Speaker 1: What you hear in this podcast does not implicate any
Speaker 1: individual or entity in any criminal activity. The views and
Speaker 1: opinions are solely those of the individuals participating in the podcast.
Speaker 1: Previously on the missionary, they're providing nutrition services to combat
Speaker 1: a crisis that literally the hospitals and others were unable
Speaker 1: to handle just due to the volume. When I moved there,
Speaker 1: there was a mentality of you have two patients, which
Speaker 1: one has a better chance of life this one than
Speaker 1: this one? You pick in this one you leave. It's
Speaker 1: like you were color coding people on a war field.
Speaker 1: I was fit to like provide medical care and whatever
Speaker 1: were over my head, like this is serious, serious, make
Speaker 1: you take you care. So, based on the allegations you
Speaker 1: have heard that she was an unlicensed medical facility, that
Speaker 1: she was providing medical care without having medical qualifications, do
Speaker 1: these allegations surprise you, given you what you know about
Speaker 1: how and geos operated here, Of course they don't surprise me.
Speaker 1: Jim mc graham was twenty two years old when he
Speaker 1: found a pamphlet recruiting young healthy men to serve their country.
Speaker 1: It was November nineteen and millions of American men were
Speaker 1: going abroad to fight in World War Two, but Jim
Speaker 1: was a conscientious objector. Instead of taking up arms, he
Speaker 1: found other ways to help by planting trees fighting forest fires.
Speaker 1: But he wanted to do more. This call for volunteers
Speaker 1: sounded like an opportunity to provide a worthwhile service, not
Speaker 1: just to our country, but to all humanity. Jim volunteer
Speaker 1: to be a guinea pig in a study called the
Speaker 1: Minnesota Starvation Experiment run by Dr Ansel Keys of the
Speaker 1: University of Minnesota, DA. He was featured in a documentary
Speaker 1: by Colorado State University. We knew fairly well what a
Speaker 1: star of person looked like and what starvation did to
Speaker 1: the human body, but until this time, there had never
Speaker 1: been an opportunity to measure exactly what changes take place
Speaker 1: in the body under starvation conditions, Nor had there ever
Speaker 1: been any scientific tests to determine what best to feed
Speaker 1: a star of person to bring him or her back
Speaker 1: to health. The project's goal to learn how to treat
Speaker 1: starvation after the war ended. The experiment was fairly simple.
Speaker 1: Thirty six men were semi starved for six months. Their
Speaker 1: diet was modeled after famine diets of bread, potatoes, porridge,
Speaker 1: and turn ups. They continued walking at least twenty two
Speaker 1: miles a week, taking classes in the university and working
Speaker 1: at the lab. Jim was six ft two and he
Speaker 1: began the study at one hundred seventy five pounds, but
Speaker 1: it wasn't long before the famine diet took a toll.
Speaker 1: Most of us suffered from edema, the collecting of liquid
Speaker 1: in the body, some more than others. I always woke
Speaker 1: up in the morning with my face puffy on the
Speaker 1: side I was lying on. Sometimes my ankles and knees
Speaker 1: were puffy. I look in the mirror and see that
Speaker 1: my eyes looked hollow, my cheeks were only a thin
Speaker 1: covering for the bones in my face, and my hair
Speaker 1: was getting thinner. If I tried to smile, it was
Speaker 1: just a grimace, and I never laughed. As Jim and
Speaker 1: the other participants rapidly lost weight, some dropped to a
Speaker 1: mirror one hundred pounds, and the psychological changes mounted, fatigue, depression, paranoia,
Speaker 1: symptoms that previously hadn't been attributed to starvation. We became
Speaker 1: very irritable and intolerant. Little things seemed to annoyance. We
Speaker 1: were no longer polite with each other or with ssitors.
Speaker 1: It seemed as if the veneer of civilization had been removed,
Speaker 1: leaving bear the animal underneath. Years later, researchers would publish
Speaker 1: one thousand, three hundred pages on the scientific effects of starvation.
Speaker 1: The research remains key to a lot of what we
Speaker 1: know and still don't know about malnutrition. I have experienced
Speaker 1: hunger and the apathy and depression that goes with it,
Speaker 1: but we lived in sanitary quarters under the constant care
Speaker 1: of doctors. Furthermore, we knew that it would all be
Speaker 1: over on a certain date. I often think how horrible
Speaker 1: it would be to be starving and never know when
Speaker 1: it would end, if ever. In association with I Heart Media,
Speaker 1: I'm Halema ge Condy, Malcolm Burnley, I'm Roger Gola and
Speaker 1: this is the missionary episode six, one hundred five children.
Speaker 1: There are a few basic facts that everyone agrees on.
