July 3, 2020 • 55 mins
When a young missionary named Renee Bach left her life in the US to start a malnutrition program in rural Uganda, she was one of thousands of like-minded people hoping to make the world a better place. But as her work in Uganda continued, rumors and speculation grew... and people began blaming Bach for the deaths of patients. So what exactly happened? Join the guys as they interview journalist Rajiv Golla, cohost of the new podcast, The Missionary.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Radio. Welcome back to the show.
(00:25):
My name is Matt, my name is Noel. They called
me Ben. We are joined as always with our super
producer Paul Mission controlled decades. Most importantly, you are you.
You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't
want you to know. It's your favorite or some of
your favorite. Quentin Quarantino's back again today. We are exploring
(00:49):
a very strange case. Let's start with the idea of
missionary work. You've heard the phrase before, right It's it's
sometimes associated with these acts that encapsulate the utmost of altruism.
And then sometimes there are cases that appear to be
self serving, and some cases, like the tragic case of
John Chow in North Centinel Island, seemed to be inherently
(01:12):
misinformed with terrible, horrific consequences. But in the world of
missionary work, you may have also heard the story of
one renee Bach who founded the organization serving his children,
often abbreviated as s HC in Uganda, in two thousand
and nine. You maybe somewhat familiar with this last story
(01:34):
at a headline level, but if you're like most of us,
you have not heard the full extent of what happened here.
And that is why today we are exploring the strange,
tragic tale of Renee Box actions and the organization in Uganda,
as well as some of the larger themes this story
touches upon. And luckily we are not doing it alone,
(01:56):
are we know? Today we are joined by Regime eve Gala,
a prolific freelance journalist and photographer. He's been published in
multiple outlets. You've probably seen his work in The Guardian, Vice,
Reuters and much much more. He, along with his team
Halima Gekandhi and Malcolm Burnley. Uh, Regieve, spent a year
(02:16):
investigating this story. He interviewed over a hundred people, asking crucial,
profound questions about the problems that arise when someone becomes
what could be called a white savior. So, Regiev, first
things first, Uh, welcome to the show and can you
please briefly describe the story that's going on here of SHC. Yeah,
(02:39):
thank you so much for having me on. Um. Yeah,
so I I got to Uganda last January, and a
few days after I got there, I heard about this
case of an American woman who had pretended to be
a doctor and who is now being accused of killing
hundreds of children. And a few days later a an
activist group called No Wait's Saviors helped file a court
(03:02):
case against her in Uganda's High Court, And so I
went along with them, and I met a few of
the people that had signed affidavits against Renee, and they
kind of set me off on this journey that took
us the next year to really get to the bottom
of this whole story and figure out what was really
going on with all these allegations. So I think some
of the initial questions here uh are going to be
(03:24):
concerning your process, which may be a little bit of
a dryway to start. So in this, in this story,
in the missionary, which one thing that you all have
done that's pretty captivating to me is that you're it's
a collaborative work of journalism, uh, and it's still I
can only imagine must must be a huge undertaking. What
(03:48):
what led you and your colleagues Halima and Malcolm to
take this approach to narrative, to storytelling an investigation. Yeah, well,
pretty quickly when we got into the story, we realized
it was going to be a lot up to interpretation. Um.
I mean this was such a polarizing case. I mean
we had one group on one hand that literally called
itself No White Saviors, and then we have the accused
(04:11):
Renee on the other, and both were telling widely different stories. Um.
And when we got into it the like actual documentation,
the evidence was kind of sparse, and so what we
had to deal with mostly was all these competing narratives
and trying to stitch them together. And it just made
the most sense. Instead of one person kind of trying
to make sense of all these things, why don't we
(04:32):
kind of bring all those perspectives to the show. And
so the three of us all come with our own
personal experiences and our own take on just how this
case unfolded and who's to blame and what really happened,
what really went wrong, And instead of just picking one
of those, we kind of tussled with each other through
(04:53):
the show and try to get those opinions out there.
It's interesting. It's almost like a Rashima type story where
there's just like an unreliable narrator, you kind of have to,
as the listener, make up your own mind as to
what really happened. For example, even this woman in question,
um ms bach Uh, she wrote a lot of these
blogs where she wrote about herself in the first person
(05:14):
as though she were the one, you know, doing the
blood transfusions on these malnourished children and and you know,
putting in I v s. And obviously a big part
of the story and the and the hubbub here is
that she has no medical experience, but she wrote about
it from the first person and later walked that back
and was like, oh, maybe it was just being a
little self aggrandizing and chose to write it in that,
you know form, but it really was others. There were
(05:36):
always nurses around that were, you know, counseling me and
telling me what to do. But even that part, it's
like how do you who do you believe? And it's
just it's fascinating that level the psychology of it. And
I was aware of White Savior as a movie trope
more than anything, where it's like the idea of like
dances with wolves or the white guy comes in and
saves all the you know, the Native Americans from themselves
(05:57):
or whatever. That is where I kind of heard about this.
So the idea that as like a genuine psychological complex,
I guess uh is very fascinating. I mean you speak
a little bit about that, um and how you kind
of started digging deeper into this idea of this almost
being a pathological you know, issue with with certain people. UM. Well,
(06:18):
I would just say on that end, we actually didn't
want to go down the pathological route for a very
specific reason, uh, in that because there was a whole
lot of evidence. We didn't want to start like armchair
diagnosing people, and we didn't want to kind of chalk
this up to a singular like mental issue or anything
like that, because what we saw and what we knew
(06:39):
from our years of reporting out there was just that
this was a systematic issue as much as it was
about like one really extraordinary case. So we really did
try to push all the pathological stuff inside, even though
there is incredible scholarship about it. There's something called um
pathological altruism where you go out of your way to
help even though you know it's hurting um, the people
(07:01):
you're trying to help are even hurting yourself, And that
kind of stuff is incredible, but um we were really
trying to try to stay on the track of understanding
this bigger system, because when you look at Renee's story,
the first thing you realize is that there's this whole
evangelical world in America that a lot of people, unless
you're in it, like you don't see it. I mean,
(07:22):
just like a quick example of that. I mean, the
lawyer that she's got on the case is the same
lawyer that represented Terry Shabo's parents, And that was incredible
to me until I realized that there's all these connections
in this evangelical world and like pretty much any story
you pick up, you're gonna kind of pull on all
these other threads. I think that's an awesome um point.
(07:43):
I'm using awesome in the in the term that it
means if you look up the word in the dictionary,
we only speak in biblical fantastic. This this is something
I don't I don't want to lose because I think
for many people, unless you have traveled maybe outside of
(08:03):
the US, you you may not, or unless you are
yourself with practicing evangelical or in the missionary community, you're right.
This is one of those things that is sort of
an an invisible culture because it's so insular, and I
think that's the word that gets used accurately quite often here.
One thing that struck me in in this story is
(08:25):
that it is uh, it is considered completely legitimate right
to be spiritually called to something, rather than perhaps secularly
qualified to do that thing. And with this, when we
were looking at it was when I was digging into UH,
(08:46):
some of the research here, I came up with a
couple of immediate questions that when to present to our audience, UM,
instead of me running through them, I think you would
be much better suited to answer these are jeeves. So
so the big accusations, right, the big rumors in Jinja
(09:06):
were that this person was making the story about themselves, right,
and that this person was doing um, doing the kind
of medical operations or the kind of medical procedures that
would require uh formal training. Is that correct? And could
you when you're telling us about that, could you tell
(09:28):
us a little bit about, um, how much of that
was rumor how much of that was true? And uh,
while I'm just laundry listing questions, I'm so sorry to
do this, but I'm so curious about this uh, could
you also tell us, um, how people are able to
practice medical procedures in this country without licensing or without training. Yes,
(09:52):
so let me take the last one first then, um, So,
Uganda does have a pretty extensive system of laws to
keep uh NGOs in check and make sure that people
that are qualified are the ones providing the services. But
at the end of the day, it's also an enforcement
issue and these uh these places where a lot of
(10:13):
these NGOs are based are not the most well resourced,
and so it's pretty easy to slip through the cracks. Um.
I mean when we started the story, the things I
was hearing made me, it made me feel like there
was this this conspiracy that somehow the government or these
big NGO groups had all conspired to allow this to
happen something like that. But when it came down to
(10:34):
it was kind of like a more pedestrian answer, like
you've got one guy in charge of the whole district
with nine registered NGOs, what can you really do? And
so it's it's pretty easy to slip onto the radar there.
And it's one of those things that up until recently,
it was pretty sensitive to to talk about openly when
a lot of the government budget is coming from foreign NGOs.
(10:56):
That's not something you want to scare away. But the
tide has changed now and Yugandan government is taking a
lot of steps to kind of cull a lot of
these paper NGOs and make sure that everyone has their
documentation and make sure everyone's doing everything above board. And
it's gonna be a slow process, but um, you know,
things are changing there. As far as the other stuff,
I mean, when I came in, the allegations were out
(11:19):
of the world. Um let me tell you, like everything
I was told about Renee was an image of this
like megalomaniac, this crazy person. It was kind of like
apocalypse Now. I felt like Martin Sheen going up the
river up to meet Colonel Kurts and just reading his files,
(11:39):
and this like image loomed larger and larger in my
mind every day. And when I read her blogs, you
can see this trajectory where like two nine, she's like
nineteen years old. She gets to Uganda, and she's got
all this ambition and this good intention to do something
for what she sees as a very vulnerable, needy place.
(12:01):
And it starts off well enough. I mean, she gets
all these kids to her house to feed them. Launch
every day, like a thousand kids are lining up with
bowls and they get beans and rice. Um. And it
was great for a while. Um, she was like just
a popular woman in the community. And then she starts
noticing all these mothers bringing her children that are just
(12:23):
very sick. There's nowhere else to take them, or at
least that's what she thinks. Um. She sees the government hospitals,
she sees how longer staff they are, and she says, well,
then let me try to jump in and help out.
And it's a mission creep where no one tells you know,
and there's not this really robust system of regulations to
keep you from overstepping your bounds. And one day you're like,
(12:46):
I don't know, trying to place an IVY line. And
then a few years down the road you have an
entire i CU built into your house. And in a
culture of missionaries, especially in Ginger, where you're rewarded for
being ambitious, for taking all this extra responsibility, for going
above and beyond and really putting others before yourself, or
(13:06):
making it seem like that it was almost inevitable, like
that's something like this could happen and when I asked
a Ugandan NGEO forum person. Her name is Margaret. She
works at the NGEO Forum in Ginja and she oversees
all the NGOs there. Uh. And when I asked her
about this whole case and like kind of ran her
through the allegations. I was like, does this surprise you?
