58 THENEWYORKER, APRIL 13, 2020
was not technically the case; it had ex-
pired ten weeks before, but there was a
three-month grace period for renewal.)
“He told us, ‘Get all these kids out of
here by five,’ ” Bach recalled. “It was one
o’clock, and we had eighteen kids, and
most of them were new admissions! We
were, like, ‘What? Where are we sup-
posed to send them?’ He was, like, ‘I
don’t care.’”
Constance Alonyo described a cha-
otic scene: “Everybody was crying. The
moms were crying; the workers were
crying. I said, ‘What is happening?’” The
staff scrambled to find placements for
the children. Bach said, “A couple of
them could be discharged, and a lot of
them we drove to this hospital that had
a nutrition program, about three hours
east of us. But it was a disaster. I mean,
the D.H.O. looked me in the face and
said, ‘Yes, some of these patients will
die, but it’s not your responsibility.’ We
had this one infant who was like eight
hundred grams, super tiny. We had kids
on oxygen who had to be transported
on oxygen. And then, of course, within
the next three days eight of those kids
did die. But he’s our authority—we
couldn’t say no.” (The officer did not re-
spond to requests for comment.)
Though Bach denies any wrongdo-
ing, she followed the advice of her “church
elders”—several male missionaries in
their late twenties who saw themselves
as leaders of the Jinja Christian commu-
nity—and wrote an open letter acknowl-
edging the accusations. “Over the years
I have unfortunately been put in situa-
tions where I felt it necessary to act out-
side my qualifications,” she wrote. “I can
see and do not deny my past mistakes
as a leader.” S.H.C. remained closed for
two years. “The organization as a whole
was, like, ‘Maybe this is as good a time
as any to take a pause,’ ” Bach said.
Eventually, S.H.C. reopened in part-
nership with the government, at Kigan-
dalo Health Center IV, with Bach serv-
ing in an administrative post. But, in the
meantime, mothers kept coming to the
house in Masese, so they were shuttledto Nalufenya children’s hospital, where
Bach had arranged to provide food and
to sponsor medication. “I would wake
up so many mornings and a mom who
we’d sent to the hospital two days ago
would be sitting on my front step, with
her baby’s dead body, because she didn’t
have any way to get home,” Bach said.
“I wanted to put every one of those moms
in my car and drive them over to Kelsey’s
house and be, like, ‘This is on you.’”
Nielsen was having her own prob-
lems. In 2014, she says, she was sexually
assaulted. “My drinking got way worse.
My mental health was not O.K.,” she
told me in Philadelphia. Nielsen parted
ways with Abide, the organization she’d
started. “Uganda was my identity. Abide
was my identity,” she said. “I needed to
come home and experience just a really
sad, heartbreaking separation.” Back in
the U.S., she spent a week in a mental
hospital. “I did it three times before I
found the medication that worked,” she
added. During one manic episode, Niel-
sen went online and started posting about
Bach. “If you had a textbook of what
mania looks like, that’s what it was,” Niel-
sen said. “Some of—a lot of—it was true,
but it was not dealt with properly.”
Since then, Nielsen has continued
posting on Facebook about S.H.C. “You
should *pray* about renaming your or-
ganization KILLING HIS CHIL-
DREN,” she wrote on the organization’s
page in 2016. “Must be nice to experi-
ment on children medically with the help
of YouTube videos and unending praise
from your literal unintelligent and igno-
rant donor base. Please get out of Uganda
willingly before I continue pursuing legal
means to have your founder and your
board thrown in AMERICAN prison.”
Though Nielsen and No White Sav-
iors have raised money for Primah Kwa-
gala’s case against Bach, Nielsen feels
that it is not enough. “Primah’s given us
some tricky advice—like not going to
the police with this,” she said. (Kwagala
denies saying this.) “But we met with
the Central Police in Kampala, the ho-
micide unit, and actually they’ve now
started investigating. There are multiple
families that Renée doesn’t even know
we’ve been in touch with, that have been
interviewed by the police.” Nielsen added
that her group gave the police two thou-
sand dollars. “The way that money works
is, they never would’ve been able to go“Things are going great with Prince Charming. The problem
is his parents, King Cruel and Queen Haughty.”••