Speaker 1: Renee had run a health facility for malnourished children, It
Speaker 1: was unlicensed for years, and at least one hundred five
Speaker 1: children died, But those facts alone didn't support the worst
Speaker 1: of the allegations that Renee was a baby killer. We've
Speaker 1: passed through years worth of Renee's blogs, social media posts,
Speaker 1: talked to missionaries and activists, but there hasn't been much
Speaker 1: else to support these accusations and allegations. It was obvious
Speaker 1: to me that there were more perspectives out there, more
Speaker 1: people we needed to speak with, a completely different world
Speaker 1: that we hadn't tapped into yet. That was Uganda's health
Speaker 1: care system and the near dozen medical staff who worked
Speaker 1: with RENEE for years. I knew that I had to
Speaker 1: get into that world. The first time I traveled throughout
Speaker 1: eastern Uganda, passing by farms huge plantain and cassava plants,
Speaker 1: pineapples and sugarcane fields, I thought, how could there be
Speaker 1: severe malnutrition in a place like this? Um Dr Esther
Speaker 1: I am a pediatrician. I also have a PhD in
Speaker 1: a clean connutrition and I am the head of Manama
Speaker 1: Jimon Nutrician Unit, Malago National Referra Hospital. Dr Barby Rickare
Speaker 1: has been working on malnutrition for more than twenty years
Speaker 1: and then one of the GYMO Nutrition Unit is the
Speaker 1: top children's nutrition unit in the country. About one percent
Speaker 1: to two percent of children, especially in the five years
Speaker 1: of age, severely malnourished, so it is that big. On average,
Speaker 1: we admit about one hundred children per month with severe
Speaker 1: acute malnutrition just on one world that nutrition or unit,
Speaker 1: so that's is quite a big number. Malnutrition remains a complex,
Speaker 1: mysterious problem, especially for children in Uganda. They're quite a
Speaker 1: number of causes or predisposing factors to malnutrition. People are
Speaker 1: surprised why we have a lot of food and yet
Speaker 1: we have malnurised children. But these children may not be
Speaker 1: taken in adequate amounts. And also the quality of the
Speaker 1: food and how is this food prepared. In Uganda, the
Speaker 1: main stables of today are mostly starchry foods like cassava
Speaker 1: and maize that lack a lot of vitamins that babies need.
Speaker 1: A lot of other countries have addressed this by fortifying
Speaker 1: or enriching their stable foods. In the US, wheat flour
Speaker 1: is often enriched with iron and folic acid. Table salt
Speaker 1: has iodine, but that hasn't happened much in Uganda. Food
Speaker 1: isn't the only factor either. Also diseases. We find some
Speaker 1: chronic diseases like tibi or v or diarrhea, diseases predisposed
Speaker 1: that children getting malnutrition. These combined factors were deadly for
Speaker 1: malnourished children There's another oddity to malnutrition too. Instead of
Speaker 1: becoming skin and bones, some children's bodies swelled, especially around
Speaker 1: their stomachs. It's an image that many Americans are likely
Speaker 1: familiar with seeing on the news starving children with bloated bellies.
Speaker 1: The swelling is called edema, and it's similar to what
Speaker 1: happened to the adults under the Minnesota experiment. With some children,
Speaker 1: their faces can become so swollen as if they're having
Speaker 1: an allergic reaction, their eyes get puffy. In Ghana, this
Speaker 1: is called quash or car, meaning the disease of the
Speaker 1: displaced child. It mostly refers to when a baby is
Speaker 1: weaned prematurely after their mothers become pregnant again. Quash your
Speaker 1: car also has local names in Uganda of Bosi and
Speaker 1: Luganda and Lose and Lugisu. Experts like Dr Esther Barbera
Speaker 1: Care are still trying to research why certain children develop
Speaker 1: it and why others simply become incredibly skinny. Around the
Speaker 1: time that Renee had established serving his children, malnutrition was
Speaker 1: the direct cause of more than a third of deaths
Speaker 1: for children under five years old in Uganda, and malnourished
Speaker 1: children or nine times more likely to die than healthy ones.
Speaker 1: Even when children were able to get to hospitals like
Speaker 1: i Mlago and be seen by experts, there were still
Speaker 1: a high chance they would die. They'll take an example
Speaker 1: of ard that is them Lego and a demnutrition or
Speaker 1: unit they come verily to when they are critically ill
Speaker 1: with these complications and you try your best, but still
Speaker 1: about ten to may day. This is unacceptable and acceptably high.
Speaker 1: As grim as those numbers are, it's actually an improvement.