(13:27):
And she says absolutely not, Like there's probably happening again
somewhere out here, like we just can't know and there's
so much going on, which yeah, I guess goes back
to the whole thing about this being a systematic issue.
More than anything else, I wanna I want to speak
up just briefly for the missionaries here. It's just in
general because I did. I grew up in in a
Christian church for for a long time and you know,
(13:51):
gone a bit of a different way a while ago
and up to this point. But for for for a
time there the way at least I was exposed to
missionary work. It was truly an altruistic thing where a
community somewhere across the world can send their funds, their
money is that they collect generally on Sundays when I
(14:11):
was a part of it, and then you know, send
it somewhere else so that help can be provided, whether
it's in building infrastructure or maybe even feeding somebody. UM.
I can totally see how maybe that the underlying reasoning
to do something like that, even if it is to
spread perhaps your religion, if the underlying reason is to
(14:34):
help others, it is a tremendously helpful and wonderful thing,
or at least you know on paper, right. I can
totally also see how if you're gonna create a non
governmental organization and take it to the links. I guess
perhaps that Renee ended up taking her organization, I can
(14:54):
see how it could become problematic. Um. And just as
everything you've said there, g um, I I what did
you uncover about what was actually happening in those facilities
that she was running? Was it her? Was it a
team of people that were attempting to perform things like
(15:15):
giving a child an ivy or an injection of some
medication or another, or was it just her? I mean,
so that's kind of where this whole case got gets
tricky because at the end of the day, we don't
have access to medical documents from it. We don't have
access to a lot of the evidence that would be
(15:36):
required to say one way or another what happened. So
what we did was we picked a few cases that
seemed to really tell a story about this NGO and
really dove deep on those. One of the cases was
a girl named Patricia who came into the facility. She
was an infant and her body was swollen. She was
(15:58):
malnourished and had a lot of other complications going on,
and when she was brought to Serving His Children, it
was determined that she needed a blood transfusion. A doctor
over the phone told Renee that this girl needed a
blood transfusion, and so Renee and one of the nurses
there went out and got blood for Patricia. When it
(16:22):
came back, though, and when it was put into Patricia
and the transfusion began, they realized that the blood was
mismatched and Patricia started swelling up, and so at that
point an American nurse was called in. The nurse made
the call to send the child to a private hospital
in Kampala, the capital of Uganda, and Patricia stayed there
(16:43):
for a week until she stabilized. At that point, she
was brought back to Serving his Children and developed a
flesh eating bacteria on her face that was just growing
and growing and almost killed her. And then it came
out that the hospital in Kampala had actually diagnosed the
fly scheeting bacteria, and so then the question became why
was Patricia discharged and why did she go back to
(17:06):
this unlicensed facility without proper medical professionals to take care
of these really highly sensitive cases. And it's really a
lot of stuff that we found was kind of like that,
where was just this gradual accumulation of mistakes of someone
who did not have the expertise needed to manage a
(17:26):
situation stepping in to do so, and that led to
pretty horrifying consequences. And to this day Patricia lives with
a scar on her face. And there there are a
lot of complications that can go along with this kind
of malnourish When I was reading a piece on NPR
about and oftentimes they're so sensitive where you are. Oftentimes
they're better left alone than trying to intervene so rapidly,
(17:50):
because you can absolutely cause a heart attack or any
other number of side effects. I guess from just how
sensitive and fragile their bodies have become, not to mention
many are living with hiv um other conditions that just
exacerbate the whole thing. Uh, And so that's particularly I
think why this is extra disturbing, the thought of someone
with no medical training thinking they can just go in
(18:12):
and do all this stuff. Yeah, And I think like
this is like a kind of a really simple test
that a lot of people bring up with this case
and a lot of mission work abroad, Like just if
you wouldn't do it in your own neighborhood, would you
be able to do it abroad? A lot of the
work that these volunteers are doing, um, these volunteer humanitarians
or missionaries are doing there there kind of organizing pills
(18:36):
and a pharmacy, or they're building walls and an orphanage,
or they're playing with kids. I mean, they're not highly
technical things, and they're not sending highly technically qualified people.
And so the question then becomes, wouldn't it benefit the
community there to just hire locals, Like, wouldn't it make
more sense to build up the local capacity instead of
sending kids from America out there? And so at that
(19:00):
point you start to see these mission trips less concerned
about the impact that they're making on the grounds versus
what they're doing for the people actually going abroad. They're
selling you an experience to go reconnect with your faith
and put your faith into action. And I think a
lot of people really have great experiences and have a
(19:21):
different outlook on life after that. UM, and when they're
managed well, they can be really great experiences on both
sides of it. Unfortunately, when the profit motive comes in
and when really highly technical issues start to crop up
in these things, that's when we need to be careful
about how to proceed. You know, I agree with that point.
(19:45):
We've done some previous work on in geos. I think
I think for many people it's easy to hear the
phrase in GEO, especially here in the West, and think, oh,
you know, like captain planet the environment, helping people that
kuy this stuff right, UM, But I profoundly appreciate you
bringing up some of the ways in which NGOs can
(20:08):
aid and a bet uh systemic and equality in these
in these situations. One one great example would be UH
clothing drives right, donate clothing to a place and then
the way that that is dispersed or even sold to
people in another country. UH is a is a death
knell for the local textile industry. Do you UM find
(20:33):
in in at least this situation here, do you feel
like it would be fair to say that uh serving
his children at least or at least renee box original
work when she was just feeding the kids? Would would
you be Do you think it's fair to say that
that was a net benefit and that this accumulation of
(20:55):
mistakes are like did it start I guess my direct
question is regive. Did it start off already hurting more
than it was helping? Speaking specifically about a feeding program,
I think there's a lot of different opinions in that
whole world about whether that actually does good for a community,
or whether it fosters sort of dependency without building anything
(21:16):
there um kind of the whole like give a man
a fish argument. It's easy to see that what she
was doing at that point in her career was far
less dangerous than what she ended up doing. I think
a lot of people go over there with this grand
ambition of fixing these huge problems, and I think we
(21:38):
all remember when we were ny and like I thought,
we could fix a lot of it. But the difference
is we didn't have money or a structure to do
it with. And when you are giving those things and
pretty much carte blanche in a foreign country, things can
go off the rails um and so that's when oversight
(22:00):
kind of comes into play. I don't want to say
things started off great or anything like that, because like,
at the end of the day, I think there's something
to be said for the mentality that you have when
you come in, and the mentality that a lot of
these people have is one of pride and believing that
you can accomplish more than you are able to. And
(22:21):
like there's research um that we cited in the show.
A professor in Honduras it's spent a long time working
with mission groups and trying to understand the impact that
the short term missions have on local communities, and what
he saw was that people that are less qualified tend
to have more impactful personal experiences than people who were qualified,
(22:42):
because if you knew what was going on, you knew
you weren't helping at all, and you knew it was
going to be incredibly difficult to change the condition of
people's lives. But if you didn't know what you were
talking about, then you thought you were doing the Lord's
work out there, sort of a Dunning Krueger, Oh yeah,
that's the one or maybe delusions of grandeur. I mean,
there's certainly some folks in the discussion around this that
(23:05):
I've heard refer to this woman as being arrogant or like,
you know, who does she think she is to believe
that she can do these things that she clearly isn't
qualified to do? And obviously the end result was loss
of life. And whether or not that bounces out with
any positive impact that that she may have done, our
best intentions gone wrong or what have you, you still
can't deny that there's some kind of blind I don't know,
(23:29):
pride or or self delusion involved and just charging into
this kind of situation headlong without maybe a proper plan
to do it correctly. A couple of years ago, when
I was reporting in South Sudan, I was covering what
ended up being a government assault on a town in
(23:49):
northern South Sudan. A number of soldiers went and massacred
a an ethnic community that they had a longstanding, um
it's a bad relationship with See when I got there,
this whole town was it was a ghost town, and
there were tens of thousands of people that had taken
(24:10):
refuge at the U N camp or at the Red
cross facility or at the Catholic compound in the middle
of town. And when I went to the Catholic compound,
I found an Indian nun there who had been in
South Sudana for thirty years, and she took me in
and for weeks I was by her side as she
handled the fallout of this horrific attack in her town.
(24:34):
And for the first time I felt like I had
seen what a missionary, or really anyone was capable of
doing when they had their head in the right place,
in their heart in the right place. I mean, she
built schools, hospitals, clinics. She was a teacher at the
college she was teaching nurses. UM. She had built the
(24:55):
biggest children's hospital in the in the in that state.
And from the outside she was just this unimpeachable figure
of righteousness. And I don't use that word lightly or sarcastically.
I mean she was just like she was doing the
thing um and it made me want to go following
her footsteps. And it was just like a very captivating,
(25:17):
inspiring thing to see. But every night, when we would
kind of go back to her place and eat dinner,
she would confess and say that she didn't know what
her purpose was. She didn't feel like she was making
any impact. Um, she didn't know where all of this led.
But the next morning she would be up before I
was making breakfast and getting out to hit the road
(25:37):
and get to work. And I think what I saw
there was that it's a wonderful thing to have a
good heart, a wonderful thing to have good intentions about something.
But what makes doing the right thing difficult is that
you never know if you are doing the right thing.
And the only way to guard against crossing that line
(26:00):
is to have humility and self doubt. And I found
that the people who are often doing the right thing
in this world are also tearing themselves to pieces trying
to answer the question of if they are doing the
right thing. That's a really beautiful way of looking at it,
and it's true. I mean, it is kind of all
constant moral quandary and just I always tell like my daughter,
(26:22):
you know, self awareness is like one of the most
important skills, I guess, or traits that you can have,
because without that, you're kind of just a drift. You know,
you can't really see yourself or how other people see you,
or how will you even know how can you like
self correct or of course correct if you get you know,
on the wrong path. So that's in this incredible story,
(26:42):
and we'll return to explore the story of missionary in
further depth after a word from our sponsor and we're back.
