In the summer of 2013, Ziria Namutamba heard that there was a missionary health facility a few hours from her village, in southeastern Uganda, where a white doctor was treating children. She decided to go there with her grandson Twalali Kifabi, who was unwell. At three, he weighed as much as an average four-month-old. His head looked massive above his emaciated limbs; his abdomen and feet were swollen like water balloons. All over his tiny body, patches of darkened skin were peeling off. At a rural clinic six months earlier, he had been diagnosed as having malnutrition, but the family couldn’t afford the foods that were recommended. Twalali was his mother’s sixth child, and she was pregnant again—too far along to accompany him to the missionary facility, which was called Serving His Children.

“We were received by a white woman, later known to me as ‘aunt Renee,’ ” Namutamba attested in an affidavit, which she signed with her thumbprint, in 2019. At Serving His Children, Namutamba “saw the same woman inject something on the late Twalali’s head, she connected tubes and wires from baby Twalali to a machine.” Days later, while Namutamba was doing laundry in the clinic’s courtyard, she overheard another woman saying, “What a pity her child has died.” Soon, the person called Aunt Renée “came downstairs holding Twalali’s lifeless body, wrapped in white clothes.”

Twalali was one of more than a hundred babies who died at Serving His Children between 2010 and 2015. The facility began not as a registered health clinic but as the home of Renée Bach—who was not a doctor but a homeschooled missionary, and who had arrived in Uganda at the age of nineteen and started an N.G.O. with money raised through her church in Bedford, Virginia. She’d felt called to Africa to help the needy, and she believed that it was Jesus’ will for her to treat malnourished children. Bach told their stories on a blog that she started. “I hooked the baby up to oxygen and got to work,” she wrote in 2011. “I took her temperature, started an IV, checked her blood sugar, tested for malaria, and looked at her HB count.”

In January, 2019, that blog post was submitted as evidence in a lawsuit filed against Bach and Serving His Children in Ugandan civil court. The suit, led by a newly founded legal nonprofit called the Women’s Probono Initiative, lists the mothers of Twalali and another baby as plaintiffs, and includes affidavits from former employees of S.H.C. A gardener who worked there for three years asserts that Bach posed as a doctor: “She dressed in a clinical coat, often had a stethoscope around her neck, and on a daily basis I would see her medicating children.” An American nurse who volunteered at S.H.C. states that Bach “felt God would tell her what to do for a child.” A Ugandan driver says that, for eight years, “on average I would drive at least seven to ten dead bodies of children back to their villages each week.”

The story became an international sensation. “How could a young American with no medical training even contemplate caring for critically ill children in a foreign country?” NPR asked last August. The Guardian pointed to a “growing unease about the behavior of so-called ‘white saviors’ in Africa.” A headline in the Atlanta Black Star charged Bach with “ ‘Playing Doctor’ for Years in Uganda.” The local news in Virginia reported that Bach was accused of actions “leading to the deaths of hundreds of children.”

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Bach made only one televised appearance in response, on Fox News. Wearing a puffy cream-colored blouse, with her blond hair half up, she was pictured on a split screen with her attorney David Gibbs, who previously led the effort to keep Terri Schiavo on life support, and now runs the National Center for Life and Liberty, a “legal ministry” that advocates for Christian causes. Over the years, Bach said, she had assisted Ugandan doctors and nurses employed by her organization in “emergency settings and in crisis situations,” but had never practiced medicine or “represented myself as a medical professional.” Bach sounded nervous, but she firmly denied the “tough allegation” against her. She had used the first person on her blog as an act of creative license, because a simple narrative appealed to donors; in fact, she’d had a Ugandan medical team by her side at all times. “I was a young American woman boarding a plane to Africa,” she said—inexperienced and idealistic, working on an intractable problem. “My desire to go to Uganda was to help people and to serve.”

This winter, Bach stood on Main Street in Bedford, Virginia, watching the Christmas parade with her parents and her two daughters, one-year-old Zuriah and ten-year-old Selah. The sidewalks were crowded with people wearing jeans and Carhartt work clothes, some sitting on folding chairs with coolers they’d packed for the occasion. Garlands and wreaths hung from the street lights, in front of two-story brick storefronts climbing a hill.

Selah, whom Bach adopted after she was brought into Serving His Children as a malnourished infant, had a scarf wrapped around her neck and wore her hair in long, neat braids. She waved at a neighbor, who was inching up the parade path behind the wheel of a vintage fire truck. “I know him!” she said, radiant with excitement. He smiled and threw her a handful of candy canes.

The elementary-school band marched by, playing a clamorous carol, followed by a Mrs. Claus on a giant tractor. The next parade participants were on foot: the Sons of Confederate Veterans, wearing Civil War uniforms and carrying Confederate flags. “It’s pretty conservative for me here, and it’s not very diverse,” Bach said quietly. She had not intended to move back to Bedford, but she’d left Uganda in a rush last summer; after the accusations against her spread, she’d started receiving death threats.

Bedford is a town of sixty-five hundred, but it feels even smaller. “It’s still a farming community, though that’s not the primary occupation of most people anymore,” Bach’s mother, Lauri, said. Lauri and her husband, Marcus, a trim man with a gray beard, ran an equine-therapy program out of their barn while their children were growing up. Neither of them had ever been outside the United States when Renée told them she was moving to Africa, but they weren’t worried. “We raised our children to be world-changers and to be risktakers,” Lauri, who has been the U.S. director of Serving His Children since 2013, said. “I felt like, if she’s doing what God calls her to do, she’d be safer walking alone in a village in Uganda than driving to the Bedford Walmart.”

As we talked, a float at the top of the hill started slipping backward; the transmission was giving out. A dozen men, including Marcus Bach, raced up and pushed it onto the flat road ahead. “It’s just what you do—you go help people,” Lauri said. “People should be driven to help others. And, in my opinion, they shouldn’t be judged for who they try to help.”

Before Renée Bach went to Uganda, her aspirations were conventional. “I wanted to get married and have five kids,” she told me at her parents’ house, as she tried to distract Zuriah with a miniature Santa so that she wouldn’t pull ornaments off the tree. “I was a super plain-Jane, straight-up white girl.” But, not long after she got her high-school diploma, members of her church told her that an orphanage in Jinja, Uganda, needed volunteers. A town of eighty thousand on the northern edge of Lake Victoria, Jinja is a bustling place, where people sell bananas and backpacks from stalls along red-dirt roads, and hired motorcycles weave around crammed minibuses decorated with pictures of Rambo and Bob Marley. Bach arrived in 2007, joining a large missionary community. “I felt very at home and at peace there,” she said. She loved being immersed in a foreign culture and absorbed in her work.