'm insane, Well, folks,
I would have to agree with you. Some days I
think I've literally gone insane. What you hear in Renee's
words depends entirely on what you believe so far. Maybe
you hear a woman of good intentions who made some mistakes,
(36:15):
or maybe you hear a predator posing as a saint.
I feel like as Christians, we are called to live
an insane life, a life set apart, a life that
is not normal by any sense of the word, A
life that would cause others to wonder, what the heck,
why on earth would she do that? Now, I'll be
(36:37):
the first to say a life of insanity is sometimes
very exciting. By obeying Christ's call, he blesses you with
many amazing things. I heard myself in those words. Renee
and I made her first trips to the continent when
we were around the same age. Neither of us had
(36:58):
any experience for expertise. We were moved to the core
by what we'd seen and it felt like doing the
right thing was the only thing that mattered, never mind
the cost. But when it came down to it, I
took a step back from the ledge and Renee kept
going this season on the missionary, no one's going to
(37:26):
call out a girl who has like dropped her life
and moved here and it's just serving serving serving to
be like, are you really doing this right? Well, they
look like a huge asshole now. And never witnessed the
blood being in us fuels though, and any kind of
bloody product at the facility. I never witnessed it. I
(37:46):
was watching her be literally crucified for trying to do
the right thing. Have you explained what we're doing here?
I'm explained to her because she's what it that she
needs to be careful of what she's talking. She grabbed
a medication and injected her with it, and then she
fell backwards died. Black African lives do not matter to
(38:08):
the same level to us as white people. I'm Renee Vach,
the founder and former director of Serving Children. A lot
of people would say, oh, why did you do this
or why did you do that? And it's like, well,
when you explain, the answer wasn't satisfying. And then you
want to say, well, have you ever been put in
(38:30):
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, you know, and you have
to live with yourself with the answer of that for
the rest of your life. The Missionaries produced in association
with iHeart Media. It's written and reported by Roger Gola,
(38:51):
Palima Gakandi, and Malcolm Burnley. It's produced by Michelle Lance
and Ryan Murdoch. Mark Ltto is our story editor. Our
executive producer is at the Good. Fact checker is Austin Thompson.
Mixing by Josh Rogisson, voice acting by Taylor Kaufman and
special thanks to equip FM and BBC HM
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