37 Pounds

a special plan for you. You were either pro Renee and going to stand up for her and you know, have her back, or you were very much against what she was doing and just kind of outraged by it. All and five children died at an unlicensed treatment center for malnourished kids in Uganda. I used to take the did Buddhist Renee is being sued and ugand in court every time a kid dies. You're writing a blog post, You're getting all its attention. You might become addicted. What

leads Renee to go down this path? She thinks that's what God wants her to do. Ye Just two days before, I had heard a horror story. After driving all morning, I approached a small, half collapsing hut. The home was littered with trash, animal waste. My mind was reeling. As I walked closer and closer, a dread came over me, but also a strong desire to run as fast as I could to comfort those hurting to fix the problem

at hand. I remained calm. I prayed. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I saw a little skeleton of a child sitting on the dirt floor. Her name was Naba Cosa, and she wasn't a child. She was a woman in her twenties. And the woman telling this story is Renee Bach. She wrote about her encounter with Nabucoza and Vivid Deep Hill and her blog. We had an actor read the post and we edited them for clarity. But this is what Renee wrote back in August of two.

When she saw a movement, she slowly lifted her eyes, and when I saw a fear, deathlike look in her eyes, I screamed inwardly. My heart stopped. No one was caring for her, no one was feeding her, no one was even looking at her. And that is how Napacosa has lived every day for the past twenty three years until now. Renee wasn't the only one in Napocosa has had that day. Her friend Ashley Laverty was there too. She smelt very foul and it was just it was horrible. It was really,

really horrible. Okay, As Renee and actually walked closer, they heard a slow, continuous tapping. Napacosa was holding an empty mug and using the little energy she had to tap it on the ground. I feel like she was tapping that cup to signal that she wanted something to eat or drink. I had a flask like a travel mug of tea in the car. It was just black tea with maybe a little bit of honey or sugar in it, and I ran and got it and she just started

like downing it, like just gulping it down. Renee and Ashley wanted to get her out of that hut immediately. She was a full grown adult woman, but I was able to like just scooper up in my two arms. According to her medical documents, Napocoza Wade only thirty seven pounds. But the needy will not be forgotten, nor the hope of the afflicted ever perish. Some seen outside, they cleaned her, wrapped her in a cloth, and held her tight as

if she were a baby. I wanted her to know that she was loved not only by me, but by a great, big, huge God, and that he had not forgotten about her. I wanted her to know that he was coming to her rescue, but Napocosa wasn't rescued. Within a few days, Nabocsa would be dead. In the next few years, there would be one hundred five deaths according to Serving his Children's own records, but Nabokoza was the first to die under their roof an association with I

Heart Media. I'm Hellymaca CONDI, I'm Roger Gola, I'm Malcolm Burnley. This is the Missionary episode two thirty seven pounds. Renee and Ashley brought Napocoza back to Serving His Children to try and nurse her back to health. As always, Renee was hopeful, determined. Renee just started feeding her bryson beans, water. She would eat as much as she could and drink as much as she could, and she started to perk

up and like gain more energy. Ashley went home for the night and left Renee with Nabucoza and a new volunteer named Shanna, who declined an interview. But according to Renee's blog, it wasn't long before things got worse. I felt sure that Nabacosa was going to be with Jesus, that at any moment she would leave this earth headed to heaven, where a heavenly host would welcome her with open arms. Renee wasn't going to let that happen without

a fight. She bundled Nabucoza in a blanket, loaded her into a van and took her to the hospital, but they were turned away. We were driving frantically through the city of Kampala in the middle of the night, searching for anyone who would give her a second glance. I was terrified, hysterical, sad, angry. They tried three more hospitals but were turned away again and again. In one of our last attempts, I ran into a hospital barefoot, carrying

Nabucoza in my arms like a small infant. No one even looked up, and after sitting on a cold floor for over an hour, the doctor told me to leave her existing ivy in and take her home. Take her home. They were out of options, so that's what they did. They got back to serving his children in the middle of the night and laid Nabucosa in bed with hot water bottles. Renee slept by her side to keep her warm,

and then a small miracle happened. Today, Navacosa is awake, she can sit up, she's eating small amounts of food and keeping it down, and she can move a little bit and make noises in response. Today, Nabucosa is very much alive. Renee and I started off as friends, and we had similar passions or interests in that, like I had worked with children suffering from malnutrition. Ashley and Renee

