Matthew 18

There's no one I would say, but please, I want to see your papas, but please waise your certificate displayed here. There was no way I would ask that. Mal nutrition season in Uganda is really like May through September because of the rainy season in the way that the harvests flow there, And so we had kind of geared up for pretty high numbers in the summer. And yeah, we had a lot of people that were just coming. We had over twenty children because that is the time the

facility was overwhelmed. We had very many. It was above the capacity. But then the morning came when a government vehicle pulled up to the gate of serving his children unannounced. It was March twelve. It was around eight I started due to as you. So at ten we used to take the vitals of these children. The babies would go to sleep. I was sitting there after taking my vitals and so the vehicle for the d H. When they came the d H or they came in the car,

the guard opened the gates. I just saw some officials coming out of the vehicle and welcome to him or what you've been doing. You're killing children here this and you're just for educating in the communities. Why are you treating children? I supposed to children. I'm supposed to work here, I said, I am a maddie and I'm not a boss. They asked for the director. I was killing my friend's thirteen children while she was on her honeymoon for two

and a half weeks. As soon as Renee called wind of the raid, she found another babysitter and raced across town. They went inside the office and the DHL stood there and looked me in the face and said, you have to get everyone out by five. And I said, well, I don't know where we're going to send all these kids because they all need really intensive care. And he said,

I don't care. You can send them home, you can refer them to government facility, and I said, but sir, these kids will die if we send them home, and he said, you're right, they will die, but it's no longer your problem, so get them out of here before five o'clock or I'm taking you to jail. After that, we saw any going in the boys quota and she started crying. Then yes, hearing they have closed us down, they have closed us down. She called it the stuff

and said the center has been closed. They could. The driver packed up those mothers and took back the motherless in their respective places, where they picked to them, women on their knees, begging, please don't make us sleep, Please aunt your name, please don't make us sleep. Our kids are gonna die. And within three days, eight or nine of those kids died in other facilities. In association with I Heart Media, I'm Malcolm Burnley, I'm Roger Gola, I'm

Mega Condi. This is the Missionary episode seven Matthew eighteen. If you compare the events of two thousand fifteen to what is happening today with serving his children, it's a bit like deja vu. For the first time, these quiet, it simmering whispered complaints about what was happening inside the facility started to get out and to be taken seriously by people with actual authority. It was the first time Renee was forced to answer questions on the record and

to be held accountable. The good Samaritan defense, the witch hunt narrative, and the arguments that Renee was only dealing with children under the watchful eye of Ugandan professionals. These were all aired out five years ago. Two thousand fifteen was the year that everything changed for serving his children

for Renee for Gina. Just weeks before the shutdown, to pediatricians from non Lufenia Children's Hospital visited serving his children and they were alarmed by certain conditions like the children receiving intravenous fluids. When the pediatricians felt they didn't need to so they took their concerns to Peter Joego Natamu, the Strict Health Officer or d h O. We know that the DHOW handed Renee an inspection notice bearing a government insignia, which said in plain language why serving his

children was being shut down. The first violation was for running a health facility with an expired license. What's weird about this is that serving his children finally did get a license in two thousand fourteen. They had passed a government inspection and everything, but without renewal, the medical license had expired by March two thousand fifteen. Renee says she believed there was a grace period lasting several months where they could operate without it as they waited to get

it renewed. I learned later that this was actually a common misconception on the ground and that you gone and officials are still trying to correct it. There is no grace period. I mean, the realities is not that hard to register. It's just a paperwork process, you know. Um I really anyone who wanted to register a house center probably could. I mean, the qualifications are not that heavy.

