June 5, 2020 • 37 mins
The role that Christian missionaries play in the world has changed a lot over the years. In this episode, we examine the missionary industrial complex — from Barbie Savior to missionary influencers — and discover that Renee Bach isn't an anomaly.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
What you hear in this podcast does not implicate any
individual or entity in any criminal activity. The views and
opinions are solely those of the individuals participating in the podcast.
Previously on The Missionary, 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 and a lot of my years of blogging.
(00:22):
I was young and I wanted to share life can
look so different than what I thought it looked like
as a girl from a rural town in America. White
people fetishize black suffering or like get off on black software,
like seeing those pictures of those like malnourished Ugandan babies.
People love that ship. You don't get to place yourself
in an e er. And then claim was an emergency.
(00:45):
She wasn't a good Samaritan, she was a fraud. Yeah,
because I didn't read the papers. I just listened to
what I was told. And if that was an oversight
by our nurses, then I was an oversight. Not to
cast any blame. It's not about saving kids. It's about
you being someone who shade these kids. That's what this
is about. You don't know anything You're just such a
(01:05):
new me, you know, so definitely a part of me
thinks like, oh, come on, Jackie, like bless your heart.
There's a photo on Instagram that you might have seen,
might have even liked. It's a Barbie Doll wearing a
white coat, standing in front of a hospital with a
(01:26):
little black baby doll in one hand and a pink
stethoscope in the other. The caption reads, there are no
trained medical professionals or hospitals in Africa, so I'm drawing
on my vast amount of knowledge to cure and heal
those around me. It was posted by Barbie Savior, a
satirical profile that documents the adventures of a Barbie Doll
(01:48):
following her calling in Africa, holding little black baby dolls
in her arms, tattooing a map of Africa on her chest,
banging on drums in a far flowing village. The account
has a hundred and fifty followers. We didn't do any promotion.
We just started posting stuff and within the first few
weeks it started going viral and then kept getting picked up,
(02:11):
and it was very clear that we had struck a nerve.
That's Emily Warrel, one of the co founders of the account.
What people assume with Barbie Saviors that we were trying
to like solve something, and that was the opposite of
what we were trying to do, Like we were just
trying to process what we had experienced. The other co
(02:32):
founder you might actually recognize, Yeah, that's Jackie Kramlick, the
same nurse that saved Patricia's life. Some of the first
ones were honestly straight up mocking Renee, because the one
where Marbie's like getting on an airplane, that's like getting
backrup with how Renee leaving for you got. Barbie Saviors
(02:56):
started out almost as therapy for Jackie and Emily, a
way to event the endless frustrations of life in Ginger.
This culture of anything goes as long as you are
trying to make a difference. You are put on a
high pedestal and respected and unquestioned, and when you're in
(03:19):
your early twenties, that's like a drug. Emily was an
archetype of the Ginger missionary, a twenty something white woman
from the States who came to Uganda with good intentions,
the support of folks back home, and the dream of
running her own ngo. You get praised for what you're doing.
You get put on this pedestal, you get all this
respect and like your your brain hasn't even formed yet.
(03:40):
But after a few years of running a charity for
children with disabilities, Emily became another archetype, the ex missionary
who crawled out of the cave and tried to coax
the rest of her friends to come out too. And
so that realization that maybe you shouldn't have started an
NGO was that all of a sudden or a slow realization.
It was more of a slow realization. Um, But then
(04:04):
all of a sudden it was kind of like, can
I cuss on this? We encourage it? I got a funk.
What have I done? Basically, so, I think pieces were
chipped off over time, and then there wasn't like one
incident or one like aha moment. It was just coming
(04:24):
to terms with the fact that something I had built
my life around was not something I believed in. Her
transformation came in the mid twenty a time when young
Christian missionaries were arriving in ginger In Mats You reversibly
changing the face of this once tight knit community. I
understood why Emily recoiled from it, because the deeper I
(04:48):
got into the missionary world, the clearer it became that
Renee wasn't just a fluke. There was a whole industry
of mission trips, evangelical politics, and international aids were rolling
around Ginger. All those things came together in what seemed
like a perfect storm to create someone like Renee and
eventually tear this community apart from within this ship. No,
(05:13):
it was just something I had never seen before, and
honestly like something I still failed to put words to.
It was just such a bizarre random events that led
to what seemed like a catastrophic breakdown of an entire
community that was supposed to have each other's backs. It
was just, honestly like mean girls on steroids. In association
(05:39):
with I Heeart Media, I'm ROGI GOA, I'm helm CONDI,
I'm Malcolm Burnley and this is the Missionary Episode five
Barbie Savior. In s a Baptist minister named William Carey
(06:05):
published a book titled An Inquiry into the Obligations of
Christians to use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens.
That obligation was the Great Commission, summed up best in
the Book of Matthew Chapter verse nineteen. Therefore go and
make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name
(06:28):
of the Father, and of the Son and of the
Holy Spirit. William Carey is considered the godfather of the
modern missionary movement, and his book was the manual for
generations of missionaries setting off from Europe to the uncharted
continents full of so called savages and nonbelievers. It's said
(06:48):
that in those days, missionaries packed their clothes in a
coffin and never expected to return home. That's because the
story of Christianity of Jesus and his followers is one
of martyrdom of believers so faithful that they were willing
to give their lives in service of the Lord. It
(07:08):
was even written in Philippians Chapter two. Have the same
mindset as Christ. Jesus he humbled himself by becoming obedient
to death, even death on a cross. There were a
few places a missionary could put their faith to the test,
like Africa. So many died there and en route that
it became known as the white Man's Graveyard. Someone who
(07:33):
really feels that they've heard God's voice might talk about
it as a call. It implies, and I think it
often is the case that it's not something that I
went around and studied or planned, or you know, I
didn't necessarily go to college and learn all the languages.
I just felt it. That's Dr Melanie McAllister. She's a
professor at George Washington University and the author of The
(07:55):
Kingdom of God. Has no borders about the role that
missionaries play in the modern world. And this is a
language that says, this is not just about me wanting
an adventure. This is about me feeling God's action in
my life. I'm doing this by virtue of a fourth
grader than me. But Dr McAllister says that the way
missionaries answer that calling has changed a lot in the
(08:18):
last fifty years. There was a transformation and how missionary
work happened really beginning in the sixties. With the increase
in flights and the lowering of costs of flights, people
were able to go for shorter periods of time and
get there more quickly. Nowadays, any teenager can hop on
(08:39):
a plane, travel halfway around the world with their church,
build a school, take some photos, and come home with
stories to tell. What used to be a life's work
was now a spring break tour package. It was now
a multibillion dollar industry selling a shortcut to righteousness to
nearly two million people a year. Kurt Verbeek is a
(09:00):
professor at Calvin University. He spent the last twenty years
studying this stuff. How it's sold is often that this
is risky, and you know, going to put your face
to a challenge, and you're going to go and share
the gospel, and there's this chance for God to use
(09:25):
this to do great things. It was the same language
that was used to recruit long term missionaries, and it
was now targeted at teenagers. In a sense, these short
trips were a form of role playing. You could live
the life of a missionary without the long term commitment
and sacrifice from the pulpit and in the pews. It's
(09:47):
more of this is going to be this life changing
experience for the people who receive us. But what lots
of times I think the parents and the leaders are
hoping for is a life shaping experience for the people
who go. After a century of colonialism and forceful efforts
(10:08):
to change local cultures, Africa was now a place where
Christians from the West could reconnect with God to heal
their own souls. They would see in Christians from these
parts of the world a kind of idealized faith that
they saw as perhaps more authentic, more passionate, more pure
(10:30):
than their own, and they looked to those parts of
the Global South as a kind of spiritual resource. If
all this work was just a way to find yourself,
then it didn't really matter what the work was, or
if it was even useful at all. I talked with
Dr Verbeek about a story I heard about a mission
(10:50):
in Mexico that really made that point clear to me.
