60 Minutes - 5/1/2016: Strike-through, Fintech, The Children's Village

Episode Date: May 2, 2016

At the height of the Ebola outbreak, 60 Minutes received a tip that a major American manufacturer had knowingly provided defective protective equipment to health care workers in the U.S. and abroad. Anderson Cooper investigates. Patrick and John Collison are among a vanguard of entrepreneurs trying to make the movement of money online as easy as sending photos or videos. The young founders of Stripe, a $5 billion payments startup, appear in a Lesley Stahl report on the burgeoning industry known as “Fintech,” which is challenging traditional financial institutions.  India Howell is mother to more than ninety children. And her business partner, Peter Leon Mmassy, is the father. It's the biggest extended family we’ve ever seen. Bill Whitaker reports. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

All right, let's go. Accusations that a major American manufacturer had knowingly provided defective surgical gowns to U.S. health care workers were first shared with 60 Minutes at a time when the Ebola crisis was spiking. Did you sell protective equipment for Ebola that you knew was defective? No, and frankly, I think the allegations aren't based in the facts. You're saying they're completely false? Yes. Is that what he told you?

Yeah. Evidently, he forgot the 11th commandment. Which is? Do not lie to 60 Minutes. It's being called the financial technology or fintech revolution. Say you need a loan. Fintech sites match borrowers and lenders directly. The way Uber connects passengers with drivers. Need financial planning? Algorithms are replacing

human advisors and brokers. Apps like Venmo let people click money to each other, similar to texting. Many of the innovative services in financial technology that have come along in the past 10 years are not coming from banks. These are all your kids. These are all my kids. That's right, they're all her kids. India Howell is mother to more than 90 children,

and her business partner, Peter Leon Massey, is the father. It's the biggest extended family we've ever seen. You're the legal guardian for the children in the village? Yes, I am the legal guardian. India and I, we are two legal guardians. So she's mom and I'm dad. I'm Steve Croft. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Steve Croft. I'm Leslie Stahl.

I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. Meet Tim's new Oreo Mocha Ice Caps with Oreo in every sip. Perfect for listening to the A-side or B-side or bull-side. Order yours on the Tim's app today at participating restaurants in Canada for a limited time. When does fast grocery delivery through Instacart matter most? When your famous grainy mustard potato salad isn't so famous without

the grainy mustard. When the barbecue's lit but there's nothing to grill. When the in-laws decide that actually they will stay for dinner. Instacart has all your groceries covered this summer. So download the app and get delivery in as fast as 60 minutes. Plus, enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. During the most recent outbreak of the Ebola virus, more than

500 health care workers died of the disease, and something called personal protective equipment became essential to preventing the deaths of even more. We're talking about gowns, gloves, masks, and other gear designed to block the transmission of deadly bacteria and viruses. They're used every day in hospitals to protect doctors, nurses, and patients, but Ebola was so lethal it raised the stakes enormously. If the protective equipment fails, infectious bodily fluids can get through, a problem known as strikethrough. At the height of the Ebola outbreak, we received a tip that a major American manufacturer had knowingly provided

defective protective equipment to health care workers in the U.S. and abroad. It's a serious accusation that's never been publicly examined until tonight. If there's one thing that became evident during the Ebola outbreak of 2014, it's that personal protective equipment properly used could mean the difference between life and death. You probably remember the tragic images from West Africa and the workers in biohazard suits trying to help without getting infected themselves. Certain types of gowns were also used during the outbreak.

The nurses at this hospital in Liberia used gowns and full-body suits to protect themselves after two of their top doctors died of the disease. Every day in the U.S., doctors and nurses rely on some of the same gowns the Centers for Disease Control recommended for Ebola. One of them is the MicroCool surgical gown, made by Halyard Health, which sells about 13 million gowns a year worldwide, including a quarter of the U.S. market. The MicroCool gown is supposed to provide the highest level of protection available against blood-borne bacteria and viruses.

