50 THENEWYORKER, APRIL 13, 2020

“My desire to go to Uganda was to help people and to serve,” Bach said. Last summer,

I

n the summer of 2013, Ziria Namu-
tamba heard that there was a mis-
sionary health facility a few hours
from her village, in southeastern Uganda,
where a white doctor was treating chil-
dren. She decided to go there with her
grandson Twalali Kifabi, who was unwell.
At three, he weighed as much as an av-
erage four-month-old. His head looked
massive above his emaciated limbs; his
abdomen and feet were swollen like water
balloons. All over his tiny body, patches
of darkened skin were peeling off. At a
rural clinic six months earlier, he had
been diagnosed as having malnutrition,
but the family couldn’t afford the foods
that were recommended. Twalali was his
mother’s sixth child, and she was preg-
nant again—too far along to accompany
him to the missionary facility, which was
called Serving His Children.
“We were received by a white woman,
later known to me as ‘aunt Renee,’” N a-
mutamba attested in an affidavit, which
she signed with her thumbprint, in 2019.
At Serving His Children, Namutamba
“saw the same woman inject something
on the late Twalali’s head, she connected
tubes and wires from baby Twalali to a
machine.” Days later, while Namutamba
was doing laundry in the clinic’s court-
yard, she overheard another woman say-
ing, “What a pity her child has died.”
Soon, the person called Aunt Renée
“came downstairs holding Twalali’s life-
less body, wrapped in white clothes.”
Twalali was one of more than a hun-
dred babies who died at Serving His
Children between 2010 and 2015. The
facility began not as a registered health
clinic but as the home of Renée Bach—
who was not a doctor but a home-
schooled missionary, and who had ar-
rived in Uganda at the age of nineteen
and started an N.G.O. with money raised
through her church in Bedford, Vir-
ginia. She’d felt called to Africa to help
the needy, and she believed that it was
Jesus’ will for her to treat malnourished
children. Bach told their stories on a
blog that she started. “I hooked the baby
up to oxygen and got to work,” she wrote
in 2011. “I took her temperature, started
an IV, checked her blood sugar, tested
for malaria, and looked at her HB count.”
In January, 2019, that blog post was
submitted as evidence in a lawsuit filed
against Bach and Serving His Children
in Ugandan civil court. The suit, led by