Every summer, an American church group brought volunteers to Mexico
to help build a wall for a local orphanage. After
a week, the group would move on and locals would
tear the wall down in preparation for the next crop
of volunteers. There's sadly a good chunk of stories like that.
(11:11):
In haiti Un, there's some school. It's a sleep in school,
but the only time there's kids in the school is
when the church or mission groups would come down, and
then they would send them all back to their homes
until the next group came. Jesus does not ask that
(11:38):
we care for the less fortunate. He demands it. I
would like to invite you to come with me on
this journey that is so far from over and see
what God will do next. One woman seemed to embody
the perfect balance of self discovery and serving others. She
did it so well that she made ginger as snary Mecca.
(12:01):
I'm Katie Davis. I'm twenty one years old and I
lived here in Uganda. I ran a Maggima ministry. Katie
Davis's story is one that you might recognize by now.
She was fresh out of high school when she felt
God calling her to Africa thing and I'd always said
I wanted to be mother to resetch just because I
guess I just loved her heart her children. So she
(12:21):
left her Tennessee town and said off for Uganda on
a short term trip just a few months. But when
she got there, she couldn't believe the poverty around her
and felt she needed to do something about it. Lord
with all your heart, and then you're to love your
neighbor as yourself. I'm like myself doesn't want to be starving,
and so I don't want other people in the world
(12:42):
to be starving. So she started an NGO to offer scholarships,
schooling and resources for thousands of vulnerable children across the country.
But that's not what made her famous. What made her
famous were the thirteen Ugandan children she adopted as her
And the littlest one looks up and she calls me, Mommy.
(13:04):
My heart breaks in two. I have no idea what
to do, but something clicks. I'm even more scared than
the day that I stepped on that plane, but I
know that this is right. She wrote a book about it,
called Kisses from Katie, and it made the New York
Times Best seller list. The recording You've been hearing is
from a Simon and Schuster advertisement for that book. The
(13:26):
cover shows a young, smiling Katie Davis on a dirt
road surrounded by laughing children, and inside the book features
a photograph taken by one of Katie's best friends, Renee Bach.
Being a missionary today was not just a way of
life anymore. It was a lifestyle brand. Blogging about your
(13:48):
daily adventures, posting photos of your picture perfect Christian family,
sharing heart wrenching videos of children in need. It wasn't
just about selling a cause, it was about selling yourself.
The aspiration used to be martyrdom and conversions. Now it
was a book deal and influencer status. It wasn't just
(14:11):
Katie's book or Rene's blogs that were filled with photos
of people like Nabucosa skinny to the bone or Patricia
swollen to the point of bursting and all in need
of rescuing. There were tons of missionaries out there, carefully
curating their online personas and posting similar images across every
social media outlet. The missionary brand depended on a charismatic,
(14:36):
selfless white woman surrounded by black children in need. It
required everything to be exaggerated. The missionary had to appear
more selfless, and the Africans had to appear more needy.
Here's Elizabeth Nicholson, one of the older missionaries in Ginger
in Uganda. If the children are go out and play,
(14:57):
it's muddy and dusty and dirty, so you put them
in the crimest clothes they have and they go out
and play. But somebody coming from the first world just
sees these dirty children in rags on Sunday. They're all
cleaned up and in their Sunday gloves. But actually this
is just a very old tactic on you platforms. Here's
Dr McAllister again. There was real pushback in the nineteen
(15:21):
fifties and nineteen sixties by African Christians about how Africans
were being represented and a young Congolese Methodist who then
comes to the US and sees how missionaries are talking
about Congo, and you know, he's saying, this is a
We're part of an African continent that is on the rise.
We have you know, big cities, We're going to be modern,
(15:44):
we have decolonized, we're talking about freedom, and you all
are still showing pictures, literally showing pictures from thirty years previous,
in order to present Africa as inherently and uniformly backward
and mired in poverty, in order to praise money for
the missionary work. All of this revolves around a deceptively
(16:04):
simple question. What is a missionary's job? Is it to
serve the vulnerable and needy? Or is it to convert
people to Christianity and save their souls. Renee believed that
it was to serve. She thought that providing medical care
and healing children was a way to open the door
for a conversation about God. My job there was to
(16:26):
like show people the character and the nature of Christ
by just acting out of love and kindness. And being
so compassionate. And I do think that that was effective,
not in people just walking up to me and being like,
oh my gosh, like you must love Jusus. I'm like,
I want to love do thus too. But I had
a lot of experiences where people would just be like,
why are you being so nice to people that aren't
(16:48):
even related to you. There's something different about you, and
I like wonder what it is. And I think that's
a far more rooted place to start a discussion about God.
But her board disagreed. When they responded to accusations of
Renee's malpractice, they quoted a nineteenth century missionary named Oswald
Chambers in missionary work, the great danger is that God's
(17:10):
call will be replaced by the needs of the people.
We tend to forget that the one great reason underneath
all missionary work is not primarily the elevation of the people,
their education, nor their needs, but as first and foremost,
the command of Jesus Christ. In other words, saving souls
(17:31):
was the only thing that mattered. Her job was to
win conversions, and there was no cost too high. The
dead kids were just collateral damage. That's a staggering mindset.
So you can understand Ugandans who looked at a hundred
years of colonial history and at the current state of
things and saw darker motives in Africa or in a community,
(17:55):
is a people grotify what people? That's Olivia Alasso, a
social worker and the Ugandan co founder of No White Saviors.
If people are not held accountable, if people's bad vices
are not brought up, a people continue to praise them.
This is also one way of creating awareness in our
communities by actually calling up people who are doing what
(18:21):
we consider inhuman. To Olivia, the missionaries continued a white
supremacist system that placed Ugandans on the bottom, subject to
the whims and fancies of people who would come to
do good, a system she and No White Saviors were
determined to dismantle. This also works up the community for
(18:42):
them to stand and ask next time to see a
white person and say, hey, look, you're coming in to
present yourself as a doctor or as a teacher, can
we see your papers? This gives them the confidence because
they have seen someone held But if we leave things
past like that, then this will continue on the African
(19:02):
continent because for us here all the time, when you're
white is right and black is wrong. Olivia was only
one of many Uganians trying to ensure accountability. Margaret Chambaku
Laba is the head of the Ginger and Geo Forum,
an independent body set up to coordinate the activities and
(19:24):
offer oversight. Tell the hundreds of organizations in Ginger and
they're still happening because you will find when you go
to Facebook pages there's so many organizations and when you
go to the ground to look for them, you don't
see them. But when you really want to interact and
say where are you based? Can I come and visit?