Its label says it meets a rigorous industry standard known as Amy Level 4, which means it's impermeable so that blood containing viruses like hepatitis and HIV won't get on surgeons' skin during an operation. There's just one problem. What was wrong with the Level 4 gowns? They would leak. They would leak when we pressure tested them, especially in the seams. Bernard Vizot was the global strategic marketing director for MicroCool and other products from 2012 to early 2015. He worked for Halyard Health, which was part of the Kimberly-Clark Corporation, until November 2014. When two nurses at a Dallas hospital became infected after caring for a patient with Ebola,

Vizzo says he was relieved the nurses hadn't been using microcooled gowns. But he was concerned by the way the company went into high gear to sell the product. These gowns were being recommended for use with Ebola? Aggressively being recommended. In what way aggressively? We put a full court press to drive microcooled cells. We told hospitals to stock up on our microcool products. We told them to have at least 8 to 12 weeks of product on hand.

And that's when things became very difficult for me. Difficult because Vizzo says he knew the gowns were not consistently meeting industry standards. There's a test for this, right? There is a test, and it's conducted in outside facilities. So did your gowns consistently pass this test? No, they did not. Was the FDA aware of this? Were they notified? No, not that I'm aware of. Were customers warned? No, customers were not warned either. Why not? Well, because Kimberly-Clark knew that if they told customers, it would cost us a lot of business. They didn't tell the public. They didn't tell the FDA. They didn't tell physicians.

They told no one. They kept selling the gown to the tune of millions of dollars every month. Michael Avenetti is a California attorney who represents hospitals that are suing Halyard Health and Kimberly-Clark for fraud. He showed us this report by an independent, certified laboratory that tested the sleeves of microcooled gowns in December 2012 at the request of one of Kimberly Clark's competitors, Cardinal Health. At the time, Cardinal and Kimberly Clark were in litigation against one another. And Cardinal had these gowns tested. And in fact, the results were disastrous for Kimberly Clark.

What do you mean disastrous? Well, if you look through the report, you'll see that 77% of the gowns that were tested failed. 77%? 77%. At hospitals like UF Health in Jacksonville, Florida, we found surgeons who told us they repeatedly experienced strike through with blood getting through their gowns and onto their skin. Some surgeons were so upset about it, they took pictures of their bloody arms and gowns and sent them to the company. Did you receive complaints from nurses, from surgeons at all? On these gowns? Yeah.

Oh, frequently. On a very frequent basis. What kind of complaints? Oh, complaints of strike-through, sleeves falling off, ties falling off. Sleeves falling off. Sleeves falling off. Sleeves falling off. Sleeves falling off during the procedure. Were you at meetings where these problems were discussed?

Every time. We were the ones who were telling senior management the problems that we were having. And what was their response? I remember the response one time from the COO was, nobody really cares about this. Nobody really cares about surgical grounds. That's just not true. Chris Lowry is the COO Vizzo was talking about,

the chief operating officer of Halyard Health. Did you sell protective equipment for Ebola that you knew was defective? No, and frankly, I think the allegations aren't based in the facts. You're saying they're completely false? Yes. We get less than one complaint for every million gowns sold. And even more so is we've never received even one report of a health care professional contracting an infection

as a result of a flaw in our product. Lowry says Bernard Vizot didn't raise his concerns until after he left the company. Vizot says he was fired because he was vocal about the problems. The company also questions the motives of this man, Keith Edgett, the former head of research and engineering for the gowns. In this video deposition, Edgett expresses the same concerns as Vizzo about what was going on at the company.