Speaker 1: Ten years ago, the mortality rate for children with severe
Speaker 1: malnourishment in Uganda was even higher. Sometimes between twenty and
Speaker 1: of severely malnourished children died in hospitals. That was the
Speaker 1: scale of the problem and that's why Uganda created a
Speaker 1: new system to build more health centers and clinics in
Speaker 1: hard hit areas. Testing testing, Okay, so could you just
Speaker 1: say your name, um and your profession. Okay. My name
Speaker 1: is r Dr Honey Forbach. I'm a retired medical practitioner
Speaker 1: and a nutritionist. I worked in the National Hospital Hospital
Speaker 1: from nine and then moved on to the National Nutrition
Speaker 1: Unit where I worked until two thousand and nine. Then
Speaker 1: I moved into programming and have recently retired Dr Hannover
Speaker 1: Pacho is another top child nutrition expert in Uganda. In
Speaker 1: two thousand nine, the year when they moved back to Uganda,
Speaker 1: Dr Pacho had turned her sights on working with the
Speaker 1: Ugandan Health Ministry to create policies to address the child
Speaker 1: malnutrition problem. She was instrumental in developing Uganda's new national
Speaker 1: guidelines on managing these cases, a step by step manual.
Speaker 1: Up until then, treatment of severe malnutrition had mostly been
Speaker 1: centered around hospitals. What was wrong with that approach? The
Speaker 1: approach was not wrong, except that there were challenges. One
Speaker 1: is that the care give us would stay for very
Speaker 1: long and in five distance away from their families because
Speaker 1: those facilities were few. And also in the course of
Speaker 1: staying in hospitals, they would get cross infections. Yes, the
Speaker 1: plan Doctor but Show helped create was to decentralize the
Speaker 1: care of severe and moderately malnourished children. The goal was
Speaker 1: to reach children who weren't accessing hospitals and to stop
Speaker 1: children from becoming severely malnourished in the first place. The
Speaker 1: community specifically is supposed to have a structure that identifies
Speaker 1: children with manetrition and refer them ali to the health facility.
Speaker 1: This model has been shown to reduce the mortality of
Speaker 1: child malned Chrisian. The idea was to move them up
Speaker 1: the pyramid of care as the cases got more complex.
Speaker 1: Children with moderate malnutrition could be treated out patient, as
Speaker 1: in they go to rural health clinics for checkups and
Speaker 1: get nutritional formulas, but they stay at home. On the
Speaker 1: other end were severe cases of malnutrition, especially those with complications.
Speaker 1: These children were supposed to be enrolled in full time
Speaker 1: in patient care, but this was also a last resort
Speaker 1: for only the most intractable cases. Once a child's health
Speaker 1: was stabilized, they could be transferred back home for the
Speaker 1: rest of their treatment. If this sounds familiar, it's because
Speaker 1: these are the guidelines. Renee says. She modeled serving his
Speaker 1: children after sending out social workers to teach about nutrition
Speaker 1: and screen for children with severe malnutrition in the villages,
Speaker 1: and then taking those sickest children back to their facility
Speaker 1: in Jina. I asked Dr Bachou which region was the
Speaker 1: worst in two thousand nine, the year Renee sat up
Speaker 1: serving his children. I it was an eastern region, Eastan
Speaker 1: region Lamutumba. It was a real case of severeli Malarui.
Speaker 1: It was really an emergency that the country had to
Speaker 1: move in to ensure that a nutrition in it was established.
Speaker 1: The name Nama Tumba sounded familiar. Later I went through
Speaker 1: my notes again and there it was. One of the
Speaker 1: children in the court case against Renee. His name Tolala Kifabi,
Speaker 1: his village Namatumba. We began this podcast and reporting this
Speaker 1: story with the court case against Renee. The fact that
Speaker 1: two Ugandan women were suing an American missionary over the
Speaker 1: deaths of their children. That to me was the most
Speaker 1: important part of this story because it seemed like this
Speaker 1: was a rare opportunity for Ugandan's to get justice. We
Speaker 1: had heard so many allegations, but these were the actual victims.
Speaker 1: Their stories were essential and piecing together what went wrong.
Speaker 1: Starting with the court documents that Renee submitted, I thought
Speaker 1: I could find material evidence that Renee was running this
Speaker 1: quack facility. Now to Lale is one of two children
Speaker 1: whose mothers are suing Renee Bach. He died after being
Speaker 1: treated at serving his children for seven days. His mother, Gimbo,
Speaker 1: was given fifty thousand Ugandan shillings less than fifteen dollars
Speaker 1: for her loss and a bag of beans. We mentioned
Speaker 1: his story in episode one. In the court documents, Kimbo says, quote,
Speaker 1: the women from Serving his children were not doctors and
Speaker 1: may have done something unprofessional that led to the death
Speaker 1: of my child. Essentially, she thinks something went wrong, but
Speaker 1: doesn't know exactly what now. The lawyers say Serving his
Speaker 1: children violated to Lally's right to life because the facility
Speaker 1: wasn't licensed at the time. The case also states that
Speaker 1: they violated his right to privacy because to Lali's photo
Speaker 1: was posted on Serving his Children's social media account. I
Speaker 1: managed to track down the health workers who oversaw Tolali's case.
