THE NEWYORKER, APRIL 13, 2020 59forward without it,” she told me, ex-
plaining that the police had already bud-
geted their resources for other cases. A
spokesman for the Kampala police de-
nied the existence of any investigation
into Bach or Serving His Children.
Nielsen told me that she had never
witnessed Bach engaging in inappropri-
ate medical care: “I would hear her talk
about it, read the blog posts, all of that,
but, no, I wasn’t the one seeing her do
it.” She has no doubt, though, that what
she has heard is true. She believes that
Bach’s supporters will stop at nothing to
protect her, but vowed that she would
not be dissuaded from her mission. “If
my dad can yell, ‘You’re not shit,’ and I
can watch him pin my mom up against
the wall and live in fear for fourteen years
of my life,” Nielsen told me, “I can come
up against Renée Bach.”
A
t Nalufenya, five cots were jammed
into a small emergency room, with
three infants perched on each one; in the
hallway, some thirty people waited on
benches to have their children examined.
“And this is the morning!” Abner Tagoola,
the head of the hospital, said. “In the
evening, you will wonder if it’s a hospi-
tal or a marketplace.” Tagoola estimated
that, on average, two hundred people a
day come to the hospital, and ten per
cent are admitted. I asked what hap-
pened to the other ninety per cent. “Ex-
actly,” Tagoola, a tall, commanding man
wearing a purple dress shirt under a white
coat, said. “In America, there’s health in-
surance—there’s everything. Here, we
are overwhelmingly congested.” Even
malnourished children who are admit-
ted to Nalufenya are rarely able to stay
as long as they should, he said: “We sta-
bilize them, but they are still malnour-
ished, and then we take them back home.
The structure by government to help
those who are still malnourished does
not exist. That was the gap Renée was
trying to fill.”
Bach’s critics accuse her of luring
mothers from Nalufenya to her own fa-
cility. Tagoola, who has been a pediatri-
cian for twenty years, said that the idea
was ludicrous. “If a mother knows that
she is likely to get free food and she’s
going to get free medicine—what would
you do?” He shook his head. “Some of
these things are contextual. In America,
they can’t believe a baby can just die. Here,
they can die.” He clapped his hands hard
and fast. Every time a child died, it made
other parents warier of the hospital. Point-
ing at three babies on a cot, he said, “If
one dies, a mother—a real mother—why
would she stay? She says, ‘I have to go
look for where there is support.’”
According to a study published in
2017 in The American Journal for Clini-
cal Nutrition, fourteen per cent of chil-
dren treated for severe acute malnutri-
tion at Mulago Hospital—Uganda’s best
facility—died. The study notes that the
over-all mortality rate in Africa for chil-
dren with S.A.M. is between twenty
and twenty-five per cent. During the
years when Serving His Children func-
tioned as an in-patient facility, its rate
was eleven per cent.
“To be sincere, if you asked me to
work with Renée again, I would work
with her,” Tagoola said. “We still are un-
derfunded, so her role would be very rel-
evant.” Nalufenya receives support from
UNICEF, but, Tagoola said, “if we had
double, it would not be enough.” He
sighed. “It was out of desperation—from
my position, ‘desperation’ is the key
word—to help these babies that she did
these things. It’s not that she was over-
enthusiastic to do miracles.”
After the suit was filed, the Uganda
Medical and Dental Practitioners Coun-
cil conducted an independent investiga-
tion, based on interviews with hospital
administrators, leaders in the districts
where the organization operated, andS.H.C. staff. “The team is unable to sup-
port allegations that children died in
large numbers due to the services of
S.H.C.,” the report states. “The team did
not find evidence that Ms. Renée Bach,
Director of S.H.C., was treating chil-
dren. The community and the health
workers at Kigandalo HC IV were ap-
preciative of her work.”
Gideon Wamasebu, the district health
officer of Manafwa, worked with Bach
in 2012 to establish a feeding programat a government health center called
Bugobero. “The thing that is wrong is
to say that Renée was seeing patients,”
he told me. “It is me—a doctor—who
was in charge. But she had the money.
She said, ‘Doctor, give me the right peo-
ple to work with,’ and all I gave her were
qualified doctors working at govern-
ment facilities.” He was particularly
struck, he said, by a claim in the court
case: Charles Olweny, a driver for
S.H.C., said that he had ferried the bod-
ies of between seven and ten dead chil-
dren home every week. “There are not
enough children in the district for that
many killings,” Wamasebu said. “And,
if you are in a community which has
some leadership, would they just be look-
ing away? It is insulting!”
Bach’s accusers say that the Ugandans
who defend S.H.C. are covering up their
own culpability. “If Renée goes down,
you all go down,” one of them told me.
Wamasebu pointed out that, when he
was working with Bach and sending chil-
dren to her program, Bugobero was the
top-rated health center of its kind in
Uganda. “So the facility that is No. 1 is
sending patients to be killed at that rate?
It doesn’t make sense.”O
ne morning, I went to the Jinja po-
lice station to look at the initial re-
port that Jacqueline Kramlich had filed
against S.H.C., and to ask if the guard-
ians of any children had filed reports of
their own. I was told to wait on a wooden
bench for an officer named Hudson. In
a central courtyard, a ritual called the
“parade of suspects” was taking place: a
dozen young men were pulled out of a
cell and asked to stand in front of their
accusers, while Hudson, a bald man in
casual clothes, made marks on a clip-
board. After a while, he summoned me
into his office, where a poster on the wall
read “Gossip ends at a wise man’s ears.”
When I brought up Renée Bach, he
asked me several times to repeat the name
and seemed to have no idea whom I was
referring to. If I wanted to see a copy of
the report, he said, I had to pay a fee at
the local bank and bring back a receipt.
I didn’t have time to go to the bank;
I had another meeting planned, with a
man named Semei Jolley Kyebakola—a
former gardener for S.H.C., who filed
an affidavit against the group and served
as the translator when the dead children’s