Can I come see the people you're really working with
the community? You don't see them and they will change
(19:46):
their names in the face. For years, Margaret has been
on the front lines doing her best to police and
geos with a few resources. She has She worried that
many of the missionaries were only out to enrich themselves,
but you'll see they're receiving funds that are receiving money.
The people who want to help, I think as pathetic
when they hear a story that is so touching, they
(20:07):
will send the money before they realize it's just a fraud.
We really have so many of those cases. Margaret told
me that there were over nine hundred registered organizations in
Ginger that came out to one NGO for every five
people in the district. Now, to be clear, not all
NGOs or missionary run and many are actually Uganda owned.
(20:30):
But still the numbers blew me away. I asked Margaret
where Renee in serving his children fit into that picture. So,
based on the allegations you have heard that she was
an unlicensed medical facility, that she was providing medical care
without having medical qualifications, do these allegations surprise you given
what you know about how NGOs operate here. Um, of
(20:55):
course they don't surprise me. I know anybody here can
come and people be live in foreign people very much,
even you when you're time to see your doctor. No
one would quote the question your qualifications or anything. So
to me, it's not a surprise. Do you think it
could happen again now? Yes, it could even be happening
somewhere else right now. I wouldn't be surprised to see
(21:18):
Anson being you know, cold to doing the same thing.
Every person I spoke to in Ginger had a horror
story to tell. Some orphanage was abusing kids, or an
NGO was embezzling its donors, and well, you didn't hear
this from me, But did you hear about that American
couple's sketchy adoption renee box story is actually quite a
(21:40):
bit more common than you might think, maybe not the
hundred and five dead children, but other parts of it.
In the year I spent in Uganda, I saw a
surprising number of missionary scandals in the headlines, like the
American evangelical who was deported after giving Ugandans a miracle
drug to cure cancer. US passed up from New Jersey
(22:02):
had been giving MMS miracle mineral solution, which is basically
like a bleaching agent to over fifty thousand Ugandans. Or
the old white guy who was caught on video punching
a hotel concierge while shouting Uganda hates Jesus, got Jesus,
(22:28):
oh yeah feeling and though he wasn't a missionary. A
German national who ran a children's home was arrested on
charges of defilement and child trafficking. We first said the
complaint AGAINIST team said that team or Navigations of Sexual
Actors againist because she was taking care of it was
(22:54):
clear that Ginger needed a radical transformation. To be honest, like,
I mean, there is a personal aspect of this case
(23:16):
for me, and I can't pretend there's not. But the
personal aspect is not how we'd It's also just knowing
that she's not the only one like this is not
Renee is not the only person doing this, not in Uganda,
not globally, and there needs to be a new standard set.
(23:37):
When Kelsey Nielsen graduated college, she received a copy of
Kisses from Katie and soon became one of the hundreds
of young women who followed her footsteps to Ginger. She
signed up to volunteer by chance at the same orphanage
that Renee volunteered at. After a few months there, Kelsey
founded an NGO called Abide Family Center to support vulnerable
(24:00):
families and offer them an alternative to putting their kids
up for adoption. It was thrilling to be a twenty
something CEO in a foreign country rubbing elbows with your
celebrity role models. And I just remember being like so
amazed at Katie and Renee and thinking like they're the
pinnacle of like what I should be striving for of,
(24:21):
Like they're so self sacrificial. They they just say yes
to everything. To Kelsey, they were the real missionaries, giving
everything they had to the poor people of Ginger. They
were making real sacrifices and changing lives. So when Renee
asked for a favor, Kelsey jumped at the chance. I
(24:42):
sat there and washed. What was I watching? I don't
know what I'm doing? Why am I Why am I
going to the hospital watch a child? But I did
it because I was like I wanted to be friends
with them like they were they were the cool girls,
and so being was like that's I wanted to be
your friends of them. But the more unmeshed Kelsey got
(25:03):
in the Ginger world, the more she saw another side
to their image. They set the tone to us what
would normalize? Like they basically set the tone of like
this is what is acceptable. So if you, like, if
you had a kid die or you had um, you
have just had like an overwhelming amount of like dizziness.
It was like, Oh, you're doing it right, Like this
(25:23):
is like this is where God you see God work.
God works when like things are chaotic, probably when you
create the chaos. It was easy to see why Ginger
was an exhausting place to be martyrdom was once the
highest calling of Christian missionaries, and in a lot of
ways that culture still lingered. It was a place that
demanded everything of a person. There were no lines between
(25:46):
a personal and professional life, and it was almost taboo
to even think of taking time for yourself. Here's renee.
For a while, especially when I first got to Ganda,
it was kind of this like who could like one
up each other, who was like the most tired and
life worked the hardest, you know, like like I haven't
had a day off and in like a month, or
(26:07):
like oh well I haven't had you know, like I
haven't been on vacation in five years. You know, and
people don't I think need it, like subconsciously it's a
way to like tell that you're working hard. I mean
I did it. I used to heavily judge people who
didn't work on the weekend. I was like, who do
you think you are? You know, working on the weekends?
Like why are you been here? You know when you've
got a town full of people who are trying to
(26:28):
save lives and who were just as ambitious and stressed out, Well,
you've got a pressure cooker on your hands. It was
a hard place to live in the sense that, like
even Kelsey, one of her closest friends was Emily, whirl
was one of the Barbie Savior girls. Well, I used
to hear Emily and Kelsey talk about each other terribly
(26:49):
behind each other's backs in public settings, you know, and
be like, I can't believe Emily is doing this with
her kids, or I can't Kelsey is crazy, you know,
which is another reason why I really didn't want to
get it involved in the community and have a lot
of friends, because I thought like, let's just mean, like
I don't want to be a part of that, and
it's so easy to get sucked into. Even in my
time in Ginger, I'd experienced similar things at coffee shops
(27:13):
and restaurants. Everyone was friendly and happy to chat, but
then I'd hear them batting rumors around about each other,
everything from extra marital affairs and drug addictions to child
abuse and trafficking. When I saw that side of Ginger,
I didn't feel so special that the box were spreading
rumors about me. We're trying to get in our heads
with things like the Patricia video. Ginger had always been
(27:35):
like this, here's Emily Warrel from Barbie Savior again. I
think seeing how the community reacted left a really bad
taste in my mouth, and I just was constantly asking
myself every day, if this is how Christians are supposed
to act and treat one another. This is not attractive
at all, This is embarrassing, This is frankly disgusting. Why
(27:57):
would I wouldn't be a part of this. When you
think about missionaries as martyrs, you think of them being
persecuted by nonbelievers, by kings in foreign lands, or by
disease and disaster in jungles and deserts. Even these days,
there's a mindset of persecution that still exists among them.