I mean the things that we put into place were probably far stricter and more structured than what was required. The obvious question here is that if it was so easy to do, then why didn't she? For the record, licensing is one of those issues that goes well beyond Renee. A lot of Ugandan clinics have been shut down because

they didn't have active licenses. Regardless, it doesn't matter what led the DHO to investigate that day elapsed a license was all he needed to shut them down immediately because it was illegal, and it wasn't all they found. The d h O also wrote down that children with tuberculosis or t B were mixed in with the rest of

the kids. Not only is t B an infectious disease, it's also a potential cause of malnutrish in, which is why there are strict standards for quarantining children with TB from those who don't have it, because otherwise you could be treating one problem while potentially infecting children with another. The third violation was a bit broad. The d h O noted that there were children in need of higher level care than what serving his children could visibly provide

cases that shouldn't have been handled there. So at the end of the day, the person who was ultimately responsible for the shutdown was the person who was running the facility. That was Renee back. What's more, we learned that Renee had made multiple attempts to try to get serving his

children reopened without addressing any of those problems. These were actually rumors that we had heard very early on during our reporting, claims that Renee had gone to the capital of Kampala to try to get reopened had done something fishy. What we did learn was this She met with Dr Cotumba sin Tango, the chief executive of Uganda's medical and dental counsel, who heard from in the last episode. He

remembers the meeting vividly because of where they met. He was attending a conference and Renee was willing to meet him in the hotel lobby. Doctor sin Tango remembers Renee trying to convince him that the DHO had gotten it wrong and to help her reopen, but that didn't fly with him. So asked you what other issue and said, oh, the districts have said, oh, if you did that to me, get the phone. So no, I get the phone. So I got the phone and I phoned. I founded, he

told me. Doctor sin Tango put the DHOW on speaker phone to make sure that Renee could hear his explanation. He said that if I was handling letters, especially, they are not fit to manage and doctoral they taught them to defy the cases film in the hospital. You know the right deal for a good affection of contra and whatever. In the coming days, Dr sin Tango received calls from

politicians asking if he would reconsider Renee's appeal. He doesn't remember exactly who called, he says, mostly because he didn't pay the much attention. They don't above mean the profession. But I think the politicians, say the local politicians. I don't remember a bit of advertise. Remember somebody, senior. I think there's some people fund me somewhere, the people fund me to the guest anything. But as you like, yes,

you know, if you are not in the line of profession. Yeah, keep in mind this is a person in a position of authority saying this. He told Renee she would have to fix the problems at serving his children and sorted out with the d show before she could reopen. We don't know if Renee ever did that, but what we do you know from the court documents is that Renee solicited letters of support from some of the medical staff she had employed, including mudasik Uza, the clinical officer we

heard from in the last episode. But when I showed him the letter bearing his signature, he said he didn't remember writing it. Later, a different official in Jinga, Henry Kombaini of the Allied Health Professionals Counsel, told me he remembered that months after the shutdown. Renee and another woman came to his office to inquire about registering a lab at serving his children, but he told them they needed

a valid license first. Was this Renee trying to back channel the system in order to reopen or was it her trying to figure out how to reopen the right way. The person I thought would have the answer to that was the d HO or district Health officer, and we tried to speak with him multiple times. I even waited at his office for hours, but he refew is to

talk with us. Even now, Renee considers the shutdown a personal hit job herself a victim of politics and Vendetta's rather than the overt reasons staring her in the face, including the government violations. Later, we were told, and you know, we don't have any evidence to this, but that the DJO was paid a bribe to come and close the center.

So when he came, he really had no option. So um, you know, he had to come with a pretty serious aggression because you know, he was paid a decent amount of money to come and lead us to believe that we were being closed. Here's what we actually know about the series of events that led up to it. The d h O got a tip from those pediatricians at Malathania, but those pediatricians got a tip from inside the missionary world. I had been the person to who volunteered to compile

all the evidence. I didn't have a lot of first hand evidence myself, which is kind of why I volunteered to do that, because I had her that I was a little bit less emotionally involved and less emotionally charged. Megan Parker didn't know Renee well. She had a reputation as something of an outsider in Ginger, running a bide family center, the NNGO she launched with Kelsey Nielsen in two I just couldn't understand how people could look at the same evidence we were looking at and come to

such different conclusions. Sometime in early the evidence gathered by women like Ashley Laberty and Jackie Kramlike crystallized into a document. It included photos from Renee's blog trying to show Renee had violated patient privacy rights, a post where Renee seemed to be transfusing a girl that we now know as Patricia. There was a little bit of firsthand testimony contributed by Ashley two, but most of the evidence was cut and pasted from Renee's blogs, and that document started to make

its way around Ginger. Elizabeth Nicholson made a copy and took it to the police. Another one went to Nalafa in You, and they even sent the material to the media. I think anything really came of that. No one communicated with us after that until the day that serving as shut down, and then obviously that was swirling all over town, and that's when we kind of were like, WHOA, I

guess that did something. Renee described this document almost like a high school burn book, coupled together by her rivals. In order to ruin her reputation back, Kelsey and a couple of other women created a file of just different pieces of blogs, a couple of photos, and to be honest, when I read it later, it sounded like they were writing it for like a tabloid publication. It was like

fairly catty. It was almost I mean, it wasn't because I was like a disaster at the time, but it was almost comical, you know, just this mean girl undertone. Later I did read the document, it didn't seem juvenile or frivolous or conspiratorial. Honestly, it read like an early draft of the court case, except without stories like twel allies. At the time, Megan and her colleagues believed they were whistleblowers,

but soon they were treated like snitches. At vacation Bible camp, that very day, someone told me, people are really unhappy. They think your approaches were unbiblical and that you should never have gone to the authorities. You should have gone

to the church elders if you had concerned. I went to missionary events and people would like refuse to speak to me, And I think again, like that was I was so like brigged out about that that I definitely overestimated how many people were against me versus on my side. Like the entire town was just split down the middle. After the shutdown, a group of religious leaders stepped in with a plan and to end the bad blood and determine once and for all, what if anything Renee did wrong.

Nobody agreed on anything in this story except one thing. The church mediation was an unqualified disaster. You know, there were so many of us that were seeing the same story, giving the same narrative, and they just wouldn't listen or wouldn't believe it, and they were just so like help bent on standing up for Renee that it was just like it was shocking, that's Ashley, here's Renee. I feel very certain that Kelsey and everybody Jackie would say, oh, well,

the elders wanted to stick up for Renee. They just didn't even want to hear what we had to say, like they don't care. And I would probably say the same thing. I feel like they were verbalizing to me like, hey, we want to help this situation, like how can we support you? But I didn't feel supported or helped at all. I feel like they made my life more living. Count Patrick Draku was a Ugandan elder at the church. When I attended, I hoped to see humility this who thought

they were right, said Luke. I humble myself, I see that I was wrong, and those who still think they're right to try to listen to the other site. I hoped for Christians behaving like much a Christians, not still infants. Yeah. Three mediators agreed to lead the process. A church elder named Jeremy Boone who led the church when I went to and to other elders from other churches in the community.

But in the small world of Ginger, everyone already knew each other old allegiances or the perception of them torpedo the process before it began. None of them had ever experienced anything like this before, where there was so much like overwhelming brokenness. My perception of Jeremy was that he went in hoping to help heal a community, realized that the whole situation was way more complex than he perceived,

and he was just in totally over his head. The mediators spoke about restoring peace, but they chose not to bring both sides together. Renee and her accusers came in separately for questioning, sitting down in plastic chairs below a shady grove of palm trees. Megan Parker and Ashley Laberty went together, and then they just tried using a whole bunch of scripture out of context, basically to demean and

degrade Megan and I. It was very upsetting. I actually had to sit on my hands because I was shaking so badly. The mediators kept coming back to a part of Matthew eighteen about the value of handling conflicts neighbor to neighbor, Christian to Christian. I have a pastor daughter born and raised okay um so lasts among the believers. They're as this passage and first for instance, that if members of the church have grievances against one another, why would you go to a law that is an unrighteous

law instead of the thing? It's the exact line. And we got really sort of heated because we're like, why are you unable to see that this isn't a church matter? And like why why would we have gone to the church elders or church leadership? Because this was not a biblical matter. This wasn't a church matter. It was a

moral and legal matter. But Ashley and Jackie had tried for years to handle this inside the community, and now they felt like these spiritual leaders weren't even taking them seriously.

Here's Jackie Kramlin. It was that whole thing that I'm like, was just like awakening to the insanity of the rules we followed as a community, you know that, like you could come forward with children dying, um now practice and neglect kind of thing negligence and be told like, yeah, okay, but you know you just said it, so me and her feelings were really hurt. Let's all make a list and bring her some special thing every day because she

feels so sad right now. They lost sight of like what the medication was because they were like, well, not our girls, because we're all in it involved, and the mediation team was all men. The mediation completely backfired. Ashley believed it could be a second chance for justice, a second chance to tell their stories, but by the end she felt like they were being asked to atone not Renee. Again. We're bringing up all these examples of the wrong that

Renee had done. Yet somehow they wanted us to feel like we were the ones in the wrong. And it was just like a very dirty feeling. I wrote, hear me like a personal email, like getting all of like how this impact me, Like explaining to him that like you're not only just kind of like turning your eyes away from justice and child abused basically and um, even when there's really hard evidence in front of your face. But like in saying that she's fine, you're calling me

a buyer. But the mediation failed in another even more significant way. The saga of serving his children was one that affected Ugandan families, but Ugandans were never involved in the process. The mediation would never address the actual issues at hand. If it did not address the victims first.

In the end, the mediators wrote a letter commending Renee for her cooperation and concluded quote that Renee and her board saw their indiscretion and we're working hard to make sure they were legally compliant and above board prior to serving his children's clinic being shut down. But the letter also went on to condemn those who brought the allegations in the first place, and said, is that the criticisms were not put forward in a caring manner. Let me

read you a line here. Harsh judgments concerning Renee's character and in one event, the destination of her soul did little to help bring facts to light. While it's understandable to be frustrated with a perceived disinterest of Renee in her board, it is never right to be presumptuous about such a grave matter a person's character or their soul. I just always remember thinking and even telling my mom Um, I was like, you know, unless this gets into the media,

like nothing is ever going to happen. She's just going to keep doing what she's doing. She's going to keep getting praised for it. People are still going to stand up for her. Um. As much as I sorry, wanted to put it behind me. There was still this part of me that like still wanted to see justice and like her, have to face the consequences of what she had done. Oh, I didn't think that I was the

person to make that all happen. Um. I felt like I was never really going to be happy or like at at peace with this situation until that happened, if that ever happens. So what was your react? Go ahead, Yeah, take a minute. I've been trying to get in contact with Jeremy Boone for months. I left him voicemails, texts, and emails. I could tell he had seen my messages, but he never wrote back. Other folks in town told me it was a dead end. Jeremy was over at all.

He'd put the whole thing behind him. He moved on and didn't want anything to do with it anymore. But then one day he responded, and a week later I was sitting cross legged on the floor of his living room. I wore the only button up shirt I packed, tucked into my jeans, trying to clean up the best I could for the church service that Jeremy was holding in his home. Goods. I'm thank you so much, Um, he

and his wife started off leading a few songs. There were about forty people there, a mixed crowd of Ugandan's, Americans, kids, teens, adults, some who'd been there for decades and some who'd just gotten there a few weeks earlier. Yeah, so a few people. He's good to happen. Thank you very much for having very glad to hear he's a journalist. Actually he's went to du University and other of you care a lot here that so far, despite that fact, which is nice.