Speaker 1: It was early two thousand thirteen when to Lali first
Speaker 1: became sick in his village of Namutumba. Namatumba is about
Speaker 1: an hour away from two major hospitals. The local health
Speaker 1: center diagnosed to Alale with malnutrition and directed Gimbo to
Speaker 1: buy nutrition supplements. This should have been a sign that
Speaker 1: the system was working, but according to Gimbo, she couldn't
Speaker 1: afford the medicine, so she returned to the village empty handed.
Speaker 1: Sophie said, those are the children. Renee and her employees
Speaker 1: were trying to help. She didn't get children who were
Speaker 1: fine from the villages. She was getting children from the
Speaker 1: ridges who are desperate to bring them and how at
Speaker 1: least for them to reford Esmail. That's Sophie Mutessi, a
Speaker 1: midwife who worked at serving his children from around two
Speaker 1: thousand twelve to two thousand fifteen. She has a lot
Speaker 1: of experience bridging the gap between villages and hospitals. To
Speaker 1: Lally was a prime example of those gaps. Even when
Speaker 1: services are nearby, many Ugandans, especially the poor, faced too
Speaker 1: many barriers to accessing them. Patients have to pay for
Speaker 1: basic supplies like gloves, gaus, bedsheets, medicines, even mats to
Speaker 1: sleep on, and they have to pay for that upfront.
Speaker 1: Those who can visit the hospital can't always stay long.
Speaker 1: That's what made serving his children different. They paid for
Speaker 1: everything by time they reached hospital. Then need is not
Speaker 1: only treatment. The mother is stressed, that's taken three days
Speaker 1: without eating, no, so not everything blessed sickness. Don't you
Speaker 1: reach at Rene's place, the treat her psychological and give
Speaker 1: her class time for resting. In July two thou thirteen,
Speaker 1: Gimbo was pregnant with another child by now months had
Speaker 1: passed since they visited the health center, so to a,
Speaker 1: Lali's condition had likely gotten worse. Serving his children passed
Speaker 1: by Gimbo's village during one of their outreaches, the staff
Speaker 1: asked her to take to Lale to the facility in Ginger,
Speaker 1: So Gimbo sent her mother to go with tolal A.
Speaker 1: But this didn't seem to be the same serving his
Speaker 1: children that Jackie Kramlck, the American nurse and volunteer, had criticized.
Speaker 1: By now, the organization had heated her warnings and hired
Speaker 1: trained nurses to join the staff. When Tolally arrived at
Speaker 1: serving his children, he was in really bad shape. He
Speaker 1: was severely dehydrated, his body was swollen, his skin was peeling,
Speaker 1: and his condition would only continue to worsen. Sophie Mutessi
Speaker 1: took care of tolal A on at least two shifts.
Speaker 1: According to her notes, Tolally was no longer able to
Speaker 1: eat the special formulas made for severely malnourished children, which
Speaker 1: is a bad sign. He also had diarrhea and was vomiting.
Speaker 1: Looking at her own notes, Sophie said that there was
Speaker 1: no difference between the food they were feeding him and
Speaker 1: what was coming out of Tol's body. That was a comment,
Speaker 1: why is that serious for the rest of us. They
Speaker 1: weren't medical like you are putting milk here. It was
Speaker 1: the milk coming down, which means no digestion was taking place.
Speaker 1: Does that mean the digestive system just isn't working down?
Speaker 1: Not working hm, urinating one or four times, dehydrated, Continue
Speaker 1: with plants, rehydrate your got you chosen. He spent, So
Speaker 1: that was the end of your shift. One of the
Speaker 1: early lessons of the Minnesota starvation experiment was that you
Speaker 1: have to be very careful about how you refeed or
Speaker 1: rehabilitate patients. Dr Barbara Carey told me about something called
Speaker 1: refeeding syndrome. Refitting syndrome is a phenomenon or a condition
Speaker 1: that occurs to manorite children when you're beginning to feed them.
Speaker 1: They have had electrolytes that imbalanced, that are not in
Speaker 1: right order, so when you begin to feed them, then
Speaker 1: that may worsen the condition. This causes a rapid crossing
Speaker 1: of some electrolytes into the cells, others out of the cells,
Speaker 1: and then that causes derangement in the body function and
Speaker 1: then they may Die. Here's Dr Barbara carry talking about
Speaker 1: the therapeutic milk products they use that Lago and how
Speaker 1: they monitor at the way we manage this or we
Speaker 1: prevent it is we use a feed usually we call
Speaker 1: it therapeutic feed, or it is like a medicine, but
Speaker 1: in form of food. It has the right balance of
Speaker 1: these nutrients and we give it cautiously slowly until the
Speaker 1: body is learning or beginning to learn to use these nutrients.
Speaker 1: Then always tip up the nutrient of value, especially the
Speaker 1: protein and the energy, so that now this baby or
Speaker 1: this toad begins to gain weight again. So it is
Speaker 1: actually a serious killer if you're not using the rate
Speaker 1: feeds in the beginning before the body function returns to them.