were part of the same missionary community in Ginger. Ashley says she even volunteered at serving his children, but she saw herself as radically different from the other missionaries. She wasn't raised in an evangelical family, and she was well traveled. Her father was an American diplomat. From the time I was a little girl, like, I always had dreamt of coming to Africa. And I don't know if it's because like I had been to all these other you know,

countries and continents. Um, this is gonna really silly. But as a child, I really think it's because I was such an animal lover and like idolized women like Jane Goodall and Diane Fosse, and like it was the wildlife that initially attracted me and like the nature. In college, actually studied health sciences and worked with disabled children before moving to Uganda was like, but it made her nervous

to see what little experience her peers had. She was surrounded by young women who felt called to do service but had never actually studied or worked in these fields, and felt like they could just figure it out as they went along. And Yeah, a lot of young girls, you know, late teens, early twenties, generally not educated beyond secondary school or high school, never having any work experience like none, but would then graduate and come over here

to set up their own organization. I'm going to come and do my own thing so i can be my own boss and run my own show. That was very, very, very much a trend, I'll be honest, though. One thing that I found a bit ironic about this story is how many of these relatively young white American missionaries were ready to criticize each other but think of themselves as

the one white person doing it right in Africa. I mean, how did these young women without any medical training end up taking care of an incredibly sick woman in the first place. Back then, in missionary communities like Ginger, experience was often overlooked. What mattered most was your compassion, your piety, and your it meant in two thousand ten, serving his children was feeding hundreds of children every week, sometimes as many as a thousand. It was also around this time

that Renee started doing more than feeding kids. She began taking them in. Children who were sick with tuberculosis or malaria now nutrition. Renee's team would bring them back and forth to the hospital for treatment, while letting the kids in their families stay at the center for free. Here's how Katie Davis, one of Renee's old friends, described her in a blog back in two thousand ten. We had a voice actor read this too. Renee lives with purpose.

She is intentional about loving people with the love of Christ. She stops for one person and loves that person as if they were Christ himself. In her living room, she spends her day's nurturing children who we all swear will surely die back to health, preparing awful smelling high calorie milk, and mopping vomit off the floor and herself. And she doesn't complain because she knows she's doing it for Jesus. My childhood hero was Mother Teresa. By today hero is Renee,

a modern Mother Teresa. That was her reputation back then, even people who had never met Renee were inspired by her and wanted to help her play a tiny role in her mission. In that same blog post, Katie asks people to help Renee buy a new car for work, a car that could be used to rescue more people like Naba Coosa. Renee needs a car, and a good one. The kind were looking for a cost between ten and twelve thousand dollars that serving his children currently just doesn't have,

and people in the comments promised to donate. Weeks later, they got that car, a white Toyota land Cruiser. Navacosa is a proving tremendously. It is nothing short of a miracle, and no doubt, due to Renee and Shannon's devoted around the clock care and a God who is more awesome than I can fathom, Nabacosa's recovery wouldn't last. Within a couple of days, her health took a turn for the worse. I do remember coming back and she was lying in there hooked up to I v S that had been

administered by Renee. She was very uncomfortable and she was groaning, and there was just like a very foul smell coming from her and that room. I just remember just being in shock by all of it. She wasn't in a medical facility, she was just being treated from the center. She wasn't getting any better despite having you know, a so called treatment plan and and food and water, and then just declined so rapidly. My friend Napocosa went to

be with Jesus. God decided that it was time for her to come home, to leave her earthly pain behind and come worship Him for the rest of eternity. Now I have to say, this is not the way I wanted things to happen. I had other plans. I had a different end to her story and mind. But this is God's perfect end to her story, and the story is not mine to write. Renee told a moving story, and as we'll see, she'd keep telling it. But here's

the thing. From the beginning, actually doubted Renee's version of events. A blog of her running through these hospitals barefoot. I feel like that was maybe for exaggeration purposes. Ashley wasn't with Rani that night, but she did know about Ugandan hospitals. She had fostered dozens of kids and often had to navigate Uganda's complex health care system, so actually doubted that Renee Nabucoza would be turned away like that again and again.

The details just felt off to her. I don't know what kind of doctor would prescribe treatment for somebody that's sick, send them home and say you can just continue this treatment from home, you who has no medical training. Like that is shocking to me. I mean, it would be one thing if all she needed was a dose of antibiotics. But like when somebody is dying, starting to death and rotting from a host of infections, you don't just give a list of instruction to say, take her on home.

