Many of you may remember a story that broke last summer about a disgraced evangelical missionary who faces a lawsuit in Uganda for practicing medicine at a quasi-clinic where numerous children died. Complicating the matter was how many of these children were hopelessly malnourished and gravely ill when they were brought to her in the first place.
I wrote about Renée Bach’s situation here at GetReligion last August while everyone was ripping into her for being a white woman trying to save black African babies. I thought the amount of venom directed against this woman was over the top in that she didn’t have to take these kids on at all. The parents of these kids had other medical choices in Jinja, the city on Lake Victoria in which Bach’s clinic was set up. Jinja is Uganda’s second-largest city, so we’re not talking about a hamlet here.
So when I heard that the New Yorker had written about this story on the whole matter last month, I figured this would be another screamer of a piece ripping up folks who go to Africa for evangelistic reasons.
Instead, I found a nuanced piece by Ariel Levy, a Jewish writer who brought her faith into the picture to give a whole different read as to why a young Christian woman set up a health clinic, called Serving His Children, over there in the first place. I started digging into who Levy is and found some pretty surprising stuff.
More on her in a moment. First, the story. This section is long, but essential:
Twalali was one of more than a hundred babies who died at Serving His Children between 2010 and 2015. The facility began not as a registered health clinic but as the home of Renée Bach — who was not a doctor but a homeschooled missionary, and who had arrived in Uganda at the age of nineteen and started an N.G.O. with money raised through her church in Bedford, Virginia. She’d felt called to Africa to help the needy, and she believed that it was Jesus’ will for her to treat malnourished children. Bach told their stories on a blog that she started. “I hooked the baby up to oxygen and got to work,” she wrote in 2011. “I took her temperature, started an IV, checked her blood sugar, tested for malaria, and looked at her HB count.”
In January, 2019, that blog post was submitted as evidence in a lawsuit filed against Bach and Serving His Children in Ugandan civil court. The suit, led by a newly founded legal nonprofit called the Women’s Probono Initiative, lists the mothers of Twalali and another baby as plaintiffs, and includes affidavits from former employees of S.H.C. A gardener who worked there for three years asserts that Bach posed as a doctor: “She dressed in a clinical coat, often had a stethoscope around her neck, and on a daily basis I would see her medicating children.” An American nurse who volunteered at S.H.C. states that Bach “felt God would tell her what to do for a child.” A Ugandan driver says that, for eight years, “on average I would drive at least seven to ten dead bodies of children back to their villages each week.”
The story became an international sensation. “How could a young American with no medical training even contemplate caring for critically ill children in a foreign country?” NPR asked last August. The Guardian pointed to a “growing unease about the behavior of so-called ‘white saviors’ in Africa.” A headline in the Atlanta Black Star charged Bach with “ ‘Playing Doctor’ for Years in Uganda.” The local news in Virginia reported that Bach was accused of actions “leading to the deaths of hundreds of children.”
Levy traveled to Bedford, Va., to get Bach’s story, which takes up the first half of the piece. We learn how a simple feeding program she set up for hungry kids turned into a health clinic after parents with critically ill children began lining up at her door.
Some key information: Her faith wouldn’t allow her to turn them away, so over the years she began hiring nurses, then doctors, to help out.
Bach was overwhelmed by what she’d taken on. She asked around to figure out how to keep medical charts that would be intelligible to staff at Ugandan health facilities. “Everyone would be, like, ‘Just buy a school notebook and write in it—that’s what everyone does.’ There were a lot of things like that, where no one had an answer. But, in the beginning, we were just trying to keep our heads above water.”
Bach had been raised to believe that Christians have a responsibility to help the needy, and that with tenacity and research ordinary people can achieve most things they set their minds to. Her mother had taught her and her four siblings at the kitchen table, using curricula from a Christian homeschooling service. A form that Serving His Children provided to volunteers contained a motto: “You don’t have to be a licensed teacher to teach, or be in the medical field to put on Band Aids.”
The writer then flew to Uganda to interview the plaintiffs and look at medical records kept by Bach’s clinic. She had a Kenyan researcher and an instructor at Harvard Medical School, both of whom had some global health expertise, to review those records.
It becomes clear from this reporting that the charges against Bach are baseless and the stories put forth by the two plaintiffs are full of holes.
Slowly the writer introduces various personalities: The mentally unhinged American social worker based in Kampala who conducts a social media campaign against Bach; a disgruntled ex-employee who now lives in Spokane and some of the inside politics between the Christian missionaries in Jinja.
This paragraph shows the fascinating gossip concerning the latter:
Though (Kelsey) Nielsen didn’t overlap with Bach at Amani, she was well aware of her. To Nielsen, Bach and her friend Katie Davis “were, like, the cool girls of Jinja.” Davis, another missionary, came to Uganda at eighteen, and within five years had become the legal guardian of thirteen Ugandan girls, whom she wrote about in her best-selling memoir “Kisses from Katie.” Nielsen said, “Honestly, I remember wanting to be friends with Katie and Renée. They’re the cool, young missionaries, starting their own N.G.O.s, adopting children.” She recalled a New Year’s Eve party at Bach’s house in 2011: “All white people and their adopted black children.”