I believe that they were putting customers in harm's way and I was struggling with it. I want to show you the results of a test performed by Intertech Labs. It shows that 77% of your microcooled gowns failed one or both of the sleeves. 77% is a lot. Anderson, it's very important to put this cardinal test data into context. First, extreme outlier test results. We had never seen test data that reflected anything like this before or for that matter since. Halyard showed us its own test results from independent laboratories. The reports show the sleeves passed some of the time and failed at others. But Chris Lowry says they passed far more than they failed. And when they

failed, it was at much lower rates than the Cardinal test suggests. For the test in February 13, 18 out of 85 samples failed. That's 21 percent. We have to look at a test failure in the context of all the tests that are passing. But you have failures in the product. You're still selling the product and you don't inform the FDA and you're not informing customers. It's important to understand that no manufacturing process is perfect. You take that... But these failures are above the industry standard. You're allowed a certain amount of failures when you actually fail a test, though. That's above the failure rate that's already built in. And in the testing that we completed after the cardinal testing, we believe that we were fully compliant with our requirements for the product as it had

been cleared. Is that what he told you? Yeah. Evidently, he forgot the 11th commandment. Which is? Do not lie to 60 minutes. The company had shown us this March 2013 lab report as part of its proof the gowns passed the test. But attorney Michael Avenetti says that's not what really happened. They claimed to have submitted 79 samples and 75 passed. They said they passed, yeah. Well, they didn't pass. They failed. Because they didn't submit 79 samples. They submitted 85 samples. And in fact, six of the samples weren't even tested because the sleeves were so bad.

The lab took them out of the package and they didn't even test them because it was obvious what was going to happen. And they didn't include that as failures? No, they didn't. And in fact, I mean, I brought the document that shows it. It's a spreadsheet prepared internally at Kimberly-Clark. It says six failed, not tested due to unsealed seams. Lot fails.

You're saying this is an example of fuzzy math? No, this isn't fuzzy math. This is fraud. When we asked Halyard about this, the company acknowledged it hadn't told us about those untested samples, but denied it was trying to deceive us. The company says even if a sleeve seam fails, the risk of a doctor or nurse getting infected is extremely low. They'd have to have some type of cut that would allow transmission. The defect would have to be in that exact place. The surgeon would have

not covered the cut or abrasion as they should have per their procedure. There are so many factors that have to align for that to occur. I think it's really easy for him to say that, but he's not the guy doing it. Dr. Sherry Wren is a vice chair of surgery at the Stanford University School of Medicine. The bottom line is, is he going to stand there and volunteer to let me paint some hepatitis C blood on his arms and on his stomach? Probably not, is going to be my guess. And you've had hepatitis C blood on your arms and on your stomach? Of course. Dr. Wren specializes in gastrointestinal surgery

and is co-author of guidelines for surgeons operating on patients with Ebola. She has no connection to the lawsuit against Halyard, but she does wear microcool gowns for procedures like this one, in which she knew the person she was operating on had hepatitis C. Shortly after we recorded this surgery, Dr. Wren told us she got blood on her arms and hands three times while wearing three different microcool gowns and operating on another patient who also had hepatitis C. We've been told that as long as your skin is intact,

you're okay. Actually, with that case, I finished operating at five in the morning, and I looked down at my hand, and I realized I had eroded off a callus. So I had ripped my own skin in the OR. It does matter then to you that these gowns are impervious? Yes, of course it matters. Do I really want to have somebody else's infected bodily fluids on my body? No, I do not. Internal documents we obtained suggest the company knew for a long time that it had a problem, which is why we wanted to ask the COO, Chris Lowry, about this November 2014 PowerPoint presentation that identifies a year-and-a-half gap in sleeve seams passing the industry test. We've been told that in November of 2014, a timeline was presented,

and your own people acknowledge that there was a year and a half period in which the sleeve seams didn't pass the test, which demonstrates the gown is impervious. Is that true? It's not. Because this is the presentation, and on the second page, it says gap in sleeve seams passing ASTM 1671, and it shows a year and a half gap. Anderson, if it's okay, I've not seen this presentation to my recollection, and so I don't think that it's appropriate, particularly out of any context, to react to it. Do you think stuff like this happens? I think, Anderson, probably from a time perspective, if you don't mind. You want to stop?

