60 Minutes - Sunday, July 31, 2016

Episode Date: August 1, 2016

Scott Pelley shares the story of three unjustly convicted men as they describes what life is like after being on death row. 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

There are very few things that you can be certain of in life. But you can always be sure the sun will rise each morning. You can bet your bottom dollar that you'll always need air to breathe and water to drink. And, of course, you can rest assured that with Public Mobile's 5G subscription phone plans, you'll pay the same thing every month. With all of the mysteries that life has to offer, a few certainties can really go a long way. Subscribe today for the peace of mind you've been searching for. Public Mobile. Different is calling. What's better than a well-marbled

ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. Ray Hinton stepped out of prison after nearly 30 years on death row, a free man.

What was that moment like? As though I was walking on clouds. But Hinton's story raises serious questions about how we handle unjust convictions. Thirty years ago, a judge proudly stood up and said, I sentence you to die. Thirty years later, no one had the decency to say, we're sorry for what took place. Peterman Glacier in Greenland is one of the largest glaciers in the Arctic Circle and one that's experienced dramatic melting. Are you staying warm?

Although it is a harsh and dangerous environment, it has drawn some of the world's leading climate scientists to study its ice sheet and look at its effects on the ocean. We watched as they attempted a first-ever look at what's happening 300 feet below the ice. 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 two legal guardians. So she's mom and I'm dad. I'm Steve Croft. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Sharon Alfonsi.

I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. Welcome to Play It, a new podcast network featuring radio and TV personalities talking business, sports, tech, entertainment, and more. Play it at play.it. About 10 times a month now, an innocent person is freed from an American prison. They're exonerated, sometimes after decades, because of new evidence, new confessions, or the forensic science of DNA. There's joy the day that justice arrives, but we wondered, what happens the day after?

You're about to meet three people who have returned to life from unjust convictions. As we first told you in January, one of them, Ray Hinton, was on death row, and he remembers too vividly the Alabama electric chair and the scent that permeated the cell block when a man was met by 2,000 volts. Hinton waited his turn for nearly 30 years until last April. That's when Ray Hinton stepped out of the shadow of execution,

taking the first steps that he chose for himself since 1985. What was that moment like? As though I was walking on clouds. I wanted to get away in case they changed their mind, you know. You still didn't believe it? I was not going to allow myself to really believe that I was free until I was actually free. Free to visit his mother, who went to her grave believing her son would be executed. The cemetery was Hinton's first destination, and he was startled by a world that had moved on without

him. We headed toward the graveyard, and a voice come on and said, at two points so many miles turn right. I said, what the hell? Who is that? And he said, it's GPS tracker. I knew I didn't see no white lady get in that car. I wanted to know how did she get in that car, and what is she doing in this car? Man, come on. Any voice tended to be a surprise.

On death row, Hinton spent most of every day alone. After 30 years inside, mostly by yourself, did you worry about coming back out into the world? You get out and you're just out. If you don't have a place to live or money or whatever, you ask yourself, what am I going to do? But my best friend stuck by me for 30 years, and he had already told me, whenever you get out, you come live with me and my wife. What did you have to learn after you got out?

I'm still learning. I'm still learning that I can take a bath every day. I'm still learning that I don't have to get up at 3 o'clock in the morning and eat breakfast. I'm still learning that life is not always what we think it is. Ray Hinton's life was never what he thought it would be after 1985, when he was misidentified by a witness who picked him out of a mugshot book. His picture was in there after a theft conviction. When police found a gun in his mother's house, a lieutenant told him that he'd been arrested in three shootings, including the murders of two restaurant managers. I said, you got the wrong guy. And he said, I don't care whether you did or don't. He said, but you're going to be convicted for it. And you know why? I said, no. He said, we got a white man.

They're going to say you shot him. Going to have a white DA. We're going to have a white judge. You're going to have a white jury, more likely. And he said, all of that spell conviction. Conviction, conviction. I said, well, does it matter that I didn't do it? He said, not to me.

