TWENTY YEARS OF UNRAVELING

A sex-abuse scandal at an African orphanage raises thorny moral questions about duty and complicity in this searing exposé.

Neill recaps his involvement with Kenya’s Nyumbani Children’s Home (called “Rainbow Children’s Home” in the book), a well-regarded, church-associated shelter and medical treatment center for HIV-positive orphans where he worked in the early 2000s. In 2019, he joined the charity’s U.S. board of directors and conducted a survey of the orphanage’s alumni, which unearthed alarming reports of child molestation. The crimes included many allegations of sexual abuse of children perpetrated by Simon Wood, a British Airways pilot who volunteered at the home; various seminarians and priests; and other boys who lived there. The abuse was mainly covered up, the author contends, by Nyumbani’s cofounder and director (whom he calls by the pseudonym “Sister Fenella”) and by staff members, who often blamed girls for having incited attacks. After the board responded to Neill’s report with denial and stonewalling, the author went to the U.S. Agency for International Development, which cut off funding to Nyumbani, and helped Washington Post reporter Rael Ombuor write an investigative piece. Neill mounts a cutting critique of Nyumbani, charging Sister Fenella and the nuns who ran the home (called “SCABs”) with harsh treatment of kids, inadequate medical care that contributed to the deaths of two children, and a failure to support troubled Nyumbani alumni. The book is also an anguished meditation on how self-regard, white saviorism, and the adulation of “rock star-saints” like Sister Fenella can blind well-meaning people to malfeasance and injustice. Neill writes in scathing, passionate prose that packs an emotional wallop. (“Anika spent her last night on this Earth in my arms, writhing in pain or in a shallow sleep from inadequate analgesics…. So, when I learned the news that Kimbery had also died of meningitis and that the [nuns] had the opportunity to vaccinate the children but didn’t, I was incandescent with rage.”) The result is a compelling takedown of the ethical rot that can eat away at unaccountable charities.

A furious indictment of the institutional power and sanctimony that enable moral atrocities.