Yeah, I mean, I think that we probably, I think we've spent the time that we agreed to in the team. After our interview, Halyard told us it was not required to meet new, more stringent testing criteria during that gap shown on the timeline. By January 2015, the company says it had new sealing machines in place to improve the quality of its sleeves. But before the new machines were up and running, the company sold thousands of microcooled gowns to the CDC's Strategic National Stockpile of Medical Supplies for use in future outbreaks and emergencies. The government's National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health is conducting research on protective equipment. When it commissioned tests of gowns produced in 2014 for the stockpile, there were some sleeve failures in three out of four batches tested.

Are federal or state authorities looking into this at all? I can't comment on that. They certainly should be, because forget about the civil liability. This is criminal conduct. In its most recent annual report, Halyard Health says it had been served with a subpoena that is related to a United States Department of Justice investigation. The Justice Department and the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates medical devices, declined to comment further. The company said to us, basically, there's no

evidence that anybody got sick or died directly related to a failure of any gowns. If it was so egregious, wouldn't there be many cases or even one clear case that you could point to that says, look, there was this failure of a gown, and this doctor became infected with Ebola or HIV or any other disease? Until now, why would any doctor or nurse have any reason to question Kimberly Clark's representations regarding the effectiveness of this gown? This story may, in fact, be the first time that physicians and nurses who have contracted disease take a step back and say, you know, maybe that's how I got it. Sometimes historic events suck. But what shouldn't suck is learning about history. I do that through

storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast chronicling the epic story of America, decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck, available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Thousands of startups are challenging many aspects of banking. The newcomers argue that this important sector is too set in its ways. It's being called the financial technology or fintech revolution. We looked at the birth of one fintech company founded by two young fintechies who started not unlike the founders of Facebook and Microsoft. Which one of you dropped out of Harvard? That was me. And which one of you dropped out of MIT?

By elimination. Right. I was the other one. Brothers Patrick and John Collison quit college because they had an idea for modernizing the financial industry they thought needed a shaking up. In a world where people can send a Facebook message or sort of upload an Instagram photo and have it available to anyone anywhere in the world like that, I think the fact that that doesn't work for money is something that seems kind of increasingly, honestly, unacceptable to people. And so I think the question for banks is just, can they get there first in providing these services, or will it be somebody new? They want to be the somebody new. John, 25, and Patrick, 27, first noticed the problem when they were in high school in Drominear, a dot of a town in Ireland. And you were coders? Yeah, well, we had both learned to program growing up. And we had been building iPhone apps.

We had been building web services. But when they wanted to charge people to buy the apps, they hit an unexpected snag. They had to go to the bank and file paperwork just to be able to collect the money. Like, really, sort of, kind of like getting a mortgage. You'd have to, like, convince them that you were worth supporting. And like a mortgage, it would have to be approved. Right, exactly. And it would take weeks for this approval process to happen. And it just seemed like this crazy mismatch.

So they decided to do something about it. They created software that allows businesses to cut through all that bureaucracy and instantly accept payments online from countries across the globe. We visited their startup, Stripe, in the Mission District, the heart of San Francisco's tech scene, where Patrick showed me how fast a business could set up a money collection system using Stripe. Set me up. Pretend I'd left 60 minutes to create an online business.

What do you want to sell? I think I'm going to sell dog food, homemade dog food. In five minutes after a few clicks and a cut and paste of their code, can I see to copy it? He said my company would be ready to receive payment for homemade dog food online right then and there. I mean, it doesn't need to take any longer. This is how it should work. And this is what would take weeks and weeks and weeks and forms and forms and verification. And going to the bank branch and waiting for paperwork to be mailed back to you and all this stuff. They developed software for buy buttons,

letting companies accept payments online fast and in new ways. Stripe charges sellers a small percentage for every transaction. Does the buyer pay anything? The buyer pays nothing. Nothing. Correct. Their goal is to make money as easy to send as email for everyone, anywhere, on any device. We want to free businesses from just selling via credit cards to people who hold bank accounts, and instead enable people to purchase online