(28:18):
You see it all the time when white Christians in
America say that they're under attack despite everything seemingly going
their way. But when persecution against missionaries came to Ginger,
it came from an unexpected place. It came from another missionary.
Katie and I were never really friends. Myself and any
of the less attractive white girls in Ginger weren't pretty
(28:41):
or cool enough for you. I never worshiped you enough
to be in your inner circle, and I'm cool with that.
Your whole Christian celebrity persona is a total joke. Also,
all that defending Renee Bach, a literal murderer of children.
That is when I lost all respect for you. These
are Kelsey Nielsen's word taken from a Facebook post, edited
(29:02):
for clarity and read by a voice actor. Earlier that year,
Kelsey was sexually assaulted by a colleague in Uganda. It
led to the deterioration of her mental health, and, as
she tells it, her NGO forcing her out of the organization.
After that, Kelsey saw Ginger in a completely different light.
She was fed up with the sketchy adoptions, the medical malpractice,
(29:25):
and all the other contradictions she saw. She knew she
would be mocked and dismissed if she spoke out. She'd
become a pariah in the missionary community, but she had
nothing to lose anymore. Just like Jesus said, no profit
is accepted in his hometown. I'm not doing this for
the likes or for attention. I'm doing it because it
(29:48):
needs to be said. And although many will say it
where it is safe, I'm not interested in staying safe
about things that matter anymore. She put other NGOs on
blast two, demanding to see financial records asking how much
you Gandon staff were being paid and how much the
directors were spending on travel, house help, and rental properties.
(30:09):
I'm only getting started. I'm threatening nothing other than exposing
all the lies, exploitation, and corruption within the missionary community
in Ginger. If I see the White Saviors of Ginger
coming clean and admitting their harmful and ethical and criminal acts,
I'll work towards reconciliation, or i will at the very
least stop posting about this. Kelsey admits that many of
(30:32):
these posts were written during a very dark moment in
her life, when her mental health was at a low point.
Others in the community were quick to seize on Kelsey's
history of mental illness and dismiss her one diness with bipolar,
bipolar and PTSD, And so you have, Okay, we're not
going to trust anything this woman says, she's just crazy.
(30:53):
So you have a lot of like stingle around mental health.
And I've even experienced that since working with the White Saviors,
since we've created this platform, had people just say like,
Kelsey is not stable, you shouldn't be having her on
your team. And it's hard. I mean, that's probably my
one area and that's really hard because I think I
still face a lot of self stigma and a lot
of like inscree of like trusting my own mind and
trusting so like trusting like what is passionate and driven
(31:16):
and like ideas and what is my mania? But she
didn't stop posting about it. Instead, she figured out how
to turn her newfound perspective into a brand of its own.
So she linked up with Olivia, the Ugandan social worker
that used to work in her NGO, and the two
of them created No White Saviors. What Barbie Savior had
(31:37):
failed to do, No White Saviors would. My biggest criticism
of Barbie Savior was that they were just criticizing this
in a satirical way and nothing was actually being done.
You could be like actually calling out this stuff directly
and doing something about it with your platform. It's all
good and fun to make a joke about it, but
that ship is literally fasting people lives, and it's not
(31:58):
funny in a community full of contradictions and abuse and
people who didn't take kindly to advice from outsiders, No
White Saviors was just as inevitable as Renee. The direction
they took was distinctly more confrontational They went after the
international adoption industry, which they accused of tricking parents into
selling their kids abroad, and they nearly canceled the British
(32:20):
TV presenter named Stacy Dooley when she posted a selfie
with a child in a village without consent. They called
for boycotts of travel bloggers who posted, in their words,
poverty porn, and they organized a campaign for the survivors
of a trafficking ring allegedly run by a German national
who ran a children's home in Uganda. A white spur mussels.
(32:43):
It is something that has really had to break. We
are trying. We don't know when it will die out.
Without work, we're just laying a foundation. Maybe at one
point it will be a chief. A lot of people
in town didn't agree with No White Saviors tactics. Their
brand of politics felt more like blackmail and extortion than advocacy. Still,
(33:07):
it forced NGOs and Gina and elsewhere to reconsider the
way that they behaved online and on the ground. I
heard from several NGEO directors in Uganda that they now
asked themselves, what would No White Saviors say before Ginja.
My entire understanding of what it meant to be a
(33:28):
missionary came from Sister Gracie, the nun I met in
South Sudan when I was still in college. She was
a lifelong missionary, dedicated to the people she lived among,
dedicated to serving their needs and uplifting them. She learned
the local language and broke bread with them every night.
She called South Sudan home. When I asked her if
(33:50):
she'd ever go back to India, she told me she
wanted to be buried in South Sudan. The most humbling
part was that she expected no credit for it, didn't
even expect results. Sometimes she didn't even know whether anything
she did mattered. But she wore the same torn and
frayed habit every single day and went to work because
(34:11):
she knew she had to keep trying. Ginger seemed like
the exact opposite. Every stone I turned over was another
scandal waiting to explode. Every missionary I spoke to was
more than happy to dish on their neighbors. People seemed
more worried about keeping up an image of righteousness than
actually being righteous. And the reason was simple, Doing the
(34:34):
right thing wasn't easy. If it was, then we'd be
living in a much different world, but painting that picture
a picture of doing the right thing that was much easier.
They were role playing a life like Sister Grace's, and
it felt like a punch to the gut. I had
seen the toll it had taken on her, the decades
(34:54):
of trauma, the gnawing self doubt rushing into Battlefield's time
and time again. I read the Ginger blogs. I saw
the heroic images they painted. I saw the NGO fundraising campaigns,
teary eyed and full of needy children. But then I
would read the Uganian headlines and I saw the stomach
churning scandals that came to the surface. And then I
(35:16):
sat in restaurants with them, eating ramen and drinking coconut latte's,
all paid for with earnest donations. That's what I've been
trying to get across this whole episode. Renee isn't an anomaly,
she isn't some ah historical monster. She's an embodiment of
(35:36):
all the swirling forces around Ginger and missionary culture at large.
Young people who tried to solve the world's problems without
qualifications are oversight folks back home who put them on
a pedestal for taking action no matter what the outcome,
and the idea that serving God was the highest calling,
(35:56):
even if it came at the expense of the people
you'd come to save. Even Jackie Kramlick, whose accused Renee
of terrible things, I saw her that way. The analogy
I use is kind of like a rabid dog and
a puppy mill that they're like, Oh, that dog was bad,
good to see you took him out, But let's not
(36:17):
talk about the evils of the puppy mill. That's the problem,
and that's why when people are like, oh, she's just
so evil, blah blah blah, It's like there's a really
a really big, deep story here of how this comes
to be and how someone could get into this position
that everyone needs to be very mindful of. But to
claim that she's just like completely evil independent of all
(36:40):
these underlying structures is really missing the point. But Gina's
reckoning was just about to arrive. Yeah. The Missionaries produced
(37:04):
an association with iHeartMedia. It's written and reported by Roger Gola,
Helene mcgegandhi, and Malcolm Burnley. It's produced by Michelle Lands
and Ryan Murdoch. Mark Lotto is our story editor, Our
executive producer is Mangis Thicketter. Our fact checker is Austin Thompson.
What you hear in this podcast does not implicate any
individual or entity in any criminal activity. The views and
opinions are solely those of the individuals participating in the podcast.
Previously on The Missionary, 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 and a lot of my years of blogging.
(00:22):
I was young and I wanted to share life can
look so different than what I thought it looked like
as a girl from a rural town in America. White
people fetishize black suffering or like get off on black software,
like seeing those pictures of those like malnourished Ugandan babies.
People love that ship. You don't get to place yourself
in an e er. And then claim was an emergency.
(00:45):
She wasn't a good Samaritan, she was a fraud. Yeah,
because I didn't read the papers. I just listened to
what I was told. And if that was an oversight
by our nurses, then I was an oversight. Not to
cast any blame. It's not about saving kids. It's about
you being someone who shade these kids. That's what this
is about. You don't know anything You're just such a
(01:05):
new me, you know, so definitely a part of me
thinks like, oh, come on, Jackie, like bless your heart.
There's a photo on Instagram that you might have seen,
might have even liked. It's a Barbie Doll wearing a
white coat, standing in front of a hospital with a
(01:26):
little black baby doll in one hand and a pink
stethoscope in the other. The caption reads, there are no
trained medical professionals or hospitals in Africa, so I'm drawing
on my vast amount of knowledge to cure and heal
those around me. It was posted by Barbie Savior, a
satirical profile that documents the adventures of a Barbie Doll
(01:48):
following her calling in Africa, holding little black baby dolls
in her arms, tattooing a map of Africa on her chest,
banging on drums in a far flowing village. The account
has a hundred and fifty followers. We didn't do any promotion.
We just started posting stuff and within the first few
weeks it started going viral and then kept getting picked up,
(02:11):
and it was very clear that we had struck a nerve.
That's Emily Warrel, one of the co founders of the account.
What people assume with Barbie Saviors that we were trying
to like solve something, and that was the opposite of
what we were trying to do, Like we were just
trying to process what we had experienced. The other co
(02:32):
founder you might actually recognize, Yeah, that's Jackie Kramlick, the
same nurse that saved Patricia's life. Some of the first
ones were honestly straight up mocking Renee, because the one
where Marbie's like getting on an airplane, that's like getting
backrup with how Renee leaving for you got. Barbie Saviors
(02:56):
started out almost as therapy for Jackie and Emily, a
way to event the endless frustrations of life in Ginger.
This culture of anything goes as long as you are
trying to make a difference. You are put on a
high pedestal and respected and unquestioned, and when you're in
(03:19):
your early twenties, that's like a drug. Emily was an
archetype of the Ginger missionary, a twenty something white woman
from the States who came to Uganda with good intentions,
the support of folks back home, and the dream of
running her own ngo. You get praised for what you're doing.
You get put on this pedestal, you get all this
respect and like your your brain hasn't even formed yet.
(03:40):
But after a few years of running a charity for
children with disabilities, Emily became another archetype, the ex missionary
who crawled out of the cave and tried to coax
the rest of her friends to come out too. And
so that realization that maybe you shouldn't have started an
NGO was that all of a sudden or a slow realization.
It was more of a slow realization. Um, But then
(04:04):
all of a sudden it was kind of like, can
I cuss on this? We encourage it? I got a funk.
What have I done? Basically, so, I think pieces were
chipped off over time, and then there wasn't like one
incident or one like aha moment. It was just coming
(04:24):
to terms with the fact that something I had built
my life around was not something I believed in. Her
transformation came in the mid twenty a time when young
Christian missionaries were arriving in ginger In Mats You reversibly
changing the face of this once tight knit community. I
understood why Emily recoiled from it, because the deeper I
(04:48):
got into the missionary world, the clearer it became that
Renee wasn't just a fluke. There was a whole industry
of mission trips, evangelical politics, and international aids were rolling
around Ginger. All those things came together in what seemed
like a perfect storm to create someone like Renee and
eventually tear this community apart from within this ship. No,
(05:13):
it was just something I had never seen before, and
honestly like something I still failed to put words to.
It was just such a bizarre random events that led
to what seemed like a catastrophic breakdown of an entire
community that was supposed to have each other's backs. It
was just, honestly like mean girls on steroids. In association
(05:39):
with I Heeart Media, I'm ROGI GOA, I'm helm CONDI,
I'm Malcolm Burnley and this is the Missionary Episode five
Barbie Savior. In s a Baptist minister named William Carey
(06:05):
published a book titled An Inquiry into the Obligations of
Christians to use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens.
That obligation was the Great Commission, summed up best in
the Book of Matthew Chapter verse nineteen. Therefore go and
make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name
(06:28):
of the Father, and of the Son and of the
Holy Spirit. William Carey is considered the godfather of the
modern missionary movement, and his book was the manual for
generations of missionaries setting off from Europe to the uncharted
continents full of so called savages and nonbelievers. It's said
(06:48):
that in those days, missionaries packed their clothes in a
coffin and never expected to return home. That's because the
story of Christianity of Jesus and his followers is one
of martyrdom of believers so faithful that they were willing
to give their lives in service of the Lord. It
(07:08):
was even written in Philippians Chapter two. Have the same
mindset as Christ. Jesus he humbled himself by becoming obedient
to death, even death on a cross. There were a
few places a missionary could put their faith to the test,
like Africa. So many died there and en route that
it became known as the white Man's Graveyard. Someone who
(07:33):
really feels that they've heard God's voice might talk about
it as a call. It implies, and I think it
often is the case that it's not something that I
went around and studied or planned, or you know, I
didn't necessarily go to college and learn all the languages.
I just felt it. That's Dr Melanie McAllister. She's a
professor at George Washington University and the author of The
(07:55):
Kingdom of God. Has no borders about the role that
missionaries play in the modern world. And this is a
language that says, this is not just about me wanting
an adventure. This is about me feeling God's action in
my life. I'm doing this by virtue of a fourth
grader than me. But Dr McAllister says that the way
missionaries answer that calling has changed a lot in the
(08:18):
last fifty years. There was a transformation and how missionary
work happened really beginning in the sixties. With the increase
in flights and the lowering of costs of flights, people
were able to go for shorter periods of time and
get there more quickly. Nowadays, any teenager can hop on
(08:39):
a plane, travel halfway around the world with their church,
build a school, take some photos, and come home with
stories to tell. What used to be a life's work
was now a spring break tour package. It was now
a multibillion dollar industry selling a shortcut to righteousness to
nearly two million people a year. Kurt Verbeek is a
(09:00):
professor at Calvin University. He spent the last twenty years
studying this stuff. How it's sold is often that this
is risky, and you know, going to put your face
to a challenge, and you're going to go and share
the gospel, and there's this chance for God to use
(09:25):
this to do great things. It was the same language
that was used to recruit long term missionaries, and it
was now targeted at teenagers. In a sense, these short
trips were a form of role playing. You could live
the life of a missionary without the long term commitment
and sacrifice from the pulpit and in the pews. It's
(09:47):
more of this is going to be this life changing
experience for the people who receive us. But what lots
of times I think the parents and the leaders are
hoping for is a life shaping experience for the people
who go. After a century of colonialism and forceful efforts
(10:08):
to change local cultures, Africa was now a place where
Christians from the West could reconnect with God to heal
their own souls. They would see in Christians from these
parts of the world a kind of idealized faith that
they saw as perhaps more authentic, more passionate, more pure
(10:30):
than their own, and they looked to those parts of
the Global South as a kind of spiritual resource. If
all this work was just a way to find yourself,
then it didn't really matter what the work was, or
if it was even useful at all. I talked with
Dr Verbeek about a story I heard about a mission
(10:50):
in Mexico that really made that point clear to me.
Every summer, an American church group brought volunteers to Mexico
to help build a wall for a local orphanage. After
a week, the group would move on and locals would
tear the wall down in preparation for the next crop
of volunteers. There's sadly a good chunk of stories like that.
(11:11):
In haiti Un, there's some school. It's a sleep in school,
but the only time there's kids in the school is
when the church or mission groups would come down, and
then they would send them all back to their homes
until the next group came. Jesus does not ask that
(11:38):
we care for the less fortunate. He demands it. I
would like to invite you to come with me on
this journey that is so far from over and see
what God will do next. One woman seemed to embody
the perfect balance of self discovery and serving others. She
did it so well that she made ginger as snary Mecca.
(12:01):
I'm Katie Davis. I'm twenty one years old and I
lived here in Uganda. I ran a Maggima ministry. Katie
Davis's story is one that you might recognize by now.
She was fresh out of high school when she felt
God calling her to Africa thing and I'd always said
I wanted to be mother to resetch just because I
guess I just loved her heart her children. So she
(12:21):
left her Tennessee town and said off for Uganda on
a short term trip just a few months. But when
she got there, she couldn't believe the poverty around her
and felt she needed to do something about it. Lord
with all your heart, and then you're to love your
neighbor as yourself. I'm like myself doesn't want to be starving,
and so I don't want other people in the world
(12:42):
to be starving. So she started an NGO to offer scholarships,
schooling and resources for thousands of vulnerable children across the country.
But that's not what made her famous. What made her
famous were the thirteen Ugandan children she adopted as her
And the littlest one looks up and she calls me, Mommy.
(13:04):
My heart breaks in two. I have no idea what
to do, but something clicks. I'm even more scared than
the day that I stepped on that plane, but I
know that this is right. She wrote a book about it,
called Kisses from Katie, and it made the New York
Times Best seller list. The recording You've been hearing is
from a Simon and Schuster advertisement for that book. The
(13:26):
cover shows a young, smiling Katie Davis on a dirt
road surrounded by laughing children, and inside the book features
a photograph taken by one of Katie's best friends, Renee Bach.
Being a missionary today was not just a way of
life anymore. It was a lifestyle brand. Blogging about your
(13:48):
daily adventures, posting photos of your picture perfect Christian family,
sharing heart wrenching videos of children in need. It wasn't
just about selling a cause, it was about selling yourself.
The aspiration used to be martyrdom and conversions. Now it
was a book deal and influencer status. It wasn't just
(14:11):
Katie's book or Rene's blogs that were filled with photos
of people like Nabucosa skinny to the bone or Patricia
swollen to the point of bursting and all in need
of rescuing. There were tons of missionaries out there, carefully
curating their online personas and posting similar images across every
social media outlet. The missionary brand depended on a charismatic,
(14:36):
selfless white woman surrounded by black children in need. It
required everything to be exaggerated. The missionary had to appear
more selfless, and the Africans had to appear more needy.
Here's Elizabeth Nicholson, one of the older missionaries in Ginger
in Uganda. If the children are go out and play,
(14:57):
it's muddy and dusty and dirty, so you put them
in the crimest clothes they have and they go out
and play. But somebody coming from the first world just
sees these dirty children in rags on Sunday. They're all
cleaned up and in their Sunday gloves. But actually this
is just a very old tactic on you platforms. Here's
Dr McAllister again. There was real pushback in the nineteen
(15:21):
fifties and nineteen sixties by African Christians about how Africans
were being represented and a young Congolese Methodist who then
comes to the US and sees how missionaries are talking
about Congo, and you know, he's saying, this is a
We're part of an African continent that is on the rise.
We have you know, big cities, We're going to be modern,
(15:44):
we have decolonized, we're talking about freedom, and you all
are still showing pictures, literally showing pictures from thirty years previous,
in order to present Africa as inherently and uniformly backward
and mired in poverty, in order to praise money for
the missionary work. All of this revolves around a deceptively
(16:04):
simple question. What is a missionary's job? Is it to
serve the vulnerable and needy? Or is it to convert
people to Christianity and save their souls. Renee believed that
it was to serve. She thought that providing medical care
and healing children was a way to open the door
for a conversation about God. My job there was to
(16:26):
like show people the character and the nature of Christ
by just acting out of love and kindness. And being
so compassionate. And I do think that that was effective,
not in people just walking up to me and being like,
oh my gosh, like you must love Jusus. I'm like,
I want to love do thus too. But I had
a lot of experiences where people would just be like,
why are you being so nice to people that aren't
(16:48):
even related to you. There's something different about you, and
I like wonder what it is. And I think that's
a far more rooted place to start a discussion about God.
But her board disagreed. When they responded to accusations of
Renee's malpractice, they quoted a nineteenth century missionary named Oswald
Chambers in missionary work, the great danger is that God's
(17:10):
call will be replaced by the needs of the people.
We tend to forget that the one great reason underneath
all missionary work is not primarily the elevation of the people,
their education, nor their needs, but as first and foremost,
the command of Jesus Christ. In other words, saving souls
(17:31):
was the only thing that mattered. Her job was to
win conversions, and there was no cost too high. The
dead kids were just collateral damage. That's a staggering mindset.
So you can understand Ugandans who looked at a hundred
years of colonial history and at the current state of
things and saw darker motives in Africa or in a community,
(17:55):
is a people grotify what people? That's Olivia Alasso, a
social worker and the Ugandan co founder of No White Saviors.
If people are not held accountable, if people's bad vices
are not brought up, a people continue to praise them.
This is also one way of creating awareness in our
communities by actually calling up people who are doing what
(18:21):
we consider inhuman. To Olivia, the missionaries continued a white
supremacist system that placed Ugandans on the bottom, subject to
the whims and fancies of people who would come to
do good, a system she and No White Saviors were
determined to dismantle. This also works up the community for
(18:42):
them to stand and ask next time to see a
white person and say, hey, look, you're coming in to
present yourself as a doctor or as a teacher, can
we see your papers? This gives them the confidence because
they have seen someone held But if we leave things
past like that, then this will continue on the African
(19:02):
continent because for us here all the time, when you're
white is right and black is wrong. Olivia was only
one of many Uganians trying to ensure accountability. Margaret Chambaku
Laba is the head of the Ginger and Geo Forum,
an independent body set up to coordinate the activities and
(19:24):
offer oversight. Tell the hundreds of organizations in Ginger and
they're still happening because you will find when you go
to Facebook pages there's so many organizations and when you
go to the ground to look for them, you don't
see them. But when you really want to interact and
say where are you based? Can I come and visit?
Can I come see the people you're really working with
the community? You don't see them and they will change
(19:46):
their names in the face. For years, Margaret has been
on the front lines doing her best to police and
geos with a few resources. She has She worried that
many of the missionaries were only out to enrich themselves,
but you'll see they're receiving funds that are receiving money.
The people who want to help, I think as pathetic
when they hear a story that is so touching, they
(20:07):
will send the money before they realize it's just a fraud.
We really have so many of those cases. Margaret told
me that there were over nine hundred registered organizations in
Ginger that came out to one NGO for every five
people in the district. Now, to be clear, not all
NGOs or missionary run and many are actually Uganda owned.
(20:30):
But still the numbers blew me away. I asked Margaret
where Renee in serving his children fit into that picture. So,
based on the allegations you have heard that she was
an unlicensed medical facility, that she was providing medical care
without having medical qualifications, do these allegations surprise you given
what you know about how NGOs operate here. Um, of
(20:55):
course they don't surprise me. I know anybody here can
come and people be live in foreign people very much,
even you when you're time to see your doctor. No
one would quote the question your qualifications or anything. So
to me, it's not a surprise. Do you think it
could happen again now? Yes, it could even be happening
somewhere else right now. I wouldn't be surprised to see
(21:18):
Anson being you know, cold to doing the same thing.
Every person I spoke to in Ginger had a horror
story to tell. Some orphanage was abusing kids, or an
NGO was embezzling its donors, and well, you didn't hear
this from me, But did you hear about that American
couple's sketchy adoption renee box story is actually quite a
(21:40):
bit more common than you might think, maybe not the
hundred and five dead children, but other parts of it.
In the year I spent in Uganda, I saw a
surprising number of missionary scandals in the headlines, like the
American evangelical who was deported after giving Ugandans a miracle
drug to cure cancer. US passed up from New Jersey
(22:02):
had been giving MMS miracle mineral solution, which is basically
like a bleaching agent to over fifty thousand Ugandans. Or
the old white guy who was caught on video punching
a hotel concierge while shouting Uganda hates Jesus, got Jesus,
(22:28):
oh yeah feeling and though he wasn't a missionary. A
German national who ran a children's home was arrested on
charges of defilement and child trafficking. We first said the
complaint AGAINIST team said that team or Navigations of Sexual
Actors againist because she was taking care of it was
(22:54):
clear that Ginger needed a radical transformation. To be honest, like,
I mean, there is a personal aspect of this case
(23:16):
for me, and I can't pretend there's not. But the
personal aspect is not how we'd It's also just knowing
that she's not the only one like this is not
Renee is not the only person doing this, not in Uganda,
not globally, and there needs to be a new standard set.
(23:37):
When Kelsey Nielsen graduated college, she received a copy of
Kisses from Katie and soon became one of the hundreds
of young women who followed her footsteps to Ginger. She
signed up to volunteer by chance at the same orphanage
that Renee volunteered at. After a few months there, Kelsey
founded an NGO called Abide Family Center to support vulnerable
(24:00):
families and offer them an alternative to putting their kids
up for adoption. It was thrilling to be a twenty
something CEO in a foreign country rubbing elbows with your
celebrity role models. And I just remember being like so
amazed at Katie and Renee and thinking like they're the
pinnacle of like what I should be striving for of,
(24:21):
Like they're so self sacrificial. They they just say yes
to everything. To Kelsey, they were the real missionaries, giving
everything they had to the poor people of Ginger. They
were making real sacrifices and changing lives. So when Renee
asked for a favor, Kelsey jumped at the chance. I
(24:42):
sat there and washed. What was I watching? I don't
know what I'm doing? Why am I Why am I
going to the hospital watch a child? But I did
it because I was like I wanted to be friends
with them like they were they were the cool girls,
and so being was like that's I wanted to be
your friends of them. But the more unmeshed Kelsey got
(25:03):
in the Ginger world, the more she saw another side
to their image. They set the tone to us what
would normalize? Like they basically set the tone of like
this is what is acceptable. So if you, like, if
you had a kid die or you had um, you
have just had like an overwhelming amount of like dizziness.
It was like, Oh, you're doing it right, Like this
(25:23):
is like this is where God you see God work.
God works when like things are chaotic, probably when you
create the chaos. It was easy to see why Ginger
was an exhausting place to be martyrdom was once the
highest calling of Christian missionaries, and in a lot of
ways that culture still lingered. It was a place that
demanded everything of a person. There were no lines between
(25:46):
a personal and professional life, and it was almost taboo
to even think of taking time for yourself. Here's renee.
For a while, especially when I first got to Ganda,
it was kind of this like who could like one
up each other, who was like the most tired and
life worked the hardest, you know, like like I haven't
had a day off and in like a month, or
(26:07):
like oh well I haven't had you know, like I
haven't been on vacation in five years. You know, and
people don't I think need it, like subconsciously it's a
way to like tell that you're working hard. I mean
I did it. I used to heavily judge people who
didn't work on the weekend. I was like, who do
you think you are? You know, working on the weekends?
Like why are you been here? You know when you've
got a town full of people who are trying to
(26:28):
save lives and who were just as ambitious and stressed out, Well,
you've got a pressure cooker on your hands. It was
a hard place to live in the sense that, like
even Kelsey, one of her closest friends was Emily, whirl
was one of the Barbie Savior girls. Well, I used
to hear Emily and Kelsey talk about each other terribly
(26:49):
behind each other's backs in public settings, you know, and
be like, I can't believe Emily is doing this with
her kids, or I can't Kelsey is crazy, you know,
which is another reason why I really didn't want to
get it involved in the community and have a lot
of friends, because I thought like, let's just mean, like
I don't want to be a part of that, and
it's so easy to get sucked into. Even in my
time in Ginger, I'd experienced similar things at coffee shops
(27:13):
and restaurants. Everyone was friendly and happy to chat, but
then I'd hear them batting rumors around about each other,
everything from extra marital affairs and drug addictions to child
abuse and trafficking. When I saw that side of Ginger,
I didn't feel so special that the box were spreading
rumors about me. We're trying to get in our heads
with things like the Patricia video. Ginger had always been
(27:35):
like this, here's Emily Warrel from Barbie Savior again. I
think seeing how the community reacted left a really bad
taste in my mouth, and I just was constantly asking
myself every day, if this is how Christians are supposed
to act and treat one another. This is not attractive
at all, This is embarrassing, This is frankly disgusting. Why
(27:57):
would I wouldn't be a part of this. When you
think about missionaries as martyrs, you think of them being
persecuted by nonbelievers, by kings in foreign lands, or by
disease and disaster in jungles and deserts. Even these days,
there's a mindset of persecution that still exists among them.
(28:18):
You see it all the time when white Christians in
America say that they're under attack despite everything seemingly going
their way. But when persecution against missionaries came to Ginger,
it came from an unexpected place. It came from another missionary.