The subject of that morning sermon was John seven Oddly residence John seven thirty seven. On the last and greatest day of the festival, Jesus stood and said, in a loud voice, let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me. Best scripture has said rivers of living model flowed with from it in them. By this, he meant the spirit with whom those who

believed in him were later to receive so great. After the service and after the pot luck lunch, Jeremy and I made plans to do an interview the next day. He had things he needed to get off his chest about how everything went down, and the next day he came to my place. I offered him a glass of water and we took our seats in my living room. First, I just want to ask, like, what made you wanna say something about this? I'll be honest. I mean I'm

still a little reluctant in some ways. Um, but you know, people are going to form their own opinions and autother them form it when I've actually spoken, rather than people form it based on, you know, my silence. And so yeah, I just wanted I could tell Jeremy was nervous. He gulped down the first glass of water quickly and got up every few minutes to refill his glass and catch his breath. He brought along a piece of notebook paper with him. Um, that's looking at so I want to

notice it. And now I'm out this, So yeah, what don't I let you sort of lead it from here and then if I have questions, I'll jump off. That works. Um. So our jurisdiction was very limited. I mean, no one had to listen to anything we said. No one had to read our letters if they don't want to read our letters. Um, we volunteered to try to try to help to get to the truth and to help bring resolve if possible. Most people were pretty positive about us

being involved. I can't say all and we're looking toward us to try to bring some light to the situation, and I think some even um hoping to find some level of understanding and resolve in the community. UM. I don't think that after the mediation letter was was written that people felt that way. I think probably people were probably discouraged and wondered why we were wherever involved, including myself. Yeah,

I empathize with them. When our teams stepped into this whole story, I didn't think any of us could predict just how messy and confusing it all was. When you got two contradictory stories and the narratives kind of in a in a cycle, you know, and you're just hearing so many different accounts, it's really hard to know what the truth is, and hard to know how to love someone,

and hard to know how to hold them accountable. I know we are committed to do in those things, but just knowing the truth and applying it it was the hard part. Um. If I had it to do over, you know, I had to do it again. I'm sure there are a lot of things I do different, but there are still a number of people to kind of

feel very personal about how everything went down. And I mean specifically, I'm thinking about this what I've heard that people that were standing against Rene felt almost personally victimized by the process that they had a scripture like Matthew eighteen and about that process of handling things in a biblical fashion thrown at them. Um, I mean, can you speak to any of that? Yeah, I mean, yeah, I don't really have anything, man, Um, I don't have anything there. Man.

Jeremy asked me to turn the recorder off, and by then a storm was passing through and made recording impossible. We decided to pick it up in the morning. When he came back, Jeremy was much more sure of what he wanted to say. I know that I hurt and disparaged people, that I didn't do it well, and whether it was ignorance or maybe some defensiveness or some self preservation. I'm always skeptical of my of myself, you know, always taking inventory to make sure my motivations are right and

I'm doing things, you know well. And if it was a wrong that I did, you know, some information I should have had. I should have gotten, you know, a process I should have went, you know, went through that I didn't. That caused the hurt. Man. I'm sorry for it, you know, looking back on it. Here, you and I were sitting in here talking yesterday and a big storm came through and the wind was raging and leaves were

blowing everywhere. We could hear a low rumble. It sounded kind of like a tornado in here, and um and we sort of invoked that as an image of what happened in the Ginger community. I felt swept up by a tornado, which I imagine a lot of people did. It felt really out of control, you know, out of my control. Uh, And it was causing chaos and really really hard to make sense of it, both when it

was happening and even in the aftermath. Picking up the pieces has been, you know, been challenging, and I imagine there are a lot of people, you know, who share that with me, probably from both sides. In sixteen, Jeremy and the Mediators wrote a follow up letter apologizing for

the role that they played in this whole process. They walked back their tacit support of RENEE and instead sided with medical authorities, with legal authorities and made strong suggestions for the changes that serving his children should make to their organization. Just before he left, Jeremy told me his story from his twenties. Uh, I was thinking this morning before I came to talk to you about sitting on

a jury. One time, there was a man who was driving drunk and he had a young boy in the driver's seat, and he drove off and he had a utility pole. And so you know, we're sitting in on this journey and the prosecution wants to get the guy for a second degree murder and the defense is arguing for man slaughter, and um the difference what had everything to do with the mental state of the man who