Speaker 1: The special formula she's talking about our f SEM five
Speaker 1: and F one two powders you can mix with water,
Speaker 1: developed in the nineties as an emergency treatment for child malnutrition.
Speaker 1: Refeeding syndrome is something that critics like Jackie said Renee
Speaker 1: was clueless about. But if you feed a child too
Speaker 1: much or the wrong type of substance too early, it
Speaker 1: can kill them. Even though Renee had access to these
Speaker 1: feeding formulas, which are normally distributed by units f or
Speaker 1: the Ministry of Health. If a child is in danger
Speaker 1: of refeeding syndrome, they should be around specialists who can
Speaker 1: recognize it. In that case, I thought maybe Renee had
Speaker 1: failed to refer to Lally to a hospital when he
Speaker 1: should have been, which would have been a clear sign
Speaker 1: of negligence. But in the court case, Renee says she
Speaker 1: left the country the day to Lally arrived at the facility,
Speaker 1: and she submitted her passport pages as proof, which means
Speaker 1: in theory, she wasn't there to make the hour. By
Speaker 1: our calls about to Lally, that decision would have fallen
Speaker 1: on the most senior person there. Mudasi causa as first
Speaker 1: professionalism msconsin she was employing professionals, qualified people. That's what
Speaker 1: I knew. Oh, I know she was employing professionally. They
Speaker 1: didn't have quacks there, okay. Mudosie is a clinical officer
Speaker 1: who works at the now Lifenia Children's Hospital in Ginger.
Speaker 1: They're kind of in between nurses and doctors. They play
Speaker 1: a big role in filling the healthcare gaps because they
Speaker 1: can practice medicine, diagnosed cases, performed surgeries, but they don't
Speaker 1: spend as many years studying medicine as doctors. We Darcie
Speaker 1: would come into serving his children a few times a
Speaker 1: week to check on the children, write prescriptions and sometimes
Speaker 1: refer them to the hospital. Actually, when I found him,
Speaker 1: he was working at the hospital. As these are doctors notes.
Speaker 1: Do you recognize these? Yeah, I suppose my handwriting. I
Speaker 1: had him read over the notes on Tolally's case. Then
Speaker 1: I asked him if there was any sign that he
Speaker 1: had requested that Tolally be referred to the children's hospital.
Speaker 1: He didn't. He thought serving his children was managing the case. Fine,
Speaker 1: this one, this one was it was story. But you
Speaker 1: would do, you'd manage. That's why when you look at
Speaker 1: to these records, I was saying, well, there's some improvement.
Speaker 1: The new complaints were not there. Yeah, so cooking and stable.
Speaker 1: Days later, on July sixteen, two thousand thirteen, Totally died
Speaker 1: of severe malnutrition. I asked Dr Patow to read over
Speaker 1: Tollly's medical documents as a second opinion, to see if
Speaker 1: there were any irregularities, any sign of misconduct, anything that
Speaker 1: went wrong reading water, you know, how He examined the patient,
Speaker 1: came up with the tentative diagnosis, and then returned that
Speaker 1: the treatment protocol, I think he must have had some
Speaker 1: you know background, yeah, or for managing this kiss? Is
Speaker 1: there any point so far where this child should have
Speaker 1: been in a hospital? Do you think? I don't know,
Speaker 1: I don't know to commit. But then it's this jealous
Speaker 1: put on oxygen, this child was put on ivy. This
Speaker 1: child was you know, put on antibiotics, the antibiotics and
Speaker 1: was being monitored. So not knowing this situation A then
Speaker 1: I would assume that this is a health facility with
Speaker 1: the trained health focus. What if it's me She has
Speaker 1: all this sophisticated a medical equipment and she is not trained.
Speaker 1: Who who decides to when to take action or not action?
Speaker 1: I was just as baffled as Dr Pato. Initially, I
Speaker 1: thought by tracking down for Lolly's journey, I would find
Speaker 1: the prime example of Renee's medical misconduct, whether she had
Speaker 1: done medicine herself or made decisions that had led to
Speaker 1: to Allalay's death, But to Alway's case, hadn't done that.
Speaker 1: In fact, it showed the opposite that Renee had hired
Speaker 1: qualified Uganda ners in medical professionals at least by two
Speaker 1: thousand thirteen. It showed that they were the ones who
Speaker 1: had treated to Lala and didn't bring him to the
Speaker 1: local hospital. Ultimately, it showed that Tolally had died despite
Speaker 1: their best efforts because severe malnutrition is so hard to
Speaker 1: treat at that stage. That makes Tolal a one about
Speaker 1: least one hundred five children who died at Serving His Children,
Speaker 1: And I keep thinking back to that number. We've talked
Speaker 1: about it throughout this podcast. One hundred five children died.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's shocking every time I hear it. And
Speaker 1: remember those are just the numbers that Serving his Children
Speaker 1: admits to, and they provided them a couple of years ago,
Speaker 1: and given the inaccuracies in their documentation, that number could
Speaker 1: be way higher. We don't have the medical docum mints
Speaker 1: of the other children who died at Serving His Children.