So Serving his Children was found into thousand nine in
the States and then was made official in Uganda in
(27:06):
what it started out as was an outreach and feeding
program UM. So Renee got a house in this pretty
rough neighborhood outside Ginja in Uganda, which is pretty popular
tourist town. UM a lot of a lot of expats
out there doing like rafting and camping and four wheeling
and stuff. And it's also become this kind of missionary mecca.
(27:29):
UM that's really popular because it's an easy place to
live whether there's great all year round and just really
friendly to outsiders. So Renee set up shop there in
uh in this rough neighborhood called Ms. Sessa. She rented
a house there and twice a week she would start
feeding the kids beans and rice. And then she noticed
(27:49):
all these other problems underneath that where these mothers were
coming to her with really sick children that needed help,
and so she started taking on some of these kids
and letting them to stay over at the house, letting
them get healthy, and kind of keeping a close eye
on them. And slowly that led into a more active
role of getting kids to hospitals, um, getting them blood, medicine,
(28:12):
getting them whatever they needed. And then around it became
a more in house thing where they were trying to
do impatient procedures and really focus on this issue of malnutrition.
But the thing is, when you're malnourished, you also pick
up a load of other diseases, and so you have
all these severe complications and you need to have the
(28:34):
highest training and qualifications to manage these really sensitive kids.
And at that point, like it's difficult to say when
things went off the rails, but like at that point
you can say, like I think we're we're awful now.
Um so, uh, that's a crucial part in the timeline though,
as you like that that part of that area twenty eleven.
(28:58):
I believe that's when we see the involvement of one
Jacqueline Kramlich. Is that correct, Jackie raml Yeah, yeah, Jackie
Kramlike Jackie Kramlick is uh plays a pivotal part I
guess in the way that the US and the West
sees the narrative unfold. Could could you tell us a
(29:19):
little bit about Kramlick's background and then how that led
to Kelsey Nielsen? And you mentioned this earlier, and I'm
sure it's an organization or it's at least a series
of terms that some of our fellow listeners clocked no
white saviors. So how how does Kramlake's involvement lead to
(29:41):
Kelsey lead to this? I gotta tell you, um, our
podcast team group chat is the image of Charlie in
the mail room with all the red strings pointing at
different photos and everything. And I've never been able to
put that in coherent words, and it's been yeah, it's
so I'll give it a shot here. Um. But Jackie
(30:02):
Cram got her nursing degree in America and was qualified
to be a nurse. But when she got to Uganda,
renee's organization told her that she did not need to
register for a medical license in Uganda. So the whole
time Jackie was there, she was operating without a nursing
license in Uganda. Nevertheless, her expertise was rarely called on,
(30:24):
and there's a few anecdotes that she tells where there
would be a really sick kid and Renee would be
like scrambling to figure out what was going wrong, and
instead of asking Jackie what was going on, she would
call a friend in America to google it or something
like that. And it's that kind of unclear chain of
command or that lack of delegation that was kind of
(30:46):
a first red flag for Jackie. But what really did
it for Jackie was that case of Patricia where she
saw over and over again all these mistakes kind of
build up and lead to this child be scarred for
life for what Jackie as was no good reason, like
just this child should not have been scarred at all.
Shortly after Patricia was discharged from serving as children, Jackie
(31:08):
resigned and I went to go work with another organization
in Ginger. Around this time, a woman named Kelsey Nielsen,
who is an American from Philadelphia came to Ginger to
start her own NGO for Family Reunification, which I guess
this is the other this is the red string pointing outwards.
(31:29):
But in Ginger there's a whole industry of child adoptions
that is pretty corrupt, and I mean, in the most
cynical phrasing you can pay fifty grand and get a
lawyer to prove it not an adoption for a kid,
and then you are a brand new parent. Uh. And
a lot of the families that go through this process
don't know necessarily what they're getting into. They think it's
(31:50):
just like for a year or two and then the
child will come back. But then they realized that they
signed away. There there their son or daughter for forever.
So it's a really tragic thing. And what Kelsey's organization
tried to do was provide these families with resources to
be able to keep their families together rather than um
being offered money and having these kids leave. And at
(32:12):
that time, Renee and a few other missionaries were really
like just top of their game. They were the mother
Theresas of Ginger. They were just they set the standard
for what a missionary was, for how much self sacrifice,
like the work entails, and Kelsey really looked up to them.
But at some point, all these contradictions in Ginger of
(32:36):
people saying that they were doing good for the community
but then the community not getting any better, they kind
of came to ahead and Kelsey decided she needed to
speak out, so she teamed up with a former employee
of hers, a Yugandan social worker named Olivia Alasso, and
the two of them created an organization called No White Saviors,
(32:56):
which is famous for its Instagram page. It's fiery Instagram
page UM, which has a couple hundred thousand followers now.
When I met them, it was like ten fifteen thousand UM,
so it has been incredible to see how much traction
they've gotten UM over the last year. There's another Instagram
(33:18):
page called Barbie Savior, which, if you've seen it, is
a collection of photos of Barbie Doll dressed up as
a volunteer tourist, a missionary kind of trapesing around Africa
finding herself and following her calling. And it's just like
really sarcastic thing where she's picking up black babies and
being like, oh my God, like I'm in love at
(33:38):
this place, and she gets like a tattoo of Africa
on her chest and everything. And that account was actually
started by Jackie Kramlick. Part of the impetus for this account,
which has a hundred fifty thousand followers now, was Renee,
and Jackie says that one of the first photos they
did of Barbie getting on a plane and waving goodbye
to her family is a replica of the photo that
(34:01):
Renee put up on her blog of the same thing.
And so that was kind of our window into seeing
this Ginger community as almost just like high school drama.
And I don't want to minimize the trauma of the
victims in this whole situation by saying, oh, it's just
(34:22):
like a mean girls fight, but I mean, there's a
big part of the story that is just as pressure
cooker of a town with a bunch of young missionaries
that are all trying to come all trying to save
the world, and they're at each other's throats the whole time.
And it's interesting because Kelsey looked at the superstars, the
(34:44):
rock stars of Ginger, like Katie Davis and Renee back
as the mean girls of Ginger, that they were these
popular girls that everyone aspired to be and he had
to be smart and pretty to get into their group.
But when we're he talks about how the Ginger community
turned on her and tried to demolish her entire career
(35:07):
and ruin her reputation. She calls Kelsey and them the
mean girls. Uh, And so it kind of gets into
this back and forth where I mean, we got lost
in it. Um, there's all these rumors floating around, and
at some point we just have to divorce ourselves and
get back to the real story, which are the families
(35:28):
that went through Serving His Children. Um, but it gave
us a huge insight into what happens when you go
to church on Sunday, put money in the basket and
it goes off to ginger and uh, we're all kind
of gossiping at the cafe there, paying for latte's, uh,
with your aunt's money. And with that, we're going to
(35:50):
take a quick break and hear a word from our
sponsor and we're back. Let's jump to the real impact,
because there, you guys did some some reporting on the
actual quantitative numbers of people who you know, went through
(36:15):
the system there went you know, lived there for a
while or retreated there, who were either injured or did
not make it. Can you talk to us a little
bit about the the actual impact that was had on
far too many people there. Okay, So Serving his Children's
inpatient program started in and in the Yugandan government stepped
(36:40):
into shut Serving His Children down because they did not
have a medical license. The one that they had had expired.
So if you look the numbers that Serving his Children provides,
between hundred and five children passed away while thirty five
children went home happy and healthy. And you can look
(37:03):
at those numbers and read them in a way that says,
I mean, look, I mean they got a four mortality rate.
That's like not bad considering that the government standard is
like they were doing better than the best government hospitals.
But then you gotta remember these are serving his children's
own numbers and not corroborated elsewhere. And at the end
(37:23):
of the day, for four of the five years of
those statistics, Serving his Children was an unlicensed medical facility.
It was an illegal facility in Uganda. At that point,
you have to ask yourself, like, is one child's death
at a facility like this too many? And that's I guess,
like what when it comes down to it, like that's
(37:47):
the interpretive part of this. And some people are willing
to swallow those numbers and say these kids would have
died no matter what, and at least someone's trying to
help them. And in fact, some Ugandan doctors we spoke
with told this that. But I think it takes education
and awareness of cases like this to make people think
(38:08):
twice about following in these footsteps. One thing that David Gibbs,
who helps represent the family here in the States, the
Bach family here in the States, one thing he says
is that the campaign that No White Saviors is trying
to put out against Renee, against all these other white
saviors and missionaries, what he's afraid of is it will
(38:33):
create a chilling effect on people that want to go
out into the world and help their fellow person. And
that's that's his fear that someone with good intentions, when
they see things like this, will be too afraid to
go out and help. But there's a part of me
that thinks maybe that is what's needed. Maybe, like that's
(38:56):
how you bring self awareness into the situation and bring
humility into this situation is by holding to account people
that have taken advantage of certain situations or slip through
cracks and hurt more than they helped. And and that's
that's the point. You know, I'm perceived delinquent society. You know,
(39:19):
there are larger links everything. Nothing nothing is created in isolation, right,
Everything exists in context and is in some way and
end result of all the actions preceding it. And one
thing that I think is incredibly pertinent here in multiple
situations abroad and in the US today is the concept
(39:43):
of knowing one's rights that you hit upon excellently in
this case. Um. One thing that seems to be a
damning allegation is the lack of informed consent, which we've
talked about previously on this show. You will have of
I believe there were some folks on the s HC
(40:04):
side who said, well, paperwork aside, legal or illegal status aside.
We had people signed forms that acknowledged you know that
this is not that that very carefully acknowledged the type
of care it was, and it was not and these
forms that the like, I understand that some people were
(40:27):
illiterate when they were asked to sign these forms. Uh,
and that I further understand that these forms were in English,
which not necessarily everybody in the country or at that
center specifically could read. Is that correct? Yeah? So I
don't know the ins and outs have you got in law?