was driving the vehicle at the time. And we literally spent a week listening to one phone call to try to read between the lines and figure out what's the context? You know, was this guy malicious? Was he hateful? You know? Did he you know? What was really going on here? And I just remember feeling really small and really unqualified and not wanting to be in that position. And the court made a decision and I walked away wondered, and

we make the right decision. I didn't even know. And twenty years later, I still look at that and say, I'm not really sure we made the right decision. But that metaphor, as earnestly as Jeremy offered, it summed up the whole problem with the mediation trying to address the intentions and motives of the people involved, Renee's intentions, her accusers intentions, rather than the actual issue at hand. Well, it costs Jeremy years of regret and some of his

closest friends. It's the same problem that's dogged us every step of our reporting. People kept asking was Renee crazy? Did you get off on experimenting on kids? Or was her heart in the right place? But intentions have always been a very naive way to look at this. It didn't matter how here your heart was, how sorry you were. There were still children in coffins, families who wanted answers and systemic failures to account for. After all, what is

it they say about the road to hell. For a couple of years, after things were quiet for serving his children, they stopped doing impatient medicine, and we're educating mothers on the complex issues of malnutrition. Renee's legacy had taken a hit, But now the organization was more bulletproof. They had partnered with the local government, and we're operating directly out of a public clinic. Serving his children two point oh was more by the book. There was one person to thank

for making that happen. One of the doctors that Renee hired years earlier, dr Ibraham Gualuca, known by colleagues simply as Dr Ibraham. He had transferred to the Chigndolo area, and Dr Ibraham helped broker the meetings that led to the government partnership. He's the one who really presented the organization, presented the program proposal, got all of the approvals, got all of our m o us signed, and then helped set up all of our trainings and stuff like that,

and then monitored the program as a whole. But as we've seen in this episode and throughout the series, Serving his Children was a black hole for so many people who came close to it. Jeremy, Jackie, the government, regulators,

the three of us working on this podcast. It seemed like everyone who lodged a complaint or tried to help or wanted to know why this happened and how ended up worse off for it, got caught up in a storm of accusations and rumors and what happened to dr Ibrahim Hammers this home doctor and his wife in India home in Indiaka. But he's so sta coming from the mountain the orange treat. The next thing the way who

had was the blitz? In December, dr Ibraham drove to pick up his wife from work in Giner and returned home where two assassins were waiting for him. They fired shots through the windshield, striking dr Ibraham twice in the chest. His wife fled, managing to escape the gunmen on foot, while dr Ibraham died in a pool of his own blood. It didn't seem like a coincidence to some people siding

against Renee. Shootings were not common in Uganda. Gun laws are strict, and we quickly heard that Dr Ibraham had a meeting with a government official scheduled for the week he was killed. He was going to blow the whistle on renew h And then those signing with Renee said, we had it all flipped around. Dr Ibraham was loyal to serving his children. He was going to march into that government office and vindicate Renee, and that's why he was killed. The trauma of a beloved doctor being killed.

The screams you hear in that news footage, they were being exploited on both sides. We were supposed to believe that someone here was a monster capable of murdering in cold blood, only no one could back it up. But everyone thought it had to do with them, their struggle, their fight. Meanwhile, Dr Ibraham's murder remains unsolved. Next time. On the final episode of The Missionary, I was so sure that I was where I was supposed to be in life and doing what I was supposed to be doing.

And now to like step back after so long and asked myself, like, did you just get it all wrong? Did you really help anyone at all? Because now, like people that you love so dearly are being blackmailed and threatened, and they're threatening my own children, And was it worth it? The Missionary is a production of I Heart Media. It's written and reported by Helema ge Condhi, Malcolm Burnley, and me Roger Goba. It's produced by Michelle Lands and Rhyan Murdoch.

Mark Lotto is our story editor. Our executive producer is Mangi. Our fact checker is Austin Thompson.