no matter what it is that they use, bank account or no. And of course, this needed the smartphone. It needed this move to mobile. For sure. Stripe is hardly alone in inventing new financial technology, or fintech. There's a revolution brewing with thousands of these companies trying to make banking faster and cheaper and increasingly mobile. Many of the innovative services in financial technology

that have come along in the past 10 years are not coming from banks. But by and large, the newcomers are not challenging the core function of banks, taking deposits. Even the startups themselves park the money they handle at FDIC-insured banks. I think there'll always be a need for sort of somewhere to store your money, to have it sit. And we think, you know, for all their flaws, they have a lot of experience at being banks, right? But fintech is targeting nearly all the other functions of banking. The startups are peeling off one profitable service after another, typically offering them for less. It's called unbundling the banks. Say you need a

loan. FinTech sites match borrowers and lenders directly. The way Uber connects passengers with drivers. Need financial planning? Algorithms are replacing human advisors and brokers. Apps like Venmo let people click money to each other, similar to texting. And if you want to wire money across borders... I'm sending $500. The CEO of a company called TransferWise showed us how his app can send money abroad and convert currencies, say dollars into pounds, without bank tellers and high exchange rates. Users just swap with each other. And a couple of clicks and boom.

Click, click, done. Do you think that the big banks today see these fintech startups as the barbarians at the gate? Well, there's certainly a lot of curiosity. What about fear? There can be some fear. Vikram Pandit, the former CEO of banking giant Citigroup, says it's the all too familiar tale of David and Goliath. A lot of what you're seeing in fintech is like what you're seeing with Uber or Airbnb. I mean, you've seen the impact of technology on travel. Yeah, the travel agents seen the impact of technology on travel. Yeah, the travel agents were thrown out of business. That's what I saw.

Is that what fintech is doing to banking? It's early days. And, you know, banks are thinking about it. And they're trying to understand what all this new technology can mean. It could mean trouble with millennials willing to ditch brand name companies for new apps on their phone. The banks have not realized how different this generation is. Max Levchin, who co-founded PayPal and was an early investor in Stripe, cites a survey saying 70% of young adults would rather go to the dentist than to a bank. They don't really have a problem putting their social security number into a web form, but they have a terrible problem going up to a teller in a bank and trying to

figure out what exactly you're supposed to do. This is so inefficient. Why am I in this stodgy, outdated room that is empty and marble laden? And it's not just about technology. There's also a question of trust. The millennials, their basically formative experience is the financial crisis. They're the ones who really don't trust the banks. And we know that many banks serve their own interests more than those of their consumers. You're criticizing a system, basically, that you helped create. Well, there's no question the crisis demonstrated that the system didn't work. And when you looked at the aftermath of the crisis, what needed to be done, you had to make sure banks got back to the

basics of banking and that they had to address the trust issue. But in the meantime, fintech started taking root. In the last year and a half, investors have poured over $20 billion into the sector, including this banking insider, who's personally invested in a dozen fintech startups. He says that beyond making banking more convenient, these companies can offer options to lower-income families that can't afford to bank at banks. Ten million American households don't even have a bank account. You know, I've read that it is more expensive for a poor person to use the banking system as it exists than for a wealthy person. How is that possible? There are bank account fees on your checking accounts. There are commissions. There are

exchange rates. It all adds up. And that doesn't happen with the new companies? The new companies, they're transparent, and they tell you what the fees are, and they are a fraction of some of the fees that are charged by banks. As services move onto the Internet, they can provide the services more cheaply. And, you know, many of these banks, they have hundreds of thousands of employees, whereas as we see financial services moving online, they don't have to have a physical presence and pay for that.