But from what the the the lawyer on the side
(40:50):
of the plaintiffs says, if a person who does not
speak English or read English signs one of these documents,
it has to be accompanied by a proof that it
was interpreted or translated for um, the signy and those
documents were not provided which have the which like threatened
(41:12):
to invalidate them. And a big part of this case
is this question of whether Renee impersonated a doctor. There's
allegations that she wore a lab coat or stethoscope. I mean,
we have photos of her with the stethoscope, but not
the lab coat. And then there's allegations that like she
told people she was a doctor or did not refuse
(41:33):
when people called her a doctor. And I think that
it is part of the same discussion where you go
into these rural communities that their engagements with white folks
for the most part are people with NGOs and people
from these big aid groups. When you see a white
(41:53):
person walk into one of these communities and they're asking
for children with malnutrition and they're got a clipboard in
their hands and the stethoscope around their neck, you're gonna
think that they have some medical qualifications. Um And a
lot of the form employees kind of say this as well,
that it took them years before they realized Renee wasn't
(42:14):
a qualified doctor. I think a lot of what no
white saviors. Is getting at as well, is that white
people in these rare, in these um vulnerable places kinda
get away with a lot just by this color of
their skin, and like their privilege means so much more
in these places than it does even in America. Even
(42:36):
I could like walk into one of these places and
with an American accent and just kind of people would
respect me and like give me a certain amount of
respect and trust that is not afforded to Ugandans. And
so part of it is people not knowing their rights,
and part of it is outsiders not fully aware of
(42:58):
the privilege that they carry into these community. That's really
something I mean, that's something I think we all need
to think about and internalized quite a lot. You know,
we're we're in a moment in history where whereasive I
think there's a tremendous amount of goodwill going around right now. Um,
there's a lot of learning and no matter how elementary
(43:20):
the learning is, it there's a lot of learning that's happening.
I wonder if they're you know, in your travels to Uganda,
to Sudan where wherever perhaps you've traveled for your work,
if you have found organizations or ways two. Maybe maybe
it's as simple as a monetary way of supporting a
(43:40):
group or somebody who's doing something good somewhere that people
listening and us that we could help without interfering. Do
you do you think there's anything out there that exists
like that. I think before anything else, it's just about
am I the right person to go out and do
that thing? And I think learning that for myself is
(44:03):
just like something that took me a long time to
even like begin to to start understanding. I mean, when
I went to South Sudan I was nineteen, got off
the plane to know anybody there and was like, I'm
gonna write stories about this place that I read about
in books. Learned pretty quickly that maybe I'm not the
person for it. And you know, it's a tricky thing
(44:24):
to kind of position yourself and say like where you
belong and what you should do, what you shouldn't do.
But where I kind of land after doing this whole
year long investigation is I tend to err on the
side of inaction now, I feel you, man. I mean,
it's like it gets so fed up and you just
(44:45):
feel kind of stymied, and it's like why bother that's
how I feel about the government, just like voting and stuff.
I mean, and it's not good, especially when you see
so many people mobilizing and getting out, you know, trying
to at least make a difference. Like I my ex
wife had had me and my daughter and her friend
and their son go out and do his protests and
there our neighborhood, and it's a predominantly black neighborhood, and
(45:06):
I was sort of like, oh, this is preaching to
the choir. This is so I was so cynical about it.
And then we went out and it was just people
hunking the horn and just seeing that we gave a
ship enough to like, you know, stand there on the
curb with Zion, not saying that's like some grand gesture,
but it really opened my eyes to the fact that
even just showing people that you care is meaningful, more
meaningful than you think. I think. Sometimes, you know, it's
(45:26):
easy to get swept up in the nihilism of it all,
uh and and to forget that, like, you know, people
do see you when you see them, and that's important
not to lose sight of. I think. I don't know,
I think. To refine my point, then I guess I
would caution against people that want to start their own
thing without seeing what other people are up to first,
(45:49):
because there's people out there doing it right. I mean,
like one great example in Gina itself, Right when Renee
came in to start her organization, there was another white
missionary woman named Elizabeth who had been a former real
estate broker in California and then one day heard her
calling to Africa and ended up in Uganda. UM. She
also wanted to tackle malnutrition, but rather than starting her
(46:11):
own program, building her own facility anything like that, she
went to the government hospital and asked them what do
you need and ended up building a malnutrition ward for
them where she would just keep it stocked with supplies
and help administer the just the logistical and administrative aspects
of it. Right. She knew the limits of her expertise
(46:36):
and put everything she knew into action, UM with an
organization that was already set up to tackle the problem
that she wanted to tackle. This brings up something that
got that I think got skipped over a little bit
at the beginning. They wanted to get in here, uh,
which is the idea of what what is helping versus hurting?
(47:01):
There is also wrapped up in that inherently the question
of what is centering right? Psychologically, we're all programmed to
think of ourselves as the protagonist of our own story, right. Uh.
And with this, you know, it's an ongoing problem for
anyone doing international research, uh, that someone comes in and
they say, well, you know, I went to school for this,
(47:23):
uh and I know, like I know a little bit
of one native language, let me tell you how to
handle this, right. And it's wrapped up in this. But
we also see that in the protest here in um
the US, right. You know, there have been people with
I'm sure the best of intentions, right, who are who
are saying, you know, I want to express solidarity by
(47:46):
starting my organization that will uh, that will you know,
make me feel good about doing the right thing right
and and perhaps back up my performative social media. But
even within function, these kinds of organizations can be mothering
and they can also uh divert funding that was going
(48:10):
to you know, like the government hospital that already really
needed that maternity ward that you're mentioning that Elizabeth created.
And I think that's a I think that's a powerful thing.
I'm I know it's a lot to ask, uh, And
I hope it doesn't sound like, you know, we're heaping
opprobrium on people who do as you said, probably have
(48:33):
the best intentions. But is that what you would recommend?
Would you recommend for someone who wants to help to
with what would be a good way to say this?
Would it be more like invest and amplify rather than
try to start a new thing. I'm not sure the
right is just take a minute. You know, I'm not
(48:55):
saying like sit down forever, but like just take a minute, um,
do a bit of research and see who's doing it
out there. I mean I had a moment when after
I was with the nun in South Sudan where I
wanted to be a missionary, where I wanted to like
do the thing, and my plan was just to go
(49:16):
move back to South Sudan and live with her and
just like learn the ropes there. And and I think
there's a lot of value in just going to a
place without an agenda necessarily and then just kind of
soaking it in because a lot of the people that
go out to these places, I mean, part of the
(49:36):
reason you're going out there is to satisfy the sense
of adventure, of being in a foreign place. I mean,
I'm guilty of that as much as any other foreign correspondent.
I think I don't think there's harm in just going
to a place to be there and learn about what's
going on before you decide to do anything. Because nine
(49:57):
times out of ton, whatever problem you're trying to solve,
there's someone already out there doing it and they can
use your help. I think that's tremendously well said. We
we typically when we explore some of these stories, at
least on our show, we we tried to go toward
the future, which I think you have done very well,
and then we also try to explore current events. We
mentioned a couple of times a lawsuit for anyone in
(50:19):
the audience who's wondering, UM, as far as I understand regime,
that lawsuit has not reached a conclusion. Is that correct?
So yeah, just to um kind of fill in the
blanks on the lawsuit. In January of nineteen two mothers
who claimed that their children passed away after being treated
at serving his children took Grenade a court um. They
(50:41):
filed a civil suit against her in uh the Ginger
High Court and are currently awaiting the outcome of a
mediation process to try to settle something out of court,
and if that doesn't happen, then it will return to
the public forum. So since March, I think recently the
Yugan and government kind of shut down all those processes
(51:03):
with COVID precautions and so everything's kind of frozen for now.
But it's a difficult thing to like figure out what
justice looks like necessarily in all these situations, because on
one end, there's an argument that these mothers could just
settle out of court, get a couple of thousand dollars,
go home, and I just that's a lot of money
(51:26):
out there, right, And then the other argument is like, no,
they gotta fight this thing and they got to prove something,
and um, there's justice to be one here for everybody.
But I think it's a lot to ask as well
of anyone. You know, this is a tremendously heavy thing
to think about and talk about and subject to make
(51:49):
a show about. But I would just say thank you
to you and your team for making it to making
all of us aware of what's going on there. He's
better aware. If you'd like to learn more about this
case and everything that happened at serving his children and
the story of renee Bach and the ongoing lawsuits and
(52:10):
everything involved. We highly recommend you go and check out
the podcast The Missionary, which is hosted by our guests today,
Regiev Gala, as well as his team members Halima ge
Gandhi and Malcolm Burnley. Again, can't recommend it enough. The
podcast is called The Missionary. Yeah, Regieve, thank you for
(52:33):
coming on air with us today. Because you travel so widely,
I can only imagine it must also be a little
bit odd to be in one place for an extended
amount of time. So thank you for spending this time
with us. Uh. We want, as Matt said, we want
everybody to check out this show. It's ongoing as we
(52:56):
record this, but we have their multiple episodes out there.
We do highly recommend that you dive in. This is
top notch journalism. Uh. These are and this is not
not blowing smoke here, it's weird, Riggi because I can
see you on the call, but I'm not We're not
saying this because you're here. This is very well researched,
it's captivating, It's more than worth your time. Uh, and
(53:20):
we want to hear what you think about the topics
we've addressed here in g OS. We want to hear
what you think about the ideas that we've explored regarding
missionary work and the ideas regarding renee bach Uh Regive.
For people who would like to learn more about you
and the missionary and your work outside of the missionary
(53:43):
where's the place they can find you or learn more
about you on the on the big creepy big brother
we call the Internet. Well, my portfolio website is rogi
gola dot com and my Twitter handle is rogi Gola,
where you can find me tweeting about NASCAR most of
the time. But hey, Noel uh, speaking of uh speaking
(54:04):
the Internet, I hear our shows on there too. Yeah, Yeah,
we're we're around. You can find us on the usual
social media spots like Facebook and Instagram and all that,
where either conspiracy stuff or conspiracy stuff show on all
the usual suspects, um. And then you can also find
us as individual human people. I am on Instagram exclusively
(54:25):
at how Now Noel Brown, I am at ben Bullan
hs W. On Twitter, you can find a Regive and
I both on their uh and I am in a
burst of creativity calling myself at ben Bullan on Instagram.
And if you don't want to use social media, you
can always give us a phone call. Our number is
one eight three three st d w y t K.
(54:49):
You can leave us a message. You have three minutes
talk about this episode, any other episode, or another one
you'd like us to cover. Really, we just we'd love
to hear from you, so please give us a call.
But if none of that, white bags your badgers. We
have one way you can always get in touch with us.
