Among the most momentous: On a Sunday morning in October 2011, a couple from a village some distance away showed up at Bach’s center carrying a small bundle.
“When I pulled the covering back my eyes widened,” Bach wrote in the blