[imagesource:hbo]

Renée Bach, a white evangelical Christian missionary, used that image up top of her as a god-like saviour of starving Ugandan children as a way to fundraise donor support from the US.

Bach was only nineteen when she founded a nonprofit in Jinja, Uganda, called Serving His Children (this was in 2009), which was focused on feeding the area’s malnourished children.

“Each picture,” she tells the cameras, “represents one life changed.” as she tried to position herself as a vessel for God’s will.

As time went on, however, her role revealed itself as toxic, and the photograph became a weapon to be used against her, with many calling her the “Angel of Death”. The activist group No White Saviors posted that photo up top with the “Angel of Death” caption and accused Bach of fraud, negligence, and bearing the responsibility for the deaths of more than 100 children in Serving His Children’s care, per Slate.

Inundated with children who often came in with more issues than just malnutrition, the facility unofficially took on the functions of a medical centre and Bach, believing that she’d been called to the task by God, felt empowered to assume some of those functions herself, without being licensed or formally trained.

With just a high-school diploma, Bach spearheaded treatments for babies and young children, which included hooking up IV drips, feeding sessions, prescribing medications, giving blood transfusions and handling other procedures.

Serving His Children ran as a non-governmental organisation from 2011 to 2015, during which time a large number of children died under Bach’s care, forcing Ugandan officials to shut SHC down.

Bach then ran back to the US, where she was faced with a lawsuit from a Ugandan human rights attorney, based on the testimony of two mothers who lost their children under Bach’s care.

HBO’s three-part docuseries Savior Complex – now streaming on Max – delves into these issues, trying to explore the way a white saviour complex can cause issues along a similar vein to colonialism, while also recognising that some help is better than no help at all. As Variety notes:

While the mortality rate at Bach’s facility was high, so was the mortality rate at local, government-operated hospitals in Uganda. The series ponders whether it would have been better for Bach to have done nothing, as opposed to give some care — and asks why she never went to medical school nor hired Ugandan doctors to lead her NGO.

“Savior Complex” takes a look past Bach to delve into a much larger issue. “We really wanted to zoom out to understand how the situation could happen at all,” Emmy-award winning series director Jackie Jesko tells Variety.

Check out the trailer:

[source:slate]