When we think of evangelicalism run amok, lately the first thing that comes to mind has been the religious right’s obstinate support for Trump. But there may be a situation playing out in Africa that may be even worse than that. An American missionary in Uganda is under fire for practicing medicine without a license in Uganda—causing hundreds of kids there to either die or suffer permanent mental and physical scars. What is more, it appears she didn’t tell her American donors that Ugandan officials had ordered her shut down due to her incompetence. There’s a name for that—fraud.
Those of you on Twitter may have seen the hashtag “#ReneeBach” trending heavily lately. Well, there’s a real person behind that hashtag. Renee Bach is the founder of Serving His Children, an NGO that claims to be fighting child malnutrition in Uganda. But since at least 2014, she’s faced complaints that she has been doing more harm than good.
Last year, Kelsey Nielsen, co-founder of No White Saviors, an NGO that wants foreign missionaries to be more sensitive to the needs of Africans, recalled that in 2014, a boy visited the NGO she ran at the time shortly after being treated at Serving His Children. When that boy died of a heart attack, Nielsen discovered Bach hadn’t bothered to follow up with the boy’s family—something that anyone with experience in child welfare ought to know.
Nielsen later discovered problems more serious than that. Apparently Bach was actively practicing medicine on kids despite having no medical training, let alone a license of any kind. She was also actively luring patients from licensed hospitals to her unlicensed operation. Eventually, Ugandan authorities ordered Serving His Children shut down in 2015.
But it was still operating in 2017, when two Ugandan moms, Gimbo Brenda and Kakai Annet, took their sons there. Soon after Brenda’s son died, she and Annet discovered that Bach not only had no medical training despite billing Serving His Children as a “medical facility,” but that it had been ordered shut down two years earlier. Brenda and Annet sued Bach and Serving His Children in a Ugandan court in January, but Bach has yet to respond. Read the complaint here.
For the past few weeks, No White Saviors has been actively working to turn the hot lights on Bach, in hopes that a lawyer in Virginia can take up the case. Click over to my piece at RDTDaily to see pictures of Bach’s victims and hear audio of Bach admitting to taking part in the medical care there.
But while digging into this for my RDTDaily piece, I discovered that at least part of Bach’s potential misdeeds may have taken place on this side of the Atlantic. How’s that? Well, in 2018, WSLS-TV in Roanoke ran a profile of Bach, who grew up in nearby Bedford. Watch here.
At the time, Bach was briefly in the States to raise money. Now, recall—she’d been ordered to stop treating children all the way in 2015. If Bach was actively raising money despite knowing she was under orders to shut down, she was defrauding her donors. Hopefully a federal or state prosecutor has the guts to take a look at this. After all, this is far, far too egregious to ignore.
Bach has more or less gone off the grid in the wake of the renewed scrutiny into her operation. WSET-TV in Lynchburg tried to interview her, but no one answered the door at her home in Bedford. She has deleted her entire social media presence as well; the Facebook, Twitter and Instagram links on Serving His Children’s Website no longer work.
But if there is any justice, Bach won’t be able to avoid her reckoning for long. This woman needs to give a full accounting for this travesty under oath—either in the United States, Uganda or both.