So you can eliminate hidden fees if your cost structure is lower. And I'm hearing eliminate jobs. I mean, we're talking about hundreds of thousands of jobs in the banking sector, tellers and, you know, financial advisors, you name it. I think in general, technology always makes some jobs less relevant or perhaps even obsolete. But I will say that the idea that these people will find nothing else to do seems like it's way too pessimistic on the capabilities of everyone as human beings. Have you looked at the employment scene right now? I think it'll take a while to adjust. But when you think about just the creativity of people and what they're capable of

and the sort of aspirations and dreams that they have, the idea that they're not capable of anything more than sort of performing these automatable clerical tasks, I don't believe that for a second. There are issues with fintech that go beyond the loss of banking jobs. Letting these new companies handle your money could be risky because there are concerns they're inadequately regulated. And there's also the issue of online security. So why should we trust you? You think no hacker could ever get in there? I think we've had the best opportunity to sort of design a secure system, right?

But you're still on the Internet. You are still operating on a base that's not secure. I think you're right in the sense that people have been trying to steal money for as long as money has existed. And the best we can sort of as a society hope to do is to sort of design security in the most thoughtful and sort of robust way possible. And that's sort of what we set out to do with Stripe. And it's not like the big banks haven't been breached by hackers. So is fintech the next Uber? Well, it's still a small slice of the financial industry. And the powerful and rich old guard is fighting back, its lobby already pushing for more regulation to curb the newcomers.

And scrambling to adapt, big banks have begun increasingly investing in and partnering with fintech, some looking at a technology called blockchain that's behind digital currencies like Bitcoin. I think it's kind of human nature to always want to see these things as a competitive dynamic that either technology companies have to win or the banks have to win, and one of them is going to lose. It's not as black and white. Yeah.

Do you think what you have can be brought to a bank like Wells Fargo or JPMorgan Chase. Can they integrate this, or it's one or the other? I think they can be part of it. They can be part of sort of the infrastructure that powers it. And again, we work with Wells Fargo and many other banks today. But I think that they can only be part of it. They can't be sort of the agents driving it forward. He says that over one in four Americans online have used Stripe in the

last year, including on sites like Facebook and Twitter and department stores like Saks and Macy's. The software is embedded on both Apple Pay and Android Pay, and it's already helped hundreds of thousands of businesses accept money online. There you go. Even though Stripe has some stiff competition, like PayPal, the brothers have made two covers of Forbes, and the four-year-old company is now valued at $5 billion. Not bad for two brothers who not long ago had to beg their bank branch for approval. When you have a major technological shift like this, it's not clear that automatically the existing financial players are the ones who're

going to win. Even though they're huge. Even though they're huge. I mean, there were plenty of huge retailers before Amazon, but somehow this little, you know, upstart from Seattle, you know, in just a few short years, gobbled up the business. Banks are so rich. Do you worry that they're going to come and buy you out? Well, luckily, we have a say in that. And we want to build a long-term independent company. Oh, you want to buy them out? Tanzania is an East African country of staggering beauty and devastating poverty. Half the population of 51 million is under the age of 14, many of them orphaned, abandoned, or abused. For the last 10 years, in a remote northern corner of the country,

hundreds of children in need of care have found refuge and protection in a mountainside oasis called the Rift Valley Children's Village. It's not just a safe haven, it's their home. It's run by an American woman, India Howell, and Peter Leon Massey, her Tanzanian business partner. They're like the odd couple. She's impatient and blunt. He's cool and diplomatic. Together, they are parents to 94 children and counting, the biggest extended family we've ever seen. When we heard of this extraordinary place, we had to go see for ourselves. Tanzania attracts about a million tourists a year, and this is one of the reasons why. The Ngorongoro Crater, where the wildlife is so

abundant, so diverse, you almost can't believe your eyes. Just over the ridge from this magnificent place lies our destination, and it's not easy to get there. After a day on planes, almost four hours of driving, the last 40 minutes on rutted dirt roads, under sprawling acacia trees, through coffee plantations, and past villages called camps where the plantation workers live, we entered the gates of the Rift Valley Children's Village and into another world. Say hi. Hi. Hello, hello, hello. From the beginning, you called this the Rift Valley Children's Village. Yes. Not an orphanage. Why?

