54 THENEWYORKER, APRIL 13, 2020buy a school notebook and write in it—
that’s what everyone does.’ There were
a lot of things like that, where no one
had an answer. But, in the beginning,
we were just trying to keep our heads
above water.”
Bach had been raised to believe that
Christians have a responsibility to help
the needy, and that with tenacity and
research ordinary people can achieve
most things they set their minds to. Her
mother had taught her and her four sib-
lings at the kitchen table, using curric-
ula from a Christian homeschooling
service. A form that Serving His Chil-
dren provided to volunteers contained
a motto: “You don’t have to be a licensed
teacher to teach, or be in the medical
field to put on Band Aids.”O
n a hot day this January, Twalali Ki-
fabi’s mother sat in a courtroom in
Jinja, with a baby strapped to her back.
Next to her was Twalali’s grandmother
Ziria Namutamba, who had taken him toServing His Children and returned with
his corpse. The other plaintiff against
Bach, Annet Kakai, rested her head on
the back of a wooden bench in front of
her. She had travelled for hours on un-
paved roads to get to this hearing, and
her dress looked tight and uncomfortable.
Television crews from Ireland and
the Netherlands had cameras trained
on the women. There was also a corre-
spondent from German public radio,
along with two journalists from Aus-
tralia and a podcaster from Florida. The
hearing was perfunctory: the magistrate
told attorneys from both sides that they
had to attempt mediation before the
court would intervene.
After it was over, Kakai sat beneath
a tree in front of the courthouse, frus-
trated. “I’m looking for compensation—
if I didn’t want that, I would not have
come and brought my case to court,”
she said. “As far as I can tell, Renée is
not a doctor, and she gave my child the
wrong medicine, and then the child be-came worse. If she was not a doctor, why
did she put a health facility and bring
our kids there?”
Namutamba said that even the chair-
man of her village thought that Bach
was a doctor. “Then the child died, and
I wasn’t told what killed him,” she said.
She grew upset speaking about the con-
sequences within her community. “The
village scorns me for not taking care of
the child right, and the mother of the
child has questioned my judgment,” she
said, motioning toward her daughter.
“Now I want Renée to face justice, so
another mother doesn’t end up in a sit-
uation where her child has died and she
doesn’t know why. Renée came to Uganda
and presented herself as a medical per-
son, and so she should compensate me.”
Primah Kwagala, the attorney who
founded the Women’s Probono Initia-
tive, explained that the lawsuit is based
on charges of human-rights violations
and of discrimination. “Treating Ugan-
dan children without proper medical
training and certification is a violation of
their right to equality and freedom from
discrimination on the ground of race and
social status, contrary to Article 23 of the
Constitution,” she said. She suggested
that S.H.C.’s staff did not believe poor
people merited equal treatment: “Maybe
you assume, because they’ve paid you
nothing, they are entitled to nothing. We
say that is discrimination.”
When I asked Kwagala why she had
selected these two families’ cases for her
lawsuit, she replied, “Because they had a
bit of evidence. Everyone else is just say-
ing, ‘That happened to me,’ but they
don’t have anything to show for it.”
The evidence, though, is not clear-
cut. According to the court filings on
Twalali, the staff at S.H.C. made every
effort to save him. I asked two inde-
pendent doctors to review his medical
records: a clinical instructor at Harvard
Medical School with expertise in global
health, and a Kenyan researcher who
has studied malnutrition for more than
a decade. Both noted that Twalali was
extremely sick when he was admitted,
on July 30, 2033. He had a fluid-filled
abdomen and swollen lower limbs, typ-
ical of children with prolonged protein
deprivation, and a cracked mouth in-
dicating a severe vitamin deficiency. He
had malaria, a respiratory infection,
anemia, and dehydration from diarrhea.Bach founded her center in 2009 and soon was feeding a thousand children a week.COURTESY MARSHALL FOSTER