Katie and I were never really friends. Myself and any
of the less attractive white girls in Ginger weren't pretty
(28:41):
or cool enough for you. I never worshiped you enough
to be in your inner circle, and I'm cool with that.
Your whole Christian celebrity persona is a total joke. Also,
all that defending Renee Bach, a literal murderer of children.
That is when I lost all respect for you. These
are Kelsey Nielsen's word taken from a Facebook post, edited
(29:02):
for clarity and read by a voice actor. Earlier that year,
Kelsey was sexually assaulted by a colleague in Uganda. It
led to the deterioration of her mental health, and, as
she tells it, her NGO forcing her out of the organization.
After that, Kelsey saw Ginger in a completely different light.
She was fed up with the sketchy adoptions, the medical malpractice,
(29:25):
and all the other contradictions she saw. She knew she
would be mocked and dismissed if she spoke out. She'd
become a pariah in the missionary community, but she had
nothing to lose anymore. Just like Jesus said, no profit
is accepted in his hometown. I'm not doing this for
the likes or for attention. I'm doing it because it
(29:48):
needs to be said. And although many will say it
where it is safe, I'm not interested in staying safe
about things that matter anymore. She put other NGOs on
blast two, demanding to see financial records asking how much
you Gandon staff were being paid and how much the
directors were spending on travel, house help, and rental properties.
(30:09):
I'm only getting started. I'm threatening nothing other than exposing
all the lies, exploitation, and corruption within the missionary community
in Ginger. If I see the White Saviors of Ginger
coming clean and admitting their harmful and ethical and criminal acts,
I'll work towards reconciliation, or i will at the very
least stop posting about this. Kelsey admits that many of
(30:32):
these posts were written during a very dark moment in
her life, when her mental health was at a low point.
Others in the community were quick to seize on Kelsey's
history of mental illness and dismiss her one diness with bipolar,
bipolar and PTSD, And so you have, Okay, we're not
going to trust anything this woman says, she's just crazy.
(30:53):
So you have a lot of like stingle around mental health.
And I've even experienced that since working with the White Saviors,
since we've created this platform, had people just say like,
Kelsey is not stable, you shouldn't be having her on
your team. And it's hard. I mean, that's probably my
one area and that's really hard because I think I
still face a lot of self stigma and a lot
of like inscree of like trusting my own mind and
trusting so like trusting like what is passionate and driven
(31:16):
and like ideas and what is my mania? But she
didn't stop posting about it. Instead, she figured out how
to turn her newfound perspective into a brand of its own.
So she linked up with Olivia, the Ugandan social worker
that used to work in her NGO, and the two
of them created No White Saviors. What Barbie Savior had
(31:37):
failed to do, No White Saviors would. My biggest criticism
of Barbie Savior was that they were just criticizing this
in a satirical way and nothing was actually being done.
You could be like actually calling out this stuff directly
and doing something about it with your platform. It's all
good and fun to make a joke about it, but
that ship is literally fasting people lives, and it's not
(31:58):
funny in a community full of contradictions and abuse and
people who didn't take kindly to advice from outsiders, No
White Saviors was just as inevitable as Renee. The direction
they took was distinctly more confrontational They went after the
international adoption industry, which they accused of tricking parents into
selling their kids abroad, and they nearly canceled the British
(32:20):
TV presenter named Stacy Dooley when she posted a selfie
with a child in a village without consent. They called
for boycotts of travel bloggers who posted, in their words,
poverty porn, and they organized a campaign for the survivors
of a trafficking ring allegedly run by a German national
who ran a children's home in Uganda. A white spur mussels.
(32:43):
It is something that has really had to break. We
are trying. We don't know when it will die out.
Without work, we're just laying a foundation. Maybe at one
point it will be a chief. A lot of people
in town didn't agree with No White Saviors tactics. Their
brand of politics felt more like blackmail and extortion than advocacy. Still,
(33:07):
it forced NGOs and Gina and elsewhere to reconsider the
way that they behaved online and on the ground. I
heard from several NGEO directors in Uganda that they now
asked themselves, what would No White Saviors say before Ginja.
My entire understanding of what it meant to be a
(33:28):
missionary came from Sister Gracie, the nun I met in
South Sudan when I was still in college. She was
a lifelong missionary, dedicated to the people she lived among,
dedicated to serving their needs and uplifting them. She learned
the local language and broke bread with them every night.
She called South Sudan home. When I asked her if
(33:50):
she'd ever go back to India, she told me she
wanted to be buried in South Sudan. The most humbling
part was that she expected no credit for it, didn't
even expect results. Sometimes she didn't even know whether anything
she did mattered. But she wore the same torn and
frayed habit every single day and went to work because
(34:11):
she knew she had to keep trying. Ginger seemed like
the exact opposite. Every stone I turned over was another
scandal waiting to explode. Every missionary I spoke to was
more than happy to dish on their neighbors. People seemed
more worried about keeping up an image of righteousness than
actually being righteous. And the reason was simple, Doing the
(34:34):
right thing wasn't easy. If it was, then we'd be
living in a much different world, but painting that picture
a picture of doing the right thing that was much easier.
They were role playing a life like Sister Grace's, and
it felt like a punch to the gut. I had
seen the toll it had taken on her, the decades
(34:54):
of trauma, the gnawing self doubt rushing into Battlefield's time
and time again. I read the Ginger blogs. I saw
the heroic images they painted. I saw the NGO fundraising campaigns,
teary eyed and full of needy children. But then I
would read the Uganian headlines and I saw the stomach
churning scandals that came to the surface. And then I
(35:16):
sat in restaurants with them, eating ramen and drinking coconut latte's,
all paid for with earnest donations. That's what I've been
trying to get across this whole episode. Renee isn't an anomaly,
she isn't some ah historical monster. She's an embodiment of
(35:36):
all the swirling forces around Ginger and missionary culture at large.
Young people who tried to solve the world's problems without
qualifications are oversight folks back home who put them on
a pedestal for taking action no matter what the outcome,
and the idea that serving God was the highest calling,
(35:56):
even if it came at the expense of the people
you'd come to save. Even Jackie Kramlick, whose accused Renee
of terrible things, I saw her that way. The analogy
I use is kind of like a rabid dog and
a puppy mill that they're like, Oh, that dog was bad,
good to see you took him out, But let's not
(36:17):
talk about the evils of the puppy mill. That's the problem,
and that's why when people are like, oh, she's just
so evil, blah blah blah, It's like there's a really
a really big, deep story here of how this comes
to be and how someone could get into this position
that everyone needs to be very mindful of. But to
claim that she's just like completely evil independent of all
(36:40):
these underlying structures is really missing the point. But Gina's
reckoning was just about to arrive. Yeah. The Missionaries produced
(37:04):
an association with iHeartMedia. It's written and reported by Roger Gola,
Helene mcgegandhi, and Malcolm Burnley. It's produced by Michelle Lands
and Ryan Murdoch. Mark Lotto is our story editor, Our
executive producer is Mangis Thicketter. Our fact checker is Austin Thompson.
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