The lieutenant denied saying that, but Hinton was convicted at age 30. He was 57 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that his defense had been ineffective. A new ballistics test found that the gun was not the murder weapon. 30 years ago, a judge proudly stood up and said, I sentence you to die. Thirty years later, no one had the decency to say, Mr. Hinton, we're sorry for what took place. No one have said it. What did the state of Alabama give you to help you get back up on your feet? They dropped all charges, and that was it.

No money? No. No suit of clothes? Nothing. No. And that is where many states are failing the growing number of exonerated prisoners. It turns out in Alabama, if Ray Hinton had committed murder and was released on parole, he would have been eligible for job training, housing assistance, and a bus ticket home.

But most states offer no immediate assistance to the innocent, whose convictions can be embarrassing because of misconduct or incompetence by police or prosecutors. BRIAN STEPHENSEN, Attorney, Ray Hinton's Case, Washington, D.C.: You can't traumatize someone, try to kill someone, condemn someone, lock someone down for 30 years, and not feel some responsibility for what you have done. JEFFREY BROWN, Attorney, Ray Hinton's Case, Washington, D.C.: Yes, that's right. JEFFREY BROWN, Attorney, Brian Stephenson worked on Ray Hinton's case for 16 years.

Stevenson started the Equal Justice Initiative, one of a growing number of legal organizations overturning false convictions. They need support. They need economic support. They need housing support. They need medical support. They need mental health care. They need to know that their victimization, their abuse, has been taken seriously. It was just absolutely unimaginable, and I couldn't even explain the horror of it. Ken Ireland lost 21 years. He was misidentified by witnesses who collected a $20,000 reward.

Convicted in a 1986 rape and murder, DNA proved his innocence. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning, sir. Because of the rare perspective of an innocent man who's done hard time, the governor put Ireland on Connecticut's parole board. You know, at some point in your life, sir, you have to step up. So this is your new cell? Well, yeah, for eight hours a day.

It took five years to get this job. At first, he lived with his sister, and he found work as a counselor for troubled kids. I got a small apartment in town. I mean, there's been nights where I just barricaded myself in a big walk-in closet and slept in there, just thinking, you know, that, you know, someone's going to come kick down my door and drag me back. You slept in a closet? Yeah, yeah, a few times I have. Are you over that now, six years later? Yeah, I don't have them issues now. It gets easier and easier every day.

One thing that made it easier was Connecticut's new law that compensates the wrongly convicted. A year ago, Ireland was the first to get a check. What did the state give you? Six million dollars. Six million dollars? Right. Wow. It's more than most states are giving.

Well, it comes to something like $300,000 a year for every year you spent in prison. Yeah. And you say it's not worth it? Oh, absolutely not. Absolutely not. They could give me $5 million for every year, and I still wouldn't be worth it. Ken Ireland was fortunate, if you can call it that. Many states don't offer compensation at all. One is Julie Balmer's home, Michigan. Other than the time, what have you lost? Everything. Everything. My life is nothing as it was. In 2003, Balmer was a mortgage broker raising her sister's baby.

He became ill, so she took him to an emergency room. Doctors there suspected the boy had been shaken until his brain was damaged. Balmer was convicted of child abuse. She was in her fifth year in prison when new evidence showed that the boy had suffered a natural stroke. She was retried, acquitted, and the judge apologized. After she was released for a time, she was homeless. How did you start over? It was very, very, very rough. You start from the bottom, reclaiming your identity. I didn't have an ID. And then after I jumped over that hurdle, then you start applying for jobs. And then you have to go through, okay, well, now there's a five-year gap on your resume.

Why is this? And then you tell your potential employer the truth. In my case, I never got phone calls back. There was no support for you of any kind? No. Our Lady of Redemption. Julie Balmer now works for a Detroit area parish. Thank you. God bless. Hopefully my testimony as an exoneree. In her spare time, she's lobbying Michigan's legislature for a compensation law. No amount of money can ever bring back everything that I've lost. No one can fail to see the injustice in these cases.