She can be managed for him home. As Renee tells it, Nabokoza fought to live until the very end until God decided it was her time to go. But Ashley says she was there when Napocosa died, and she remembers a completely different version where Nabacosa's death wasn't dignified, wasn't peaceful at all. At this point, she had been allowed to go outside and she was sitting on the veranda, and I believe she had been eating lunch, and all of

a sudden she took a turn for the worst. She just like the eyes started rolling back in her head, gurgling as if she was like gonna, you know, possibly faint or honestly die. And Renee ran into the house. She had her own little pharmacy set up, and she grabbed a medication, came outside and injected her with it, and then she died, but fell backwards. In Ashley's description is so alarming and almost violent. We were left wondering

how much had Renee's faith blinded her. Did Renee call us the death of the woman she set out to save. It's not like she was held by Renee As she peacefully slipped away. It was like, oh my gosh, like something is happening with her. I'm going to run inside, come back out, jabber, and then bool, she's dead. Nama Coosa's death spelled the end of Ashley and Renee's friendship.

Nine years later, Ashley would write an affidavit against Renee, accusing her of illegally practicing medicine in and she would use Nabokoza as her primary example. You get it, y'all. Get Missionaries weren't just something I read about in history books. They were something I grew up hearing about for years. My family comes from a place called Tuntumu, a two hour drive from Nairobi. Yeah, it's a beautiful town, nestled

in the rolling hills and highlands of central Tania. I live in the US now, but when I first heard about Renee, I was living in Kenya. I moved there back into I was and eighteen, mostly to be a freelance reporter. But I also wanted to travel the country with my cousins and spend time with my grandmother or show show, as we say in cuckoo you or native language. I wanted to know her and record her history my

never days like me. When I wasn't practicing my cuckoo you, I was walking in the family farm, picking mangoes and avocados straight from the trees, or playing fetch with the dogs and saying hide my uncle's cows path. But whenever I walked through it, I also felt like I could feel the weight of history on my shoulders. Britain has brought much good to Kenya. A standards of living are growing still higher as more of her people learn the

lessons that the white man has to teach. More than a hundred years ago, Tumutumu became one of the very first missionary outposts of the Church of Scotland and across the ridge from our home, that's where the Catholic missionary set up. Down the street were the Anglicans. Mister Littleton lens of the maumas threats on the lives of Catholic missionaries, and in the Nyanza province he talks with elders of the Kukuyo tribe from which the Maumau drew hundreds of recruits,

many of whom have not been arrested. You can see the presence of missionaries everywhere. They established one of the very first hospitals in the region to Mutumu Hospital, and one of the best schools to Mutumu Primary School where my father went. He The one thing my grandmother would talk about proudly was her lifelong membership in the church as women's Guild. It was a point of pride for her and in our town. It made her a respectable woman.

What does she want us to remember? I might remember then, which it tell us about the women's guild? He give them. On the day I recorded her, she was wearing her favorite light blue bandanna. It read p C E A Presbyterian Church of East Africa and If you ask some of the older Kenyons about missionaries, this is what they talk about. The good things. For her generation. The church represented a new Africa with a brand new set of opportunities.

When my grandmother died last year, dozens of women from the guild came to the church. They wore the same blue bandana that my grandmother always wore. Together, they carried my grandmother's coffin out of the church, her bandanna draped over it. To me, you can't talk about missionaries without talking about colonialism. The missionaries had come with promises to educate and convert Kenyon's, but they were also complicit in

the theft of their land and their resources. But whenever I asked her about the other side of that history, the dark side, how the British detained tens of thousands of cuku Are tribe and forcibly relocated people to barbed wire camps, burned down homes, set up curfews, all to keep them down. I always had the sense that my grandmother just didn't want to speak about those things. To her. The British had done terrible things, but the missionaries had

done God's work. They brought hospital is to save children, schools, to bring opportunities, and I get that when I think about Renee Boch. The question isn't whether or not all missionaries are bad, but I do wonder what would the you Gonde and she encountered say. That's what has driven me throughout this entire podcast actually hearing the you Gonde

on side of the story. Would they see her as my grandmother did, doing God's work by bringing hospitals and schools, or would they see her as a harbinger of something darker, an enabler of something more dangerous, something so terrible that no one could speak about it now. A lot of things Renee wrote in her blog are hard to believe. Did she really run barefoot through a hospital? Did a

