guardians filed their court documents.
He’d also built a sideline taking journal-
ists to the villages outside Jinja to meet
these women, along with several others
who stepped forward after they heard
about the case.
I waited for Kyebakola at a crowded
restaurant on the edge of town, known
for its goat stew. I texted him that it
would be easy to find me because I was
the only mzungu—white person—in the
place. The first thing he said when he
walked in was “You are the one who has
been to the police station?” Hudson had
called to let him know.
Kyebakola told me that he had seen
Bach practice medicine, and that the
court case proved it. When I asked what
Ugandan doctors and nurses had done
wrong in treating Twalali Kifabi, he
changed tack, complaining that he and
Charles Olweny were fired without
cause. “We just ask for a salary incre-
ment, but instead you terminate us with-
out a reason!” he said. “If you are a Chris-
tian, how can you do that?” He then
told me that Bach had tried to hire
them back after a time. “She begged us.
I say to Renée, ‘What you are doing is
like a man using a condom: after throw-
ing it away, again you go back and put
on the condom and use it.’”
I felt uncomfortable getting in a car
with Kyebakola, knowing that the po-
lice had reported to him on my activi-
ties. When I told him that I would not
go with him to the villages, he said an-
grily that I had come only to protect my
fellow-mzungu. “And you call yourself a
Christian!” he yelled. (I told him several
times: I call myself a Jew.) “The prob-
lem is, whites, you claim you are Chris-
tian, but you are not. How do you ex-
pect me to live? You are telling me to
go steal! As a Christian, you should pay.
There is no money which is enough—
but try! If you see Renée, tell her: it is
better to settle out of court.” A few min-
utes after I parted ways with Kyebakola,
Hudson sent a message letting me know
that he would not be supplying a copy
of the police report.
From time to time after that, Kyeba-
kola sent me conspiracy-theory articles
and strange video clips via WhatsApp.
One claimed that the scientist Robert
Gallo had admitted, “We were forced to
create the HIV virus as a secret weapon
to wipe out the African race.” Another,
about a man who implanted his “infected
blood” in Cadbury products, was accom-
panied by obviously doctored photo-
graphs of people whose lips had suppos-
edly grown to enormous size after they
ingested the candy. Then, in February, I
opened a video from Kyebakola and re-
alized after a few seconds that it was
grainy, violent child pornography: a whiteman hurting a sobbing white five- or
six-year-old, as she screamed for mercy.
After I contacted the police and the
National Center for Missing and Ex-
ploited Children, I let Kelsey Nielsen
know that Kyebakola—whose number
she’d given me—had sent me child por-
nography. “Olivia and Wendy both said
that it is common when there is a con-
cerning/disturbing video, people here
will share it more as a concern over what
is happening,” Nielsen replied. “It might
have been good to ask him for context
and to know why he’s sending it.” After
a bit of back-and-forth, Nielsen agreed
that there was no condonable explana-
tion. “I apologize for any of my initial
confusion,” she said. “I sometimes let
Olivia and Wendy override my own re-
action when it’s ‘culture.’”L
ife has made Constance Alonyo re-
silient. She raised fifteen children:
three of her own, and twelve from her
brothers, who died in the insurgency
that racked northern Uganda after 1986.
“It is a lot of children,” she said, laugh-
ing. “I am carrying the Cross!” But life
was difficult even before she became a
mother. When Alonyo was a teen-ager,
she was abducted from her school with
twenty-six of her classmates by Lord’s
Resistance Army soldiers, who beat the
girls and dragged them into the forest.
“They walk us two miles, lock us in a
house, light it on fire. I said, ‘Why must
we die today?’ ” Alonyo persuaded her
classmates to form a human battering
ram, hurling themselves against a wall
until it collapsed and they were able to
escape. Her father’s house was also
burned, and his cows were taken. “After
my father lost all his riches, he took
Jesus as his Lord and Saviour,” Alonyo
said, and she followed suit. “Me, I love
Jesus Christ!” she told me, smiling ju-
bilantly. “Even as I am treating the chil-
dren, I am singing to the Lord. I do not
want to be the Devil’s toolbox.”
All of Alonyo’s colleagues at the Ki-
gandalo Health Center’s malnutrition
ward—a squat, three-room building
with giraffes and monkeys painted on
its walls—are born-again Christians, as
Serving His Children requires. But some
of their patients are Muslim; a woman
in a black abaya sat with an emaciated
baby on her lap, watching as Alonyo
tried to engage another infant with a