But when it comes to compensation, there are people watching this interviewer saying, you know, it was just bad luck, and we don't necessarily owe them for the life that they lost. This isn't luck. This was a system. This was actually our justice system. It was our tax dollars who paid for the police officers who arrested Mr. Henton, our tax dollars that paid for the judge and the prosecutor that prosecuted him, that paid for the experts who got it wrong, that paid to keep him on death row for 30 years for a crime he didn't commit. This has nothing to do with luck. This has everything to do with the way we treat those who are vulnerable

in our criminal justice system. Ray Hinton is considering applying for compensation, but Alabama has paid only one exoneree after 41 claims. In the meantime, attorney Brian Stevenson has been Hinton's guide to advances like ATMs and smartphones and to frustrations that never change, like getting a license at the DMV. And will I ever catch up with the world? I don't know, but I'm going to try. Hinton is working part-time now, speaking about justice and faith.

I just never, never believed that God would allow me to die for something that I didn't do. I didn't know how he was going to work it out, but I believed that he would work it out. I can't get over the fact that just because I was born black and someone that had the authority who happened to be white felt the need to send me to a cage and try to take my life for something that they knew that I didn't do. Of course, they did take Ray Hinton's life. A false conviction isn't about lost time. It's the loss of an education, a marriage, the chance to start a family, settle into a job, and build a pension. The only thing Alabama didn't take was the breath from his body.

Are you angry? No. How could you not be? Three decades of your life, most all of your life. They took 30 years of my life, as you say. What joy I have, I cannot afford to give that to them. And so being angry would be giving them, letting them win. You'd still be in prison? Oh, absolutely.

I'm a person that loves to laugh. I love to see other people smile. And how can I smile when I'm full of hate? And so the 30 years that they got from me, I count today, I count every day as a joy. Since our story first aired, Ken Ireland left his job at the Connecticut Board of Pardons and Paroles, bought an RV, and is traveling across the United States, making up for lost time. Welcome to Play It, a new podcast network featuring radio and TV personalities talking business, sports, tech, entertainment, and more. Play it at play.it.

One of the most significant efforts to study changes in the climate has been taking place near the top of the world. As we first reported earlier this year, it's a place called Peterman Glacier in Greenland, one of the largest glaciers in the Arctic Circle and a glacier that has experienced dramatic melting. It is a harsh and dangerous environment and it has drawn some of the world's leading climate scientists who are only able to work there a little over a month a year. We wanted to find out how that work is proceeding, how they're able to move equipment and people in such a hostile place, and what they've discovered so far. So we went to the top of the world to find out.

Our journey took us 700 miles above the Arctic Circle to the U.S.'s Thule Air Force Base in northern Greenland, built at the start of the Cold War to watch for Soviet missiles. It is an alien landscape, home to curious Arctic hares and packs of prehistoric-looking musk ox. From there, we flew even further. The destination? Petermann Glacier. It's on the northwest coast of Greenland, just a few hundred miles south of the North Pole. To get there in a helicopter took us four hours over a rarely seen landscape that is both severe and serene. The last town we'd see was Connock,

with 700 residents and more huskies than people. Locked in by ice nine months of the year, villagers have always hunted seal and narwhal to survive. Greenland is three times the size of Texas, and 80% of it is covered in ice. But it now loses more ice than it gains in snowfall every year. We saw evidence of the imbalance everywhere. Blue gashes across the ice.

Rivers of rushing melt water and the occasional thunderous crack of icebergs dropping into the sea we still had 300 miles to go and stopped twice to refuel along the way these barrels were left behind for us by the scientists who made the trip to Petermann Glacier three weeks earlier. This is the ultimate self-service gas station.

The middle of nowhere. This will keep us going for how much longer? Yeah, we can fly two and a half hours. Our pilots, native Greenlanders, kept a rifle nearby at each stop to protect us from polar bears. Have you seen polar bears out here? Yeah, a lot. So now it's ready. Now we're safe. Finally, we arrived at Petermann Glacier.