You don't have to just uh, you know, meet me
at a crossroads at midnight, or save a name into
(55:11):
a dark mirror. You can send us an email twenty
four hours a day, seven days a week, how many
ever days in a year there are you can reach
us directly. We are conspiracy at iHeart radio dot com.
(55:42):
Stuff they don't want you to know is a production
of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio,
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Radio. Welcome back to the show.
(00:25):
My name is Matt, my name is Noel. They called
me Ben. We are joined as always with our super
producer Paul Mission controlled decades. Most importantly, you are you.
You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't
want you to know. It's your favorite or some of
your favorite. Quentin Quarantino's back again today. We are exploring
(00:49):
a very strange case. Let's start with the idea of
missionary work. You've heard the phrase before, right It's it's
sometimes associated with these acts that encapsulate the utmost of altruism.
And then sometimes there are cases that appear to be
self serving, and some cases, like the tragic case of
John Chow in North Centinel Island, seemed to be inherently
(01:12):
misinformed with terrible, horrific consequences. But in the world of
missionary work, you may have also heard the story of
one renee Bach who founded the organization serving his children,
often abbreviated as s HC in Uganda, in two thousand
and nine. You maybe somewhat familiar with this last story
(01:34):
at a headline level, but if you're like most of us,
you have not heard the full extent of what happened here.
And that is why today we are exploring the strange,
tragic tale of Renee Box actions and the organization in Uganda,
as well as some of the larger themes this story
touches upon. And luckily we are not doing it alone,
(01:56):
are we know? Today we are joined by Regime eve Gala,
a prolific freelance journalist and photographer. He's been published in
multiple outlets. You've probably seen his work in The Guardian, Vice,
Reuters and much much more. He, along with his team
Halima Gekandhi and Malcolm Burnley. Uh, Regieve, spent a year
(02:16):
investigating this story. He interviewed over a hundred people, asking crucial,
profound questions about the problems that arise when someone becomes
what could be called a white savior. So, Regiev, first
things first, Uh, welcome to the show and can you
please briefly describe the story that's going on here of SHC. Yeah,
(02:39):
thank you so much for having me on. Um. Yeah,
so I I got to Uganda last January, and a
few days after I got there, I heard about this
case of an American woman who had pretended to be
a doctor and who is now being accused of killing
hundreds of children. And a few days later a an
activist group called No Wait's Saviors helped file a court
(03:02):
case against her in Uganda's High Court, And so I
went along with them, and I met a few of
the people that had signed affidavits against Renee, and they
kind of set me off on this journey that took
us the next year to really get to the bottom
of this whole story and figure out what was really
going on with all these allegations. So I think some
of the initial questions here uh are going to be
(03:24):
concerning your process, which may be a little bit of
a dryway to start. So in this, in this story,
in the missionary, which one thing that you all have
done that's pretty captivating to me is that you're it's
a collaborative work of journalism, uh, and it's still I
can only imagine must must be a huge undertaking. What
(03:48):
what led you and your colleagues Halima and Malcolm to
take this approach to narrative, to storytelling an investigation. Yeah, well,
pretty quickly when we got into the story, we realized
it was going to be a lot up to interpretation. Um.
I mean this was such a polarizing case. I mean
we had one group on one hand that literally called
itself No White Saviors, and then we have the accused
(04:11):
Renee on the other, and both were telling widely different stories. Um.
And when we got into it the like actual documentation,
the evidence was kind of sparse, and so what we
had to deal with mostly was all these competing narratives
and trying to stitch them together. And it just made
the most sense. Instead of one person kind of trying
to make sense of all these things, why don't we
(04:32):
kind of bring all those perspectives to the show. And
so the three of us all come with our own
personal experiences and our own take on just how this
case unfolded and who's to blame and what really happened,
what really went wrong, And instead of just picking one
of those, we kind of tussled with each other through
(04:53):
the show and try to get those opinions out there.
It's interesting. It's almost like a Rashima type story where
there's just like an unreliable narrator, you kind of have to,
as the listener, make up your own mind as to
what really happened. For example, even this woman in question,
um ms bach Uh, she wrote a lot of these
blogs where she wrote about herself in the first person
(05:14):
as though she were the one, you know, doing the
blood transfusions on these malnourished children and and you know,
putting in I v s. And obviously a big part
of the story and the and the hubbub here is
that she has no medical experience, but she wrote about
it from the first person and later walked that back
and was like, oh, maybe it was just being a
little self aggrandizing and chose to write it in that,
you know form, but it really was others. There were
(05:36):
always nurses around that were, you know, counseling me and
telling me what to do. But even that part, it's
like how do you who do you believe? And it's
just it's fascinating that level the psychology of it. And
I was aware of White Savior as a movie trope
more than anything, where it's like the idea of like
dances with wolves or the white guy comes in and
saves all the you know, the Native Americans from themselves
(05:57):
or whatever. That is where I kind of heard about this.
So the idea that as like a genuine psychological complex,
I guess uh is very fascinating. I mean you speak
a little bit about that, um and how you kind
of started digging deeper into this idea of this almost
being a pathological you know, issue with with certain people. UM. Well,
(06:18):
I would just say on that end, we actually didn't
want to go down the pathological route for a very
specific reason, uh, in that because there was a whole
lot of evidence. We didn't want to start like armchair
diagnosing people, and we didn't want to kind of chalk
this up to a singular like mental issue or anything
like that, because what we saw and what we knew
(06:39):
from our years of reporting out there was just that
this was a systematic issue as much as it was
about like one really extraordinary case. So we really did
try to push all the pathological stuff inside, even though
there is incredible scholarship about it. There's something called um
pathological altruism where you go out of your way to
help even though you know it's hurting um, the people
(07:01):
you're trying to help are even hurting yourself, And that
kind of stuff is incredible, but um we were really
trying to try to stay on the track of understanding
this bigger system, because when you look at Renee's story,
the first thing you realize is that there's this whole
evangelical world in America that a lot of people, unless
you're in it, like you don't see it. I mean,
(07:22):
just like a quick example of that. I mean, the
lawyer that she's got on the case is the same
lawyer that represented Terry Shabo's parents, And that was incredible
to me until I realized that there's all these connections
in this evangelical world and like pretty much any story
you pick up, you're gonna kind of pull on all
these other threads. I think that's an awesome um point.
(07:43):
I'm using awesome in the in the term that it
means if you look up the word in the dictionary,
we only speak in biblical fantastic. This this is something
I don't I don't want to lose because I think
for many people, unless you have traveled maybe outside of
(08:03):
the US, you you may not, or unless you are
yourself with practicing evangelical or in the missionary community, you're right.
This is one of those things that is sort of
an an invisible culture because it's so insular, and I
think that's the word that gets used accurately quite often here.
One thing that struck me in in this story is
(08:25):
that it is uh, it is considered completely legitimate right
to be spiritually called to something, rather than perhaps secularly
qualified to do that thing. And with this, when we
were looking at it was when I was digging into UH,
(08:46):
some of the research here, I came up with a
couple of immediate questions that when to present to our audience, UM,
instead of me running through them, I think you would
be much better suited to answer these are jeeves. So
so the big accusations, right, the big rumors in Jinja
(09:06):
were that this person was making the story about themselves, right,
and that this person was doing um, doing the kind
of medical operations or the kind of medical procedures that
would require uh formal training. Is that correct? And could
you when you're telling us about that, could you tell
(09:28):
us a little bit about, um, how much of that
was rumor how much of that was true? And uh,
while I'm just laundry listing questions, I'm so sorry to
do this, but I'm so curious about this uh, could
you also tell us, um, how people are able to
practice medical procedures in this country without licensing or without training. Yes,
(09:52):
so let me take the last one first then, um, So,
Uganda does have a pretty extensive system of laws to
keep uh NGOs in check and make sure that people
that are qualified are the ones providing the services. But
at the end of the day, it's also an enforcement
issue and these uh these places where a lot of
(10:13):
these NGOs are based are not the most well resourced,
and so it's pretty easy to slip through the cracks. Um.
I mean when we started the story, the things I
was hearing made me, it made me feel like there
was this this conspiracy that somehow the government or these
big NGO groups had all conspired to allow this to
happen something like that. But when it came down to
(10:34):
it was kind of like a more pedestrian answer, like
you've got one guy in charge of the whole district
with nine registered NGOs, what can you really do? And
so it's it's pretty easy to slip onto the radar there.
And it's one of those things that up until recently,
it was pretty sensitive to to talk about openly when
a lot of the government budget is coming from foreign NGOs.
(10:56):
That's not something you want to scare away. But the
tide has changed now and Yugandan government is taking a
lot of steps to kind of cull a lot of
these paper NGOs and make sure that everyone has their
documentation and make sure everyone's doing everything above board. And
it's gonna be a slow process, but um, you know,
things are changing there. As far as the other stuff,
I mean, when I came in, the allegations were out
(11:19):
of the world. Um let me tell you, like everything
I was told about Renee was an image of this
like megalomaniac, this crazy person. It was kind of like
apocalypse Now. I felt like Martin Sheen going up the
river up to meet Colonel Kurts and just reading his files,
(11:39):
and this like image loomed larger and larger in my
mind every day. And when I read her blogs, you
can see this trajectory where like two nine, she's like
nineteen years old. She gets to Uganda, and she's got
all this ambition and this good intention to do something
for what she sees as a very vulnerable, needy place.
(12:01):
And it starts off well enough. I mean, she gets
all these kids to her house to feed them. Launch
every day, like a thousand kids are lining up with
bowls and they get beans and rice. Um. And it
was great for a while. Um, she was like just
a popular woman in the community. And then she starts
noticing all these mothers bringing her children that are just
(12:23):
very sick. There's nowhere else to take them, or at
least that's what she thinks. Um. She sees the government hospitals,
she sees how longer staff they are, and she says, well,
then let me try to jump in and help out.
And it's a mission creep where no one tells you know,
and there's not this really robust system of regulations to
keep you from overstepping your bounds. And one day you're like,
(12:46):
I don't know, trying to place an IVY line. And
then a few years down the road you have an
entire i CU built into your house. And in a
culture of missionaries, especially in Ginger, where you're rewarded for
being ambitious, for taking all this extra responsibility, for going
above and beyond and really putting others before yourself, or
(13:06):
making it seem like that it was almost inevitable, like
that's something like this could happen and when I asked
a Ugandan NGEO forum person. Her name is Margaret. She
works at the NGEO Forum in Ginja and she oversees
all the NGOs there. Uh. And when I asked her
about this whole case and like kind of ran her
through the allegations. I was like, does this surprise you?