doctor actually tell her to manage a patient herself? But what grabs my attention the most is something that Renee implies again and again in her blogs, this idea that you Gondan families didn't care enough and that was why their children were starving, as if love could heal any amount of poverty. After Nabacosa died, Renee wrote this, you should know that thousands of people are praying for you and your family. I know your mom is feeling so sad about the past twenty three years. I told her

you forgave her. One of the only things Renee and Ashley agree on is that Naubakoza was neglected, had been starved. In fact, in her affidavit, Renee says that one of Nabucoza's relatives told her they put her in a room to wait for her to die. Sweet Nabucosa lived a life full of incredible pain and suffering. She lived a life of neglect, a life of abuse. She was even denied the right to be loved by her own mother. Can you even begin to imagine what that would be, La,

I can't. After Renee posted Navacosa's story, it spread like wildfire from one Christian blog to another, the parable of poor Nabacosa, who had never received love until the day she was rescued by these two young white women. Here's some of what they wrote. She was in her awful state only because no one had cared for her, No one had loved her, no one had even given her a second thought. That she survived as long as she did in the care of Anti Renee is a miracle

in itself. I've never held a starving person in my arms, her dry skin warm against mine, and prayed she lived. Renee has it was just too easy, too convenient to cast off Nabacosa's family as these silent villains in Renee's heroic story, a cheap plot device that was eerily familiar, like the casual mention of fly is swarming around an African child's head. But what would Nabucoza's family say. We needed to hear in their words what happened. So Regiv went to go find them. I set out early one

Sunday morning, all right. I headed north from Gina for about an hour, following the Nile downstream along the same dirt roads that Renee would have taken when she found Nabucoza ten years earlier. I'm on the back of a motorcycle with smy my translator, and fix her. I'm holding the recorder in one hand and the seat would together. So Mom and Nabokoza is still here. No, she's gone already, Okay. So May was a former employee of serving his children who had been fired back in over a pay dispute.

Now he's a witness in the case against Renee. So he's not exactly a neutral party, but he knew the local language and where Navacoza's village was, and we had all his translations checked with the third party in full disclosure. Our team chose to pay some for this work. Anyway, we got to the village and asked around for Navacoza's mother. So where are we now? Yeah? Okay, And pretty quickly we found not her mother but her sister, Lydia. I'm she was outside of a small brick house cooking over

a fire. Her kids were nearby sorting some nuts. Actually, does she know anything information? Litia's eyes got big as she told sam story Ginger masses vunteers in bazoong I recognized some words ginger Messungu. She's going to the term as so far as she's the sister to the little Navakosa and when Navakosa was sick, she's among the people who escorted Navacoza to the clinic in Gina suburb. In all of Renee's blog posts about Navocosa, she told the story of neglect, a story about a woman cast aside

by her own family. She never once mentioned that Nabucoza's sister was by her side for four whole days did she believe that these missouis were doctors? Well, you kid, but no, it is this money. She said, she didn't know whether they were doctors, but she felt like a goat being dragged along. I met Navacosa's mom, Jane a week later at her farm. She had a bundle of corn husks on her head and wore a tied eye

green tashiki and a long skirt. She sat down the corn husks and brought a few logs for us to sit on in her front yard. I wanted to hear about how Navacosa came to be the way she was. I brought along another interpreter, Sophie tell Us from Navocosa's birth. When was Navacasa born and was she healthy as a child? Oh? Yea as valubuality. Did I have my nine? It did two and she was a healthy baby, no problems. Jane said that at age three they noticed Novacosa's hands were

different sizes. One hand was big, another one was small. That's how it started. And she was speaking normally like her brand developing like everybody else or how get a balloon? Jean going to nyog the okay, she could not speak. I learned that Nabucoza used to walk despite half her body being paralyzed, but she also regularly had seizures. Nevertheless,

for twenty seven years they got by. When Jane spent time with her husband, Nabocoza would stay with her grandmother and they had always done their best to take care of her. The people, the Missoulus that found Navocosa, they're saying that she was neglected, that she was not eating, that they were trying to starve her. That's the way she's saying, you know, towards in that case, we are lying.

