glect was there, and that he was getting
sick again.’”
“We would have loved to follow up
on our kids for years,” Bach said. “But
our focus was getting kids re-fed and
back at home. It’s sometimes an eight-
hour drive to get to one of our clients—
who all get at least one home visit from
a nutritionist. Kelsey was, like, ‘If he had
never been at S.H.C., he’d still be alive.’
I was, like, ‘O.K., Kelsey, as a social
worker, what would your advice be?’ And
she said, ‘Hire more social workers; do
longer follow-up care.’ And literally the
next month we hired another social
worker, and we increased our aftercare
from three to six months. I don’t like
her as a person, but she knows her trade.
She went to school for social work—
that must mean something.”
J
acqueline Kramlich, who left Serving
His Children shortly before Sharifu’s
death, told me that she had never un-
derstood why Nielsen blamed Bach: “You
know, there’s the Renée camp—‘Renée’s
a saint, and she’s never done a thing wrong
in her life’—and then there’s the Kelsey
camp: ‘Renée is completely evil, and she
deserves to rot in prison.’ ” In the follow-
ing year, the opposing factions in Jinja
exchanged claims and counterclaims
about Bach, and the line blurred between
the verifiable and the outlandish.
Not everyone was worried about the
same things. Kramlich told me, “What
keys up the nonmedical public is, she
was doing I.V.s. That’s the least of my
concerns. Renée was good at I.V.s! We
used to say in nursing school, you can
teach a monkey to put in an I.V. But she
was prescribing medication. She started
doing femoral taps and blood transfu-
sions—I saw her do both of those things.”
When I pressed Kramlich about wit-
nessing Bach perform femoral taps, she
conceded that it happened only once, and
added, “In fairness, it was being taught
to her at the time by an American M.D.”
She had also seen only one blood trans-
fusion: on a nine-month-old named Pa-
tricia, who came into S.H.C. with criti-
cally low hemoglobin. She needed an
emergency transfusion, so Bach procured
blood that matched Patricia’s type from
a hospital in Jinja. Kramlich says that she
walked in on Bach performing the trans-
fusion; Bach says that a nurse was with
her, and a doctor supervised them by
phone. The two women agree that Pa-
tricia had an allergic reaction to the trans-
fusion, and that Bach rushed her to a
hospital in Kampala. Five days later, when
the girl needed more blood, Bach offered
her own. (“I was praying that my blood
would be to her as the blood of Christ is
to me!” she wrote on her blog.) The trans-
fusion worked, and Patricia survived.
Kramlich said she didn’t realize that
the situation at S.H.C. required inter-
vention until after she quit. But, follow-
ing her resignation, she heard many dis-
turbing things “through the grapevine.”
The most alarming account, she said,
came from S.H.C.’s head nurse, who told
her that Bach had performed a thora-
cotomy on a child. This strains credu-
lity: a thoracotomy is a major surgery
that involves opening the chest cavity to
gain access to the internal organs. The
nurse, Constance Alonyo, filed an affi-
davit in Bach’s defense. “They say I told
Jackie that Renée has been doing wrong,”
she told me. “I went before the lawyer, I
said, ‘No, I did not say that!’”
In 2015, as Kramlich prepared to move
back to the United States, she felt that
it was her duty to do something about
Bach. “I had a few friends—including
Kelsey—and we grappled with: How
do we handle this?” she said. In Febru-ary, 2015, Kramlich met with the Jinja
police and filed a report.
Kramlich now lives in Spokane, with
her husband and four children they
adopted in Uganda. She told me that
the “cultlike” Christian milieu in Jinja
was “drastically disillusioning” to her
faith. “What you see over there is ‘I never
wanted to go to Africa, and then God
told me I had to—it’s his plan, not mine.’
The problem is, if you can’t make the
choice to do it, then you can’t make the
choice to stop doing it.” Kramlich is a
patient-care manager at Assured Home
Health, a facility for the elderly. She is
also a co-creator of the Instagram ac-
count Barbie Savior, which follows the
adventures of a Barbie doll engaged in
“voluntourism”: taking a selfie next to
a black baby on a hospital cot, squat-
ting over a pit latrine. The bio reads,
“Jesus. Adventure. Africa. Two worlds.
One love. Babies. Beauty. Not qualified.
Called. 20 years young. It’s not about
me ... but it kind of is.”O
n March 12, 2015, soon after Kram-
lich spoke with the police, Jinja’s
district health officer arrived unan-
nounced at S.H.C. and ordered Bach to
shut down immediately, because her op-
erating license was no longer valid. (This“Dinner’s ready, if you want to take a break from your personal space.”