There's the camp. And spotted the ice camp below. Great to see you. So who did you upset to get put out here? I know, the gods, the gods. Keith Nichols is an expert in drilling in remote places. And in terms of remote, this would be really hard to beat. It feels like you're on another planet.

If you take a walk around here, you could be expecting Scotty to beam you up. It is extraordinary. Nichols and a team of scientists were drawn to this remote sliver of Greenland in part by these satellite images. In 2010, a chunk of ice four times the size of Manhattan broke off. Then, two years later, another large chunk came down. The glacier has receded by 20 miles in five years. Nichols and his team are trying to drill beneath it. This is a lot of work in difficult conditions. What do you hope to learn? What we're trying to learn is how the oceans are interacting with the ice, how they're melting it.

We're trying to predict how in the future that melting might change. To drill through the ice, they heated melt water from the glacier to make a hot water drill to pierce through the 300-foot thick ice. There has to be serious challenge to running equipment like this in this kind of weather. The biggest challenge is we've got water and it's very cold. So if we have water freezing in hoses, that can be devastating for the projects. This is the moment the coring machine struck the bottom of the sea floor. A half mile beneath the ice, they made history. It was the first time anyone has ever collected sediment from beneath the ice shelf in Greenland. The ocean beneath ice shelves is probably the least accessible part of the world ocean.

And just getting access to that is a triumph, frankly, as far as we're concerned. The ice shelf extends out from the glacier and floats on the ocean. They believe it acts like a dam, holding back the ice from sliding into the sea. If it goes away, sea levels go up. Is there a sense of urgency in the work that you're doing? So sea level rise is the big question that we're trying to get at. And Peter McGlassier, this experiment here, gives us an opportunity to get at those processes, to try and understand the basic physics as to how that can happen.

Our visit to the ice camp was cut short. Our pilots warned us something called ice fog was moving in and could strand us here for days. We hightailed it back to the helicopter, heading to another outpost of the expedition, what the scientists call Boulder Camp, set up on the edge of Petermann Glacier. Sean Marcotte and a team of geologists have been here for weeks, gathering samples from rocks. So this was probably deposited when the ice was maybe a few hundred to a few thousand feet thicker. And when it was deposited, you're probably talking about maybe five five six hundred feet of ice above us above where we are above where we are now

peterman would have been much larger and it would have been dropping these rocks all over the surface to the person at home who's looking at you guys just chipping away at rocks and going why should i care about this we know that if you warm the planet up the glaciers respond they melt the question is, at what rate? How fast is that going to happen? And where is it going to happen? And where are the most vulnerable spots of this ice sheet? To understand all of that, you have to understand how the ice sheet, what controls an ice sheet. We need to understand this glacier so that we can provide a better prediction for the larger ice sheet. That matters to us because of sea level.

If these glaciers can respond dynamically, then we should all be concerned because that can create dynamic changes in sea level and flood infrastructure. And we need to know that for planning for the future. We camped out next to the scientists. With 24 hours of light, we slept in these tents under the midnight sun. In the morning, we were shuttled out to meet the Odin, a Swedish icebreaker making its way around Petermann Glacier. The Odin supports the scientists on land and acts as a floating laboratory.

Named after a Norse god who relentlessly sought wisdom, it's home to more than 50 climate scientists from around the world with similar convictions. Their work is funded mostly by the Swedish government and the U.S.'s National Science Foundation. Larry Mayer is one of the geologists on the Odin. He's using sonar to map the ocean floor, creating the first detailed maps that show how Petermann Glacier slid into the sea. You can see it, like skid marks of a car at an accident scene. Yeah, the ice went here and the ice went there. And we can see it, and oh, it has stopped here.