Speaker 1: That said, the number one hundred five still seems like
Speaker 1: a lot to me. Here's the math. Between two thousand
Speaker 1: and ten and two thousand fifteen, one hundred five children
Speaker 1: out of nine hundred forty who were treated in patient
Speaker 1: at Serving His Children died. That's a mortality rate of
Speaker 1: eleven percent. But that's nearly half the mortality rate in
Speaker 1: Uganda's top hospital after learning about how hard it is
Speaker 1: to treat severe child malnutrition. That number doesn't look as
Speaker 1: bad as it did in the beginning. Based on that
Speaker 1: number alone, it could be tempting to say that serving
Speaker 1: his children helped save more children from malnutrition than had died.
Speaker 1: But there's one obvious caveat that we can't forget. Even
Speaker 1: though to Lolly had gotten quality care from quality Ugandan
Speaker 1: medical professionals when he died, serving his children was still
Speaker 1: an unlicensed facility. Wake up, Africa, you're trying to come
Speaker 1: open up your pie gone Helen. Welcome to Africa. Watch
Speaker 1: on the Dr Mombi Show. My name is Dr mombys Iraki.
Speaker 1: How you're doing. How's everything going? I pray you well
Speaker 1: in everything earthing. I just hope everything is going absolutely
Speaker 1: fantastically for you and you're living your best life. Now.
Speaker 1: I've got a story that got me just I even
Speaker 1: wanted to just throw this at someone for real. It
Speaker 1: got me so emotional. And it's all about this a
Speaker 1: fake ass, you know, white supremacist. You ain't even a doctor.
Speaker 1: This YouTube show aired on February five, two nineteen, when
Speaker 1: the news of renee Bach and serving his children was
Speaker 1: just starting to spread online. She wasn't deported, she wasn't charged,
Speaker 1: The health ministry in Uganda didn't belaunch any kind of
Speaker 1: investigation against and she's still in Uganda till this day.
Speaker 1: It's crazy. So what they're doing now is their demanding
Speaker 1: that this question has nagged me throughout this story. In
Speaker 1: the past year, I learned Uganda does have a lot
Speaker 1: of rules and regulations that are sometimes complex and bureaucratic,
Speaker 1: but they're there. So how had Renee been able to
Speaker 1: buy and procure medicine for years, to coordinate blood transfusions,
Speaker 1: get lab tests, order specialized nutritional formulas, and eventually higher
Speaker 1: legitimate staff, all without a license. We couldn't both say
Speaker 1: that you gone that had laws and regulations that Renee
Speaker 1: hadn't followed without recognizing that someone was responsible for enforcing them.
Speaker 1: Could you introduce yourself. I'm doctor Cartoon by Cento executive
Speaker 1: or you're gonna Medican Dental Console. It's a government which
Speaker 1: is in charge of regulity in the practice of doctors
Speaker 1: and their facilities. I'm in doctor Saintongo's office in Kampala.
Speaker 1: It's not too far from the country's biggest hospital and Lago.
Speaker 1: Doctor sin Tongo is one of those matter of fact
Speaker 1: expert types. He just doesn't beat around the bush. He
Speaker 1: told me he hadn't heard about these latest accusations that
Speaker 1: Dr Mumby was talking about against renee Bach or serving
Speaker 1: his children until he got a call from the Minister
Speaker 1: of Health saw that the video running. I don't seen it,
Speaker 1: so she wanted it to know. Are the issues to
Speaker 1: do that fast? So it today and the producer a
Speaker 1: primary portion. So now he had to get to the
Speaker 1: bottom of it fast. Doctor sin Tongo assembled a three
Speaker 1: person team to go out and investigate the claims against
Speaker 1: serving his children. Dr Katumba tried to find other people
Speaker 1: who had worked at serving his children in Ginger or
Speaker 1: the mothers in the court case, but they didn't find
Speaker 1: them and they had limited funds to continue investigating, so
Speaker 1: we didn't get to the opportunity. I tried to get
Speaker 1: to details at what happened Deforma clinics because unfortunate today
Speaker 1: put in a good doctor. We also didn't have contact
Speaker 1: of the people had to complain. I had some better
Speaker 1: luck and more time to track down some of these folks.
Speaker 1: I knew that there were plenty of nurses and doctors
Speaker 1: involved with serving his children over the last ten years,
Speaker 1: but only a handful were part of the actual court case.
Speaker 1: They would have seen firsthand how things had worked there,
Speaker 1: and it seemed like no one else was talking to them,
Speaker 1: not the lawyers, not the media, and not the government investigators.