(13:27):
And she says absolutely not, Like there's probably happening again
somewhere out here, like we just can't know and there's
so much going on, which yeah, I guess goes back
to the whole thing about this being a systematic issue.
More than anything else, I wanna I want to speak
up just briefly for the missionaries here. It's just in
general because I did. I grew up in in a
Christian church for for a long time and you know,
(13:51):
gone a bit of a different way a while ago
and up to this point. But for for for a
time there the way at least I was exposed to
missionary work. It was truly an altruistic thing where a
community somewhere across the world can send their funds, their
money is that they collect generally on Sundays when I
(14:11):
was a part of it, and then you know, send
it somewhere else so that help can be provided, whether
it's in building infrastructure or maybe even feeding somebody. UM.
I can totally see how maybe that the underlying reasoning
to do something like that, even if it is to
spread perhaps your religion, if the underlying reason is to
(14:34):
help others, it is a tremendously helpful and wonderful thing,
or at least you know on paper, right. I can
totally also see how if you're gonna create a non
governmental organization and take it to the links. I guess
perhaps that Renee ended up taking her organization, I can
(14:54):
see how it could become problematic. Um. And just as
everything you've said there, g um, I I what did
you uncover about what was actually happening in those facilities
that she was running? Was it her? Was it a
team of people that were attempting to perform things like
(15:15):
giving a child an ivy or an injection of some
medication or another, or was it just her? I mean,
so that's kind of where this whole case got gets
tricky because at the end of the day, we don't
have access to medical documents from it. We don't have
access to a lot of the evidence that would be
(15:36):
required to say one way or another what happened. So
what we did was we picked a few cases that
seemed to really tell a story about this NGO and
really dove deep on those. One of the cases was
a girl named Patricia who came into the facility. She
was an infant and her body was swollen. She was
(15:58):
malnourished and had a lot of other complications going on,
and when she was brought to Serving His Children, it
was determined that she needed a blood transfusion. A doctor
over the phone told Renee that this girl needed a
blood transfusion, and so Renee and one of the nurses
there went out and got blood for Patricia. When it
(16:22):
came back, though, and when it was put into Patricia
and the transfusion began, they realized that the blood was
mismatched and Patricia started swelling up, and so at that
point an American nurse was called in. The nurse made
the call to send the child to a private hospital
in Kampala, the capital of Uganda, and Patricia stayed there
(16:43):
for a week until she stabilized. At that point, she
was brought back to Serving his Children and developed a
flesh eating bacteria on her face that was just growing
and growing and almost killed her. And then it came
out that the hospital in Kampala had actually diagnosed the
fly scheeting bacteria, and so then the question became why
was Patricia discharged and why did she go back to
(17:06):
this unlicensed facility without proper medical professionals to take care
of these really highly sensitive cases. And it's really a
lot of stuff that we found was kind of like that,
where was just this gradual accumulation of mistakes of someone
who did not have the expertise needed to manage a
(17:26):
situation stepping in to do so, and that led to
pretty horrifying consequences. And to this day Patricia lives with
a scar on her face. And there there are a
lot of complications that can go along with this kind
of malnourish When I was reading a piece on NPR
about and oftentimes they're so sensitive where you are. Oftentimes
they're better left alone than trying to intervene so rapidly,
(17:50):
because you can absolutely cause a heart attack or any
other number of side effects. I guess from just how
sensitive and fragile their bodies have become, not to mention
many are living with hiv um other conditions that just
exacerbate the whole thing. Uh, And so that's particularly I
think why this is extra disturbing, the thought of someone
with no medical training thinking they can just go in
(18:12):
and do all this stuff. Yeah, And I think like
this is like a kind of a really simple test
that a lot of people bring up with this case
and a lot of mission work abroad, Like just if
you wouldn't do it in your own neighborhood, would you
be able to do it abroad? A lot of the
work that these volunteers are doing, um, these volunteer humanitarians
or missionaries are doing there there kind of organizing pills
(18:36):
and a pharmacy, or they're building walls and an orphanage,
or they're playing with kids. I mean, they're not highly
technical things, and they're not sending highly technically qualified people.
And so the question then becomes, wouldn't it benefit the
community there to just hire locals, Like, wouldn't it make
more sense to build up the local capacity instead of
sending kids from America out there? And so at that
(19:00):
point you start to see these mission trips less concerned
about the impact that they're making on the grounds versus
what they're doing for the people actually going abroad. They're
selling you an experience to go reconnect with your faith
and put your faith into action. And I think a
lot of people really have great experiences and have a
(19:21):
different outlook on life after that. UM, and when they're
managed well, they can be really great experiences on both
sides of it. Unfortunately, when the profit motive comes in
and when really highly technical issues start to crop up
in these things, that's when we need to be careful
about how to proceed. You know, I agree with that point.
(19:45):
We've done some previous work on in geos. I think
I think for many people it's easy to hear the
phrase in GEO, especially here in the West, and think, oh,
you know, like captain planet the environment, helping people that
kuy this stuff right, UM, But I profoundly appreciate you
bringing up some of the ways in which NGOs can
(20:08):
aid and a bet uh systemic and equality in these
in these situations. One one great example would be UH
clothing drives right, donate clothing to a place and then
the way that that is dispersed or even sold to
people in another country. UH is a is a death
knell for the local textile industry. Do you UM find
(20:33):
in in at least this situation here, do you feel
like it would be fair to say that uh serving
his children at least or at least renee box original
work when she was just feeding the kids? Would would
you be Do you think it's fair to say that
that was a net benefit and that this accumulation of
(20:55):
mistakes are like did it start I guess my direct
question is regive. Did it start off already hurting more
than it was helping? Speaking specifically about a feeding program,
I think there's a lot of different opinions in that
whole world about whether that actually does good for a community,
or whether it fosters sort of dependency without building anything
(21:16):
there um kind of the whole like give a man
a fish argument. It's easy to see that what she
was doing at that point in her career was far
less dangerous than what she ended up doing. I think
a lot of people go over there with this grand
ambition of fixing these huge problems, and I think we
(21:38):
all remember when we were ny and like I thought,
we could fix a lot of it. But the difference
is we didn't have money or a structure to do
it with. And when you are giving those things and
pretty much carte blanche in a foreign country, things can
go off the rails um and so that's when oversight
(22:00):
kind of comes into play. I don't want to say
things started off great or anything like that, because like,
at the end of the day, I think there's something
to be said for the mentality that you have when
you come in, and the mentality that a lot of
these people have is one of pride and believing that
you can accomplish more than you are able to. And
(22:21):
like there's research um that we cited in the show.
A professor in Honduras it's spent a long time working
with mission groups and trying to understand the impact that
the short term missions have on local communities, and what
he saw was that people that are less qualified tend
to have more impactful personal experiences than people who were qualified,
(22:42):
because if you knew what was going on, you knew
you weren't helping at all, and you knew it was
going to be incredibly difficult to change the condition of
people's lives. But if you didn't know what you were
talking about, then you thought you were doing the Lord's
work out there, sort of a Dunning Krueger, Oh yeah,
that's the one or maybe delusions of grandeur. I mean,
there's certainly some folks in the discussion around this that
(23:05):
I've heard refer to this woman as being arrogant or like,
you know, who does she think she is to believe
that she can do these things that she clearly isn't
qualified to do? And obviously the end result was loss
of life. And whether or not that bounces out with
any positive impact that that she may have done, our
best intentions gone wrong or what have you, you still
can't deny that there's some kind of blind I don't know,
(23:29):
pride or or self delusion involved and just charging into
this kind of situation headlong without maybe a proper plan
to do it correctly. A couple of years ago, when
I was reporting in South Sudan, I was covering what
ended up being a government assault on a town in
(23:49):
northern South Sudan. A number of soldiers went and massacred
a an ethnic community that they had a longstanding, um
it's a bad relationship with See when I got there,
this whole town was it was a ghost town, and
there were tens of thousands of people that had taken
(24:10):
refuge at the U N camp or at the Red
cross facility or at the Catholic compound in the middle
of town. And when I went to the Catholic compound,
I found an Indian nun there who had been in
South Sudana for thirty years, and she took me in
and for weeks I was by her side as she
handled the fallout of this horrific attack in her town.
(24:34):
And for the first time I felt like I had
seen what a missionary, or really anyone was capable of
doing when they had their head in the right place,
in their heart in the right place. I mean, she
built schools, hospitals, clinics. She was a teacher at the
college she was teaching nurses. UM. She had built the
(24:55):
biggest children's hospital in the in the in that state.
And from the outside she was just this unimpeachable figure
of righteousness. And I don't use that word lightly or sarcastically.
I mean she was just like she was doing the
thing um and it made me want to go following
her footsteps. And it was just like a very captivating,
(25:17):
inspiring thing to see. But every night, when we would
kind of go back to her place and eat dinner,
she would confess and say that she didn't know what
her purpose was. She didn't feel like she was making
any impact. Um, she didn't know where all of this led.
But the next morning she would be up before I
was making breakfast and getting out to hit the road
(25:37):
and get to work. And I think what I saw
there was that it's a wonderful thing to have a
good heart, a wonderful thing to have good intentions about something.
But what makes doing the right thing difficult is that
you never know if you are doing the right thing.
And the only way to guard against crossing that line
(26:00):
is to have humility and self doubt. And I found
that the people who are often doing the right thing
in this world are also tearing themselves to pieces trying
to answer the question of if they are doing the
right thing. That's a really beautiful way of looking at it,
and it's true. I mean, it is kind of all
constant moral quandary and just I always tell like my daughter,
(26:22):
you know, self awareness is like one of the most
important skills, I guess, or traits that you can have,
because without that, you're kind of just a drift. You know,
you can't really see yourself or how other people see you,
or how will you even know how can you like
self correct or of course correct if you get you know,
on the wrong path. So that's in this incredible story,
(26:42):
and we'll return to explore the story of missionary in
further depth after a word from our sponsor and we're back.
So Serving his Children was found into thousand nine in
the States and then was made official in Uganda in
(27:06):
what it started out as was an outreach and feeding
program UM. So Renee got a house in this pretty
rough neighborhood outside Ginja in Uganda, which is pretty popular
tourist town. UM a lot of a lot of expats
out there doing like rafting and camping and four wheeling
and stuff. And it's also become this kind of missionary mecca.