How much of the world's oceans have been mapped with this kind of detail? Oh, probably on the order of 6% to 7%. Very, very little, yeah. You can only make the trip to Petermann Glacier a few weeks each summer when the ice melts enough to allow passage. You can see those blocks of ice drifting by. Expedition leader Alan Mix

is running the ship's coring operation, trying to grab sediment from the seafloor. There's actually a coring site right now that's under that block of ice, and we just can't get there. So we're trying to drift with the ice and just sort of sneak up on it gently. It's hard to sneak up on anything in an icebreaker. Yoden doesn't so much as sail as it does smash the ice like a 13,000-ton hammer.

Once in position, they throw something called a piston core, like a dart, at the bottom of the ocean. Oh, that doesn't sound good. After multiple attempts... Go to the next one, but we'll hit it with a gravity core. A core sample like this is collected. Inside the ship's lab, the multi-year process of investigating those cores begins. What's your best guess? How old is this?

So the base of this core probably is no more than 10,000 years. Ann Jennings is with the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. She says each core holds clues about Peterman Glacier's past. Well, we didn't really expect to find things living under the ice shelf, but we have. What have you found? This one we found is called Sibicidoides woolerstorfi. It has a big name for a little bug. Easy for you to say.

It looks like a little seashell. And it is a seashell, but it's a single-celled animal. That single-celled animal, like all living creatures, is made out of carbon, allowing scientists to determine when it lived. Which tells you what? The age of the sediments. So we can take then the depth scale here and convert it to age. And then we can say, when did the ice retreat?

How quickly did it retreat? Was there a lot of melt water coming out? You can get all that from what looks like mud. Yes. After a week in Greenland, we headed home. But the scientists kept working, taking advantage of the final days of the short Arctic summer. The 66 core samples they collected during their month at sea

will be studied by scientists around the world for decades. This is the largest core repository in the world. Peter Domenical is a paleoclimatologist at Columbia University. He says the cores collected in Greenland are like a black box of the Earth's inner workings. This one he collected just south of Greenland. So this is today's climate, and we've had about 10,000 years of relatively warm climate. And then we go 10,000 years in the past, boom, there's the last ice age. This is when Long Island was formed, when Cape Cod was formed.

You can just find this color, and this is filled with these rocks, what we called ice-rafted detritus, until this period, when, whoa, there's another warm phase, and then another cold phase, and then another warm phase, a short cold phase, a longer warm phase, and then, boom, another ice age. And so you've had cold, warm, cold, warm, cold, warm today. How do we know that the warming we're seeing now, how do we not know it's part of this warm, cold, warm, cold?

That's a great question. These transitions are gradual and kind of almost like a tide wave or something. And this transition, when you get to today, it goes boom, suddenly very warm. Domenicao says the cores pulled from Petermann Glacier will fill in a crucial piece of the climate change puzzle. How impressive was it that they got to Petermann Glacier? It's impressive. What's more impressive is that we haven't been there every year

and that we're not doing this every year. We should be doing this, we should be monitoring this whole system with much greater focus than we are now how quickly have we seen the changes in Greenland the changes that are happening right now as a result of human activities are remarkable and they're happening incredibly fast and they're not only happening fast but but it's accelerating. And it's important to really get our mind around what we're saying there. We're not just saying that climate in the Arctic is changing.

It's changing at an accelerating rate. So it basically means it's starting to melt, but it's melting at a faster and faster clip. So anyone who knows what it's like to fall off a cliff, that's what it's doing. Welcome to Play It, a new podcast network featuring radio and TV personalities talking business, sports, tech, entertainment, and more. Play it at play.it. 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 have ever seen. And as we reported in May, 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? It's everything. When the kids come here, this is home.

You got to do a better job. This is really gross. 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, 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. They're up at dawn, get ready for school, and sit down for breakfast. 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 be able 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? Did you think this is realistic? I'm very practical, and 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. When I saw her at first, I was like terrified. Actually terrified. 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.

You know, 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. OK, another one who can give me an example?

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?

I'm Bill Whitaker. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.