Speaker 1: After months of pouring over court documents and medical databases
Speaker 1: and criss crossing the country on buses and motorcycles, I
Speaker 1: managed to track down eight nurses, three doctors, a nutritionist,
Speaker 1: and a medical officer who at one point or another
Speaker 1: had worked at Serving his Children, but only a few
Speaker 1: were willing to go on the record about their time there.
Speaker 1: It was easy to see why they wouldn't want to
Speaker 1: get involved in this mess. After all, if something wrong
Speaker 1: had happened at Serving his Children and they didn't report it,
Speaker 1: they could lose their licenses. But one of them, a
Speaker 1: nurse named Violet, was willing to go on the record.
Speaker 1: So I'm on the way to Kagadi, which is a
Speaker 1: town that's in western Uganda, close to order with the DRC,
Speaker 1: and I'm searching for a nurse named Violet. So I
Speaker 1: called her a few days ago and explained what we're
Speaker 1: trying to do. Um it's a Sunday, so I'll probably
Speaker 1: have to wait for her to get out of church.
Speaker 1: Violent Auto Beatrix had worked at Serving His Children in
Speaker 1: two thousand twelve for about six months. She's now a
Speaker 1: government nurse and the opposite side of the country, about
Speaker 1: eight hours away from Ginger. When we met at a hotel,
Speaker 1: I realized she hadn't heard anything about the case. She
Speaker 1: was exactly the kind of source I wanted to speak
Speaker 1: with when I just got there. Nothing much was told
Speaker 1: to me about how the organization started, but being someone
Speaker 1: who's looking for a job, someone who is jobless, I
Speaker 1: just took on. They didn't tell me that we have
Speaker 1: a opened that organization wasn't experienced medically. Violet told me
Speaker 1: she had her reservations about serving his children. She had
Speaker 1: a lot lot of experience working at big NGOs like
Speaker 1: Doctors without Borders, but she didn't think she and her
Speaker 1: fellow nurses were equipped to deal with extreme cases of malnutrition.
Speaker 1: And she was a trained midwife, but also didn't think
Speaker 1: they were equipped to have women giving birth there. Violet
Speaker 1: knew her own limits, but didn't think Renee knew hers.
Speaker 1: I would see how read she would read through books,
Speaker 1: and then she would apply, let's see her reading medical books.
Speaker 1: Would see how read medical books and an apply and
Speaker 1: and she would she would do the medical, the nothing,
Speaker 1: the treatment, all that. Yeah, Violet agreed line by line
Speaker 1: with what Jackie Kramlick, the American nurse, had said. Renee
Speaker 1: did blood transfusions, I v s, intramuscular injections, spinal taps,
Speaker 1: femeral artery punctures. So here was someone who categorically thought
Speaker 1: Renee had done wrong. This is the type of person
Speaker 1: who could have said something at the time. I asked
Speaker 1: her if she did, there's no I would say, but please,
Speaker 1: I want to see your papas, but please wise your
Speaker 1: certificate displayed here. There was no way I would ask that.
Speaker 1: Why not, Well, it would look like I'm attacking her.
Speaker 1: When I entered there, I saw her actions. She acted
Speaker 1: a medical person. She introduced everything to me and we
Speaker 1: started practicing together with her. So I kept it to myself,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, after all, I won't work here for long.
Speaker 1: Violet told me that government nurses like her make about
Speaker 1: one hundred dollars a month. She needed the job at
Speaker 1: serving his children. This was something I had heard from
Speaker 1: other former employees too. They said the nurses were too
Speaker 1: subordinate to say anything, So I wondered, what about the doctors.