Because my kids aren't orphans. They're not up for adoption. They never have been and never will be because they're home now. India Howell runs this home, really a group of houses, with her business partner and managing director, Peter Leon Massey. You're the legal guardian for the children in the village? Yes, I am the legal guardian. India and I, we are two legal guardians. So she's mom and I'm dad. And they call you mama? They call me Mama, and then after they've watched enough Disney movies, they start calling me Mom. Had you wanted to be a mom, have your own kids?

Believe it or not, I don't think I was issued with the biological clock. As all of my friends became more frantic and started to marry people, they would later divorce because they just wanted to have kids. I couldn't understand that drive. And here I am with more children than I can count, and I can't imagine any other way. These are all your kids? These are all my kids. So what do the kids get here? I can ask you the same thing. I mean, about your home, what do your kids get so it's everything when they when the kids come here is this is home the Rift Valley Children's Village

is located near the town of Karatu on nine acres of land donated by local villagers with 90 employees including social workers counselors and support staff peppered throughout the year with many volunteers. There are 22 buildings, a third of which are the children's houses. Each house has two deputy moms, called mamas, all Tanzanian. The children here range from toddler to 21. Let me get you a bag for the shoes. They get food, clothing, shelter, education, and love.

Like most large families, the kids have regular routines. Everybody awake? They're up at dawn, get ready for school, and sit down for breakfast. We are family. There's snack time, play time, and like it or not, for Bobo and Asal and everyone else, bath time. Establishing traditions is a big deal here, right down to birthday celebrations. Happy birthday to you. It might not be the exact date, but for a little boy like Eliassi, it's his day. Every child who ends up

with India and Peter has a story, some more poignant than others. It seems that most of the children have lost their parents or were living with relatives. And just some of the descriptions we came across here, frightened and angry, mistreated emotionally and physically. Yeah. Oh, this sweet little girl, she witnessed her father beat her mother to death and was probably three or four years old. So old enough to see what was happening, but by no means old enough to have the feel to emotionally process that. Then moved in with relatives where she was being sold. She was being prostituted out. What India and Peter have undertaken is no easy feat. And it all started with a trip India took to Tanzania in 1998, which had nothing to do with children.

How did you end up here in northern Tanzania? My mother asked the same question many times, quite by accident, actually. I agreed to go climb Kilimanjaro with one of my best friends for her 40th birthday. I had no interest in Africa whatsoever, but stepped off the plane and knew that I was home. The feeling was so strong that after the climb, India went back to the U.S., quit her job, and applied for one with a safari company. She was hired and within three months was back in Tanzania. Why did you choose this area? Peter, who grew up in poverty but managed to make it through high school,

was working to earn money for college at a safari company. India became his boss. What did you think of her? It was my first time to work under a woman boss, an American woman boss. So I was really impressed, and she was smart, and she had this sense of humor, but tough lady. This tough lady grew up in an exclusive enclave on the north shore of Long Island, New York, and was CEO of a business in Boston, a world away from Tanzania. So you came here to work for a safari company. Right. And end up founding a

children's village. Right. That seems like a big jump, but actually there's a thread. So part of my job required that I go to the city of Arusha every week. And every time you got out of the car, you were just swarmed with all these ragged little boys who I soon discovered were what we call street children here. And my mission from the beginning was to identify these kids that are living at risk before they're driven to the streets. So how did you find out that you both had this interest in helping needy children. I wrote a proposal, a very small proposal, about my home village. And I showed it to India.