(27:29):
UM that's really popular because it's an easy place to
live whether there's great all year round and just really
friendly to outsiders. So Renee set up shop there in
uh in this rough neighborhood called Ms. Sessa. She rented
a house there and twice a week she would start
feeding the kids beans and rice. And then she noticed
(27:49):
all these other problems underneath that where these mothers were
coming to her with really sick children that needed help,
and so she started taking on some of these kids
and letting them to stay over at the house, letting
them get healthy, and kind of keeping a close eye
on them. And slowly that led into a more active
role of getting kids to hospitals, um, getting them blood, medicine,
(28:12):
getting them whatever they needed. And then around it became
a more in house thing where they were trying to
do impatient procedures and really focus on this issue of malnutrition.
But the thing is, when you're malnourished, you also pick
up a load of other diseases, and so you have
all these severe complications and you need to have the
(28:34):
highest training and qualifications to manage these really sensitive kids.
And at that point, like it's difficult to say when
things went off the rails, but like at that point
you can say, like I think we're we're awful now.
Um so, uh, that's a crucial part in the timeline though,
as you like that that part of that area twenty eleven.
(28:58):
I believe that's when we see the involvement of one
Jacqueline Kramlich. Is that correct, Jackie raml Yeah, yeah, Jackie
Kramlike Jackie Kramlick is uh plays a pivotal part I
guess in the way that the US and the West
sees the narrative unfold. Could could you tell us a
(29:19):
little bit about Kramlick's background and then how that led
to Kelsey Nielsen? And you mentioned this earlier, and I'm
sure it's an organization or it's at least a series
of terms that some of our fellow listeners clocked no
white saviors. So how how does Kramlake's involvement lead to
(29:41):
Kelsey lead to this? I gotta tell you, um, our
podcast team group chat is the image of Charlie in
the mail room with all the red strings pointing at
different photos and everything. And I've never been able to
put that in coherent words, and it's been yeah, it's
so I'll give it a shot here. Um. But Jackie
(30:02):
Cram got her nursing degree in America and was qualified
to be a nurse. But when she got to Uganda,
renee's organization told her that she did not need to
register for a medical license in Uganda. So the whole
time Jackie was there, she was operating without a nursing
license in Uganda. Nevertheless, her expertise was rarely called on,
(30:24):
and there's a few anecdotes that she tells where there
would be a really sick kid and Renee would be
like scrambling to figure out what was going wrong, and
instead of asking Jackie what was going on, she would
call a friend in America to google it or something
like that. And it's that kind of unclear chain of
command or that lack of delegation that was kind of
(30:46):
a first red flag for Jackie. But what really did
it for Jackie was that case of Patricia where she
saw over and over again all these mistakes kind of
build up and lead to this child be scarred for
life for what Jackie as was no good reason, like
just this child should not have been scarred at all.
Shortly after Patricia was discharged from serving as children, Jackie
(31:08):
resigned and I went to go work with another organization
in Ginger. Around this time, a woman named Kelsey Nielsen,
who is an American from Philadelphia came to Ginger to
start her own NGO for Family Reunification, which I guess
this is the other this is the red string pointing outwards.
(31:29):
But in Ginger there's a whole industry of child adoptions
that is pretty corrupt, and I mean, in the most
cynical phrasing you can pay fifty grand and get a
lawyer to prove it not an adoption for a kid,
and then you are a brand new parent. Uh. And
a lot of the families that go through this process
don't know necessarily what they're getting into. They think it's
(31:50):
just like for a year or two and then the
child will come back. But then they realized that they
signed away. There there their son or daughter for forever.
So it's a really tragic thing. And what Kelsey's organization
tried to do was provide these families with resources to
be able to keep their families together rather than um
being offered money and having these kids leave. And at
(32:12):
that time, Renee and a few other missionaries were really
like just top of their game. They were the mother
Theresas of Ginger. They were just they set the standard
for what a missionary was, for how much self sacrifice,
like the work entails, and Kelsey really looked up to them.
But at some point, all these contradictions in Ginger of
(32:36):
people saying that they were doing good for the community
but then the community not getting any better, they kind
of came to ahead and Kelsey decided she needed to
speak out, so she teamed up with a former employee
of hers, a Yugandan social worker named Olivia Alasso, and
the two of them created an organization called No White Saviors,
(32:56):
which is famous for its Instagram page. It's fiery Instagram
page UM, which has a couple hundred thousand followers now.
When I met them, it was like ten fifteen thousand UM,
so it has been incredible to see how much traction
they've gotten UM over the last year. There's another Instagram
(33:18):
page called Barbie Savior, which, if you've seen it, is
a collection of photos of Barbie Doll dressed up as
a volunteer tourist, a missionary kind of trapesing around Africa
finding herself and following her calling. And it's just like
really sarcastic thing where she's picking up black babies and
being like, oh my God, like I'm in love at
(33:38):
this place, and she gets like a tattoo of Africa
on her chest and everything. And that account was actually
started by Jackie Kramlick. Part of the impetus for this account,
which has a hundred fifty thousand followers now, was Renee,
and Jackie says that one of the first photos they
did of Barbie getting on a plane and waving goodbye
to her family is a replica of the photo that
(34:01):
Renee put up on her blog of the same thing.
And so that was kind of our window into seeing
this Ginger community as almost just like high school drama.
And I don't want to minimize the trauma of the
victims in this whole situation by saying, oh, it's just
(34:22):
like a mean girls fight, but I mean, there's a
big part of the story that is just as pressure
cooker of a town with a bunch of young missionaries
that are all trying to come all trying to save
the world, and they're at each other's throats the whole time.
And it's interesting because Kelsey looked at the superstars, the
(34:44):
rock stars of Ginger, like Katie Davis and Renee back
as the mean girls of Ginger, that they were these
popular girls that everyone aspired to be and he had
to be smart and pretty to get into their group.
But when we're he talks about how the Ginger community
turned on her and tried to demolish her entire career
(35:07):
and ruin her reputation. She calls Kelsey and them the
mean girls. Uh, And so it kind of gets into
this back and forth where I mean, we got lost
in it. Um, there's all these rumors floating around, and
at some point we just have to divorce ourselves and
get back to the real story, which are the families
(35:28):
that went through Serving His Children. Um, but it gave
us a huge insight into what happens when you go
to church on Sunday, put money in the basket and
it goes off to ginger and uh, we're all kind
of gossiping at the cafe there, paying for latte's, uh,
with your aunt's money. And with that, we're going to
(35:50):
take a quick break and hear a word from our
sponsor and we're back. Let's jump to the real impact,
because there, you guys did some some reporting on the
actual quantitative numbers of people who you know, went through
(36:15):
the system there went you know, lived there for a
while or retreated there, who were either injured or did
not make it. Can you talk to us a little
bit about the the actual impact that was had on
far too many people there. Okay, So Serving his Children's
inpatient program started in and in the Yugandan government stepped
(36:40):
into shut Serving His Children down because they did not
have a medical license. The one that they had had expired.
So if you look the numbers that Serving his Children provides,
between hundred and five children passed away while thirty five
children went home happy and healthy. And you can look
(37:03):
at those numbers and read them in a way that says,
I mean, look, I mean they got a four mortality rate.
That's like not bad considering that the government standard is
like they were doing better than the best government hospitals.
But then you gotta remember these are serving his children's
own numbers and not corroborated elsewhere. And at the end
(37:23):
of the day, for four of the five years of
those statistics, Serving his Children was an unlicensed medical facility.
It was an illegal facility in Uganda. At that point,
you have to ask yourself, like, is one child's death
at a facility like this too many? And that's I guess,
like what when it comes down to it, like that's
(37:47):
the interpretive part of this. And some people are willing
to swallow those numbers and say these kids would have
died no matter what, and at least someone's trying to
help them. And in fact, some Ugandan doctors we spoke
with told this that. But I think it takes education
and awareness of cases like this to make people think
(38:08):
twice about following in these footsteps. One thing that David Gibbs,
who helps represent the family here in the States, the
Bach family here in the States, one thing he says
is that the campaign that No White Saviors is trying
to put out against Renee, against all these other white
saviors and missionaries, what he's afraid of is it will
(38:33):
create a chilling effect on people that want to go
out into the world and help their fellow person. And
that's that's his fear that someone with good intentions, when
they see things like this, will be too afraid to
go out and help. But there's a part of me
that thinks maybe that is what's needed. Maybe, like that's
(38:56):
how you bring self awareness into the situation and bring
humility into this situation is by holding to account people
that have taken advantage of certain situations or slip through
cracks and hurt more than they helped. And and that's
that's the point. You know, I'm perceived delinquent society. You know,
(39:19):
there are larger links everything. Nothing nothing is created in isolation, right,
Everything exists in context and is in some way and
end result of all the actions preceding it. And one
thing that I think is incredibly pertinent here in multiple
situations abroad and in the US today is the concept
(39:43):
of knowing one's rights that you hit upon excellently in
this case. Um. One thing that seems to be a
damning allegation is the lack of informed consent, which we've
talked about previously on this show. You will have of
I believe there were some folks on the s HC
(40:04):
side who said, well, paperwork aside, legal or illegal status aside.
We had people signed forms that acknowledged you know that
this is not that that very carefully acknowledged the type
of care it was, and it was not and these
forms that the like, I understand that some people were
(40:27):
illiterate when they were asked to sign these forms. Uh,
and that I further understand that these forms were in English,
which not necessarily everybody in the country or at that
center specifically could read. Is that correct? Yeah? So I
don't know the ins and outs have you got in law?