I quickly glanced at Katie Davis’s web site and noticed her adopted daughters were mainly AIDS orphans that no one else wanted. What would detractors of such women do; leave these kids on the street?
What comes across is a stable of disreputable Ugandans and Americans whose dubious accusations against Bach hold no water whatsoever. The story is not so much about religion as it is about fights between religious people, some of whom are quite devious. It’s also about a cast of characters including the corrupt local police and a disgruntled chauffeur who emailed Levy child porn.
You heard that right. In fact, the story takes an abrupt shift when the reporter gets this horrendous video and confronts Nielsen (the social worker) who recommended the chauffeur to her. Nielsen emails back an explanation that seems to condone the video.
By this point, I think Levy had reached her limit and had long since realized that a coterie of Ugandans and Americans were trying to frame Bach and if it takes sending a pornographic video to a reporter, so be it. So, what do you do when you’ve been assigned a story you think is heading in one direction only to find it going in completely another?
Well, you present the facts as best as you can dig them up. When she began asking too many questions, she was accused of having a Christian bias, at which point she had to identify herself as Jewish.
I was impressed with how Levy followed every last lead, checking one source’s stories against those of others who remembered the same incident and factchecking items like whether Bach’s passport had a certain July 2013 date in it. And it makes me wonder at the quality of reporting of all the other outlets that showed up in Uganda to sift through the facts.
An exception is a broadcast that came out last October from NTV in Uganda whose staff had the benefit of thoroughly knowing the culture and having access to police reports and local villagers. That broadcast, which is atop this blog, discredits Bach’s accusers.
When the print edition of this story came out on April 13, the headline simply said “The Mission,” which is the same title as the 1986 film about an ill-fated Jesuit missionary in the 1750s whose well-meaning foray into eastern Paraguay ended up with natives and Jesuits alike being killed. Surely the headline writer meant to have us liken that incident to the deaths of children brought to Bach’s feeding station in the 21st century.
But the story doesn’t go there; in fact its conclusions infuriated Bach’s opponents, including the American social worker who filed this complaint against the New Yorker on Medium.com, saying she was unfairly linked to the man who sent Levy the child porn video.
Reading between the lines, we learn that Levy felt harassed enough to delete her personal Twitter account after a Ugandan activist went after her. There’s obviously a lot of background drama going on in this story and reading the hate mail from tweets of the story posted by the magazine itself shows there’s a ton of folks out there who would lynch Bach if they could.
What did the story leave out? It refers briefly to certain missionaries that Bach answered to and I wish Levy had talked with them to just give us more of an idea of the missionary culture in Jinja and if anyone of the Americans there supported Bach. Perhaps local missionaries, fearing some kind of reprisals, refused to be interviewed. Or did they dislike her?
I also wondered if Bach belonged to any denomination. I learned from another source that her parents attend a Baptist church but nothing pointing to the specifics of Bach’s affiliation.
The sub-plot to this whole drama is the group #nowhitesaviors and the anti-missionary hatred they’ve whipped up in recent years.
Read some of the comments on the New Yorker’s Instagram feed next to the story. “White missionaries are just modern-day colonialists,” says one of the tamer ones. (I’m guessing most of these folks have never been to countries, like India and many parts of Africa, where the despised missionaries have built hospitals, schools, universities and other infrastructure that has saved and improved millions of lives.)
Inside.com had an interesting read on the situation.
As the lawsuit makes its way through the courts, it becomes clear the real conflict lies within the expat community in Jinja where Bach – untrained in both social work and medicine – came up against a rival clique critical of her motives. But while the legal evidence against Bach is far from incontrovertible, she’s most definitely guilty of being a white Christian woman who believes God wanted her to work in Africa.
Nearly 100 percent of the press that ran on this story last summer was extremely negative toward Bach, but the New Yorker at sent a journalist to Uganda to look into it. Part of this may be due to who the reporter was. I usually don’t delve into the background of journalists doing a story, but Levy is no ordinary scribe.
In this earlier New Yorker profile, Levy is introduced as a “bisexual Wesleyan graduate” who marries another woman, conceives a child, who she miscarries while also going through a divorce. Her father produced content for abortion rights groups such as NARAL and Planned Parenthood; her mother worked with disabled children and was having an open affair.
What this produced was a woman who says she likes to write about “unusual female voices and perspectives;” most often offbeat stories about lesbians, female pole dancers, people into S&M or just women who defy society’s conventions. This Guardian profile tells how unusual she is and how she became famous after writing an article about how she miscarried her very premature son, born at 19 weeks, in while doing a story in Mongolia.
While experiencing the miscarriage, she met a male South African doctor who was in the ER at the hospital in Ulaanbaatar where she was treated. She later took up with him (like I said, she’s bisexual), and they married about two years ago, although I can’t find anything on the internet that shows a wedding. Assuming this is so, this explains her high comfort level with doing stories based out of Africa.
Anyway, the New Yorker may not be doing more stories soon on wrongly accused missionaries after getting a ton of criticism on social media for not nailing Bach. But I’m glad they sent an unusual reporter who did a thorough job researching an unusually complex story in a country where the answers aren’t always what they seem to be.
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