I said, I'm really thinking that I want to do this. The proposal suggested that through environmental conservation, a community can not only sustain itself, but more importantly, enable children to thrive. He said, you know, I've written a business plan. I said, oh, I'd love to see it. What did you think when you saw it? Do you think this is realistic? I'm very practical, and my, no matter what idea comes to me, my first thought is, and where does the money come from? Because it doesn't matter if it's a good idea if you can't pay for it and sustain it. So Peter's proposal was all but forgotten. Then this happened. One of India's employees at the

safari lodge told her he was not only quitting his job, but abandoning his three-year-old son named Doctor. Just like that, India was thrust into motherhood. There's this little peanut in a shuka, which is the fabric that the Maasai wear. And we just looked at each other, and it was like we'd been looking for each other forever. And we finally found each other, and he just ran into my arms, and I was sunk for life. Riziki, also abandoned by her birth parents, followed doctor. Then came Juma and India, named after her new mom. Now a full-time mother of four, India decided to leave the city of Arusha and the safari business

and move to the countryside, where she rented a house on an old coffee plantation. So we had a swing right here. Word got out there was a lady taking in children. Over the course of four years, village and church leaders and relatives started dropping off abandoned and abused children, some orphaned by AIDS. The family grew to 17 kids. Peter, in the meantime, got his degree, became managing director, and married his

college sweetheart, Grace. They now have three daughters of their own. That house was where Peter lived. Doctor, the first child she took in, is now 19. There was something that mom was showing that my family didn't have, where it was love, care that came first before anything else. Riziki is 21. At first I was so much afraid of her. Why? When we were little kids, I mean, they just tell us, like, the white people are bad people. And when I saw her, at first I was, like, terrified.

Actually terrified? Mm-hmm. But as time went by, I was, like, terrified. Actually terrified? Mm-hmm. But as time went by, I mean, I got used to her, and I wasn't afraid anymore. Now you love her? Very much. I do. Mika, how did we get Mika's shirt? As it turns out, giving kids a place to live is the easy part.

I thought I had it all figured out. They can go to the local public schools, and I realized the school isn't a school, by my definition. So India and Peter convinced the local elders to let them take over the administration of a primary school. This is what the elementary school looked like before. This is what it looks like today. Peter and India now run two schools, primary and secondary, for their kids and almost 700 local children, like James and his friends, who trek five miles every day to get here. Okay, another one who can give me an example? miles every day to get here. The kids are taught in Swahili and English, and they have the best

scores and graduation rates in the region. Even so, to accomplish anything, India has had to overcome Tanzanian skepticism. Locals have seen Western good intentions come and go before. I know you've heard the criticism of the white woman, the white American rushing in to save the Tanzanians. How do you respond to that? I smile and nod. It's very sweet and naive that people think that it could be that easy. Her American assertiveness often clashes with the local culture, so Peter has the added title of diplomat. He smooths tensions between India and the community. You guys make a good team.

We are making a very good team, and she drives me nuts, but I love that. If it weren't for Peter, I would have been deported, because he's always explaining me. He gets the American culture, but he most importantly gets what is needed here and how to translate all of the different ideas into something workable. The Rift Valley Children's Village runs on an annual budget of $1.3 million with the help of various family foundations and generous donors. We are actually showing not just our village, but... Still, India travels twice a year to the U.S. to raise money. Beyond the children's village, half of the budget pays for local schools,

a microfinance program with 500 clients... And how long has she had it? And a health clinic that serves 8,000 people. Are you surprised by the success of the Children's Village? I mean, I know this was your dream long ago, but look at what you've brought about. Are you surprised? I'm amazed. I'm astonished. Every single day I leave, I wake up, I'm like, wow, did we really do all this? In the mail this week, viewers dove in with comments about our story on Skylar Baylor,

the transgender swimmer on the Harvard men's team. The Skylar story should be treasured by all. What an impressive young man and role model. Other viewers criticized us for reporting the story by all. What an impressive young man and role model. Other viewers criticized us for reporting the story at all. A cringeworthy piece of propaganda, truly a low point for 60 Minutes. And there was this. I was disappointed that Ms. Stahl found the need to question this young man about his anatomy. Would she have asked this question of another guest? I'm Leslie Stahl. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.