Jane denied neglect. She said Navacosa had been closely cared for and NGO in the area had even been giving her anti Caesar medication with a warning never to stop taking them. Or as Jane put it, it would hit Navocosa so bad. But when Renee brought Nabucoza back to serving his children, that's exactly what they did. I can't a facigated real. They were told to stop the medication that she was on, so they started giving her that food. Then I asked Jane the question that had been on

my mind for months. It was the whole reason that had come all this way to meet her in the first place, Um, how did Nabucosa pass away? At it? And I have found it? Went after bathing her, she was trying to give some food and then she saw that food was no longer going now carrying her to put down the bid, she went like that. The way that Jane spoke, she made it clear that Navocoza wasn't neglected. She was loved by her family. They were with her

in her last days. That meant Renee had gotten the story wrong, or at the very least made it her own. I think Jane impacked my things, But just as I was about to leave, she asked if I had a photo of Navocosa. I pulled out my phone and sifted through Renee's blogs just for a second. Then I handed my phone to her. It was a photo of Navacosa lying in a bed with fresh, clean clothes on. Her eyes are wide open and she's looking right at the camera.

M Jane spent a few quiet moments with a smile on her face, and I realized that for Jane, it might have been ten years since she even seen a photograph of her own daughter. Before Nabucoza died, a story was already being written about her life in Renee's blogs, it was a story of unimaginable neglect, of starvation, and ultimately the origin story of Renee's own heroism. Nine years later, Ashley uses Navacosa's story too in her case against Renee.

Only this story is a victimization of Napacosa being injected, stabbed with a syringe by Renee, killed rather than saved. So why should we trust Ashley's version any more than Renee's. Of course, he might be thinking, well, what about the family who says they never abandoned not Pacosa, never neglected her, hadn't done their best even with few resources. Is it possible they might not be telling the truth. Yes, of course,

but that's not really the point. The point is that Renee, in Ashley, and other missionaries in this case that are too often talking about what did or did not happen to Ugandan's But except for a few former employees, these Ugandan voices are largely absent. And keep in mind that most of the time these missionaries don't even speak any of the local languages. Who gets to tell the story matters,

and how they tell it matters too. For Renee, not Beacosa's death could have been an early warning that she was in over her head, but Renee thought is something different, an opportunity, a rolling cry. Navacosa's life was not in vain. God is still using her even today. God has used her to put a beautiful face and name to the word starvation, to make the hunger crisis real for people

all around the world. Navacosa's life mattered. Thousands have fallen in love with this precious woman, have cried over her pain and spent nights in prayer for her. There are thousands of navacosa Is all around the world. Now that you know about it, what are you going to do? Within two months of Napacosa's death, Renee was back in the United States, holding fundraising events at local churches from Chattanooga, Tennessee,

to Miskogee, Oklahoma. She would hold silent auctions and sell beads and other handmade goods from Uganda, and even stage mock feedings where churchgoers would in their own bulls and line up for rice and beings, just like the children in Uganda. And she would tell stories like navacasas show pictures of children she had supposedly saved. Jackie Crawmlick is a nurse who volunteered at Serving His Children. She still

remembers one of her name's presentations. She told the story of Navocosa, the whole story from beginning to end, like this girl and she was a sack of blaa and she was like stabbing and crying. The story was basically all about how this girl was so neglected and abused your whole life. She was neglected, neglected until you know Renee came in and saved her, and her fundraising took off on the back of that story. Navacasa's story was,

no doubt a powerful one. Renee was a gifted storyteller doing something we do all the time as journalists describe and vivid details the harsh environments in which people are living, described their suffering and lyric crazings, and end with a glimmer of hope a call to action. Renee would continue to post countless stories and photos of sick children on her blog and on social media, all part of her

campaign to end child malnutrition. In a few years, Serving His Children would go from a fledgling nonprofit to something bigger and NGO with outsized ambitions, collecting more than one point five million dollars in five years as the list of donors grew longer, but Nabokoza's name would just be the first in a different list, A long, somber one. Next time on the Missionary, we go looking for Renee Back and we find her sitting at home in Virginia,

her life upside down, wondering why she's an outcast. I guess how you've been. Yeah, it's been challenging for sure. No one wants to be be said to be murder. People have forgotten that I'm a human, like in, a person with emotions and someone who has children that are going to grow up one day and google their mom's name and say, Wow, was my mom a serial killer? Did she start a genocide? Because that's what people said about her. The Missionaries produced an association with iHeart Media.

It's written and reported by Roger Gola, Heleemage Condhi, and Malcolm Burnley. It's produced by Michelle Lands and Ryan Murdoch. Mark Lotto is our story editor. Our executive producer is Moi Thicketter. Our fact checker is Austin Thompson. Mixing by Josh Rogisson and voice acting by Taylor Kaufman.