But from what the the the lawyer on the side
(40:50):
of the plaintiffs says, if a person who does not
speak English or read English signs one of these documents,
it has to be accompanied by a proof that it
was interpreted or translated for um, the signy and those
documents were not provided which have the which like threatened
(41:12):
to invalidate them. And a big part of this case
is this question of whether Renee impersonated a doctor. There's
allegations that she wore a lab coat or stethoscope. I mean,
we have photos of her with the stethoscope, but not
the lab coat. And then there's allegations that like she
told people she was a doctor or did not refuse
(41:33):
when people called her a doctor. And I think that
it is part of the same discussion where you go
into these rural communities that their engagements with white folks
for the most part are people with NGOs and people
from these big aid groups. When you see a white
(41:53):
person walk into one of these communities and they're asking
for children with malnutrition and they're got a clipboard in
their hands and the stethoscope around their neck, you're gonna
think that they have some medical qualifications. Um And a
lot of the form employees kind of say this as well,
that it took them years before they realized Renee wasn't
(42:14):
a qualified doctor. I think a lot of what no
white saviors. Is getting at as well, is that white
people in these rare, in these um vulnerable places kinda
get away with a lot just by this color of
their skin, and like their privilege means so much more
in these places than it does even in America. Even
(42:36):
I could like walk into one of these places and
with an American accent and just kind of people would
respect me and like give me a certain amount of
respect and trust that is not afforded to Ugandans. And
so part of it is people not knowing their rights,
and part of it is outsiders not fully aware of
(42:58):
the privilege that they carry into these community. That's really
something I mean, that's something I think we all need
to think about and internalized quite a lot. You know,
we're we're in a moment in history where whereasive I
think there's a tremendous amount of goodwill going around right now. Um,
there's a lot of learning and no matter how elementary
(43:20):
the learning is, it there's a lot of learning that's happening.
I wonder if they're you know, in your travels to Uganda,
to Sudan where wherever perhaps you've traveled for your work,
if you have found organizations or ways two. Maybe maybe
it's as simple as a monetary way of supporting a
(43:40):
group or somebody who's doing something good somewhere that people
listening and us that we could help without interfering. Do
you do you think there's anything out there that exists
like that. I think before anything else, it's just about
am I the right person to go out and do
that thing? And I think learning that for myself is
(44:03):
just like something that took me a long time to
even like begin to to start understanding. I mean, when
I went to South Sudan I was nineteen, got off
the plane to know anybody there and was like, I'm
gonna write stories about this place that I read about
in books. Learned pretty quickly that maybe I'm not the
person for it. And you know, it's a tricky thing
(44:24):
to kind of position yourself and say like where you
belong and what you should do, what you shouldn't do.
But where I kind of land after doing this whole
year long investigation is I tend to err on the
side of inaction now, I feel you, man. I mean,
it's like it gets so fed up and you just
(44:45):
feel kind of stymied, and it's like why bother that's
how I feel about the government, just like voting and stuff.
I mean, and it's not good, especially when you see
so many people mobilizing and getting out, you know, trying
to at least make a difference. Like I my ex
wife had had me and my daughter and her friend
and their son go out and do his protests and
there our neighborhood, and it's a predominantly black neighborhood, and
(45:06):
I was sort of like, oh, this is preaching to
the choir. This is so I was so cynical about it.
And then we went out and it was just people
hunking the horn and just seeing that we gave a
ship enough to like, you know, stand there on the
curb with Zion, not saying that's like some grand gesture,
but it really opened my eyes to the fact that
even just showing people that you care is meaningful, more
meaningful than you think. I think. Sometimes, you know, it's
(45:26):
easy to get swept up in the nihilism of it all,
uh and and to forget that, like, you know, people
do see you when you see them, and that's important
not to lose sight of. I think. I don't know,
I think. To refine my point, then I guess I
would caution against people that want to start their own
thing without seeing what other people are up to first,
(45:49):
because there's people out there doing it right. I mean,
like one great example in Gina itself, Right when Renee
came in to start her organization, there was another white
missionary woman named Elizabeth who had been a former real
estate broker in California and then one day heard her
calling to Africa and ended up in Uganda. UM. She
also wanted to tackle malnutrition, but rather than starting her
(46:11):
own program, building her own facility anything like that, she
went to the government hospital and asked them what do
you need and ended up building a malnutrition ward for
them where she would just keep it stocked with supplies
and help administer the just the logistical and administrative aspects
of it. Right. She knew the limits of her expertise
(46:36):
and put everything she knew into action, UM with an
organization that was already set up to tackle the problem
that she wanted to tackle. This brings up something that
got that I think got skipped over a little bit
at the beginning. They wanted to get in here, uh,
which is the idea of what what is helping versus hurting?
(47:01):
There is also wrapped up in that inherently the question
of what is centering right? Psychologically, we're all programmed to
think of ourselves as the protagonist of our own story, right. Uh.
And with this, you know, it's an ongoing problem for
anyone doing international research, uh, that someone comes in and
they say, well, you know, I went to school for this,
(47:23):
uh and I know, like I know a little bit
of one native language, let me tell you how to
handle this, right. And it's wrapped up in this. But
we also see that in the protest here in um
the US, right. You know, there have been people with
I'm sure the best of intentions, right, who are who
are saying, you know, I want to express solidarity by
(47:46):
starting my organization that will uh, that will you know,
make me feel good about doing the right thing right
and and perhaps back up my performative social media. But
even within function, these kinds of organizations can be mothering
and they can also uh divert funding that was going
(48:10):
to you know, like the government hospital that already really
needed that maternity ward that you're mentioning that Elizabeth created.
And I think that's a I think that's a powerful thing.
I'm I know it's a lot to ask, uh, And
I hope it doesn't sound like, you know, we're heaping
opprobrium on people who do as you said, probably have
(48:33):
the best intentions. But is that what you would recommend?
Would you recommend for someone who wants to help to
with what would be a good way to say this?
Would it be more like invest and amplify rather than
try to start a new thing. I'm not sure the
right is just take a minute. You know, I'm not
(48:55):
saying like sit down forever, but like just take a minute, um,
do a bit of research and see who's doing it
out there. I mean I had a moment when after
I was with the nun in South Sudan where I
wanted to be a missionary, where I wanted to like
do the thing, and my plan was just to go
(49:16):
move back to South Sudan and live with her and
just like learn the ropes there. And and I think
there's a lot of value in just going to a
place without an agenda necessarily and then just kind of
soaking it in because a lot of the people that
go out to these places, I mean, part of the
(49:36):
reason you're going out there is to satisfy the sense
of adventure, of being in a foreign place. I mean,
I'm guilty of that as much as any other foreign correspondent.
I think I don't think there's harm in just going
to a place to be there and learn about what's
going on before you decide to do anything. Because nine
(49:57):
times out of ton, whatever problem you're trying to solve,
there's someone already out there doing it and they can
use your help. I think that's tremendously well said. We
we typically when we explore some of these stories, at
least on our show, we we tried to go toward
the future, which I think you have done very well,
and then we also try to explore current events. We
mentioned a couple of times a lawsuit for anyone in
(50:19):
the audience who's wondering, UM, as far as I understand regime,
that lawsuit has not reached a conclusion. Is that correct?
So yeah, just to um kind of fill in the
blanks on the lawsuit. In January of nineteen two mothers
who claimed that their children passed away after being treated
at serving his children took Grenade a court um. They
(50:41):
filed a civil suit against her in uh the Ginger
High Court and are currently awaiting the outcome of a
mediation process to try to settle something out of court,
and if that doesn't happen, then it will return to
the public forum. So since March, I think recently the
Yugan and government kind of shut down all those processes
(51:03):
with COVID precautions and so everything's kind of frozen for now.
But it's a difficult thing to like figure out what
justice looks like necessarily in all these situations, because on
one end, there's an argument that these mothers could just
settle out of court, get a couple of thousand dollars,
go home, and I just that's a lot of money
(51:26):
out there, right, And then the other argument is like, no,
they gotta fight this thing and they got to prove something,
and um, there's justice to be one here for everybody.
But I think it's a lot to ask as well
of anyone. You know, this is a tremendously heavy thing
to think about and talk about and subject to make
(51:49):
a show about. But I would just say thank you
to you and your team for making it to making
all of us aware of what's going on there. He's
better aware. If you'd like to learn more about this
case and everything that happened at serving his children and
the story of renee Bach and the ongoing lawsuits and
(52:10):
everything involved. We highly recommend you go and check out
the podcast The Missionary, which is hosted by our guests today,
Regiev Gala, as well as his team members Halima ge
Gandhi and Malcolm Burnley. Again, can't recommend it enough. The
podcast is called The Missionary. Yeah, Regieve, thank you for
(52:33):
coming on air with us today. Because you travel so widely,
I can only imagine it must also be a little
bit odd to be in one place for an extended
amount of time. So thank you for spending this time
with us. Uh. We want, as Matt said, we want
everybody to check out this show. It's ongoing as we
(52:56):
record this, but we have their multiple episodes out there.
We do highly recommend that you dive in. This is
top notch journalism. Uh. These are and this is not
not blowing smoke here, it's weird, Riggi because I can
see you on the call, but I'm not We're not
saying this because you're here. This is very well researched,
it's captivating, It's more than worth your time. Uh, and
(53:20):
we want to hear what you think about the topics
we've addressed here in g OS. We want to hear
what you think about the ideas that we've explored regarding
missionary work and the ideas regarding renee bach Uh Regive.
For people who would like to learn more about you
and the missionary and your work outside of the missionary
(53:43):
where's the place they can find you or learn more
about you on the on the big creepy big brother
we call the Internet. Well, my portfolio website is rogi
gola dot com and my Twitter handle is rogi Gola,
where you can find me tweeting about NASCAR most of
the time. But hey, Noel uh, speaking of uh speaking
(54:04):
the Internet, I hear our shows on there too. Yeah, Yeah,
we're we're around. You can find us on the usual
social media spots like Facebook and Instagram and all that,
where either conspiracy stuff or conspiracy stuff show on all
the usual suspects, um. And then you can also find
us as individual human people. I am on Instagram exclusively
(54:25):
at how Now Noel Brown, I am at ben Bullan
hs W. On Twitter, you can find a Regive and
I both on their uh and I am in a
burst of creativity calling myself at ben Bullan on Instagram.
And if you don't want to use social media, you
can always give us a phone call. Our number is
one eight three three st d w y t K.
(54:49):
You can leave us a message. You have three minutes
talk about this episode, any other episode, or another one
you'd like us to cover. Really, we just we'd love
to hear from you, so please give us a call.
But if none of that, white bags your badgers. We
have one way you can always get in touch with us.
You don't have to just uh, you know, meet me
at a crossroads at midnight, or save a name into
(55:11):
a dark mirror. You can send us an email twenty
four hours a day, seven days a week, how many
ever days in a year there are you can reach
us directly. We are conspiracy at iHeart radio dot com.
(55:42):
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