Speaker 1: We need a doctor, plain and simple, a doctor who
Speaker 1: can be there in emergencies, give your action to our
Speaker 1: nursing staff, and provide an in house diagnosis for the
Speaker 1: many complications that come with severe malnutrition. In May two
Speaker 1: thousand twelve, a year before Tolali's case, Renee put out
Speaker 1: a blog post asking for donations twenty two thousand dollars
Speaker 1: so she could hire a doctor and a nutritionist. A
Speaker 1: doctor who can come alongside us as we strive to
Speaker 1: save the lives of children that faced the horrible reality
Speaker 1: of malnutrition. A doctor who shares our passion for serving
Speaker 1: the Lord. Until she hired that full time doctor, she
Speaker 1: had other doctors coming in periodically. One was Dr Alex Wassamoka,
Speaker 1: who came in a few times a week. He worked
Speaker 1: at serving his children for about six or seven months
Speaker 1: in two thousand twelve. Now he's a doctor at Ginger
Speaker 1: Hospital and when he looked back at serving his children,
Speaker 1: he saw nothing but things to be proud of. So
Speaker 1: there was no time, not even a single time, when
Speaker 1: there was no nurse to attend to the children. These
Speaker 1: children were actually treated in the best way I could say,
Speaker 1: the best way possible. In his view, sometimes kids were
Speaker 1: better off at serving his children than the hospital. It
Speaker 1: was well equipped and had to study supply of oxygen,
Speaker 1: which many hospitals often run out of, and it was small,
Speaker 1: so it had a good nurse to patient ratio. When
Speaker 1: I compared that with what was in the hospital, you know,
Speaker 1: the hospital, the numbers were so enormous. The nurses in
Speaker 1: the hospital are a few story could not attend to
Speaker 1: all the children in time and as required. You know,
Speaker 1: when the nurse patient ratio is not a proper then
Speaker 1: even the quality of care drops because then the children
Speaker 1: were too many compared to the staff available. Dr Wassamocha
Speaker 1: wasn't the only one who thought this. I spoke with
Speaker 1: at least two other doctors who had worked part time
Speaker 1: at serving his children who thought the facility overall had
Speaker 1: done a good job. So did nurses like Sophie Mutessi,
Speaker 1: who you heard from earlier. It was exactly these sorts
Speaker 1: of competing narratives that had stumped Dr Katumba's investigation. He
Speaker 1: had heard news about RENEE killing hundreds of kids performing
Speaker 1: medicine trampling on Uganda's rules. But then when he managed
Speaker 1: to visit Serving his Children's brand new facility less than
Speaker 1: two hours outside of Ginger, he found staff who were
Speaker 1: properly licensed, a facility with all of the right paperwork
Speaker 1: and an administration that was going by the book. Where
Speaker 1: were all of the dead kids? The main component was
Speaker 1: in India District unaffortunated. So we wrote a report and
Speaker 1: it had administer that that was our immutation, that we
Speaker 1: couldn't find a compliment for the Gingha site. The issue
Speaker 1: was that all of the accusations against Renee were made
Speaker 1: about work she had done at an old facility in Ginger.
Speaker 1: The team didn't have the time or resources to investigate
Speaker 1: claims at a facility that no longer existed, and even
Speaker 1: if they did, they would have probably heard the same
Speaker 1: conflicting things that I did. The report they submitted concludes
Speaker 1: this that they are unable to support allegations that children
Speaker 1: died in large numbers due to serving his children, and
Speaker 1: that they found no evidence that Renee Boch was treating children.
Speaker 1: The report was released, but the case was kept open
Speaker 1: in case any additional evidence or sources ever came forward.
Speaker 1: The experience that Dr sin Tanko had, I think speaks
Speaker 1: to how the whole story has unfolded. We had entered
Speaker 1: the story with huge, big, scary, outrageous testimonies about Renee
Speaker 1: and what she had done, the number of children that
Speaker 1: had died, the court case, but so far a lot
Speaker 1: of that evidence wasn't actually supporting the worst of the allegations.
Speaker 1: In fact, if anything, it suggested that it wasn't as
Speaker 1: bad as we thought. But what had become crystal clear
Speaker 1: to me was that there had been a bigger structural
Speaker 1: failure that goes well beyond Renee. And this mattered to
Speaker 1: me as somebody who has covered health and human rights
Speaker 1: in the region, because at the end of the day,
Speaker 1: Renee's only one person and Geo's like serving his children,
Speaker 1: had been encouraged allowed to operate in Jinja for years.
Speaker 1: They were able to interact with other hospitals and facilities
Speaker 1: and pharmacy ease. And despite the fact that yes, Uganda
Speaker 1: is a country with laws and regulations, those same laws
Speaker 1: and regulations hadn't managed to regulate her, and staff who
Speaker 1: were licensed, who were credible hadn't stopped it either. Next
Speaker 1: time on the missionary, I just couldn't understand how people
Speaker 1: could look at the same evidence we were looking at
Speaker 1: and come to such different conclusions. And I said, but sir,
Speaker 1: these kids will die if we send them home. And
Speaker 1: he said, you're right, they will die, but it's no
Speaker 1: longer your problem, So get them out of here at
Speaker 1: before five o'clock before I'm taking you to jail. I
Speaker 1: remember I would walk into like cafes and people would
Speaker 1: leave when they saw me, Like I went to like
Speaker 1: missionary events, and people would like refuse to speak to me.
Speaker 1: And this was my sort of ah ha moment. This
Speaker 1: was my wake up call that I had been lied
Speaker 1: to directly to my race. The Missionaries produced an association
Speaker 1: with iHeart Media. It's written and reported by Roger Gola,
Speaker 1: Helene mcgegandhi, and Malcolm Burnley. It's produced by Michelle Lands
Speaker 1: and Ryan Murdoch. Mark Lotto is our story editor. Our
Speaker 1: executive producer is Mongiter. Our fact checker is Austin Thompson.
Speaker 1: Mixing by Josh Rogison and voice acting by Taylor Kaufman.