Being the bleeding heart and face of Save the Children tipped into the realm of the tyrannical for Sally Struthers, who starred in late-night television ads for the international aid organization for some three decades. She only found a sense of release when she performed as the evil orphanage warden Miss Hannigan in a touring production of Annie. “After all the years of stumping for the hungry and disenfranchised children on the planet, to play a woman who hates children is delicious,” the actor told Marc Maron on his WTF podcast.
She was the avatar for the countless do-gooders – mostly white, mostly evangelical, mostly women – who continue to stream into foreign nations with the mission of tending to the poor and needy. Renee Bach took the Mother Teresa-ism to the extreme, moving to Uganda, where she established a food distribution center and health clinic where she herself, a homeschooled woman with no medical training, oversaw the medical treatment of more than 1,000 young children. Over the course of several years, hundreds of the residents at Serving His Children saw their way to improved health. And over a hundred died in her care. “It wasn’t really a huge news story,” Jackie Jesko, an investigative reporter who directed Savior Complex, a three-part series centering on Bach. “When I first read about her, I thought there were a lot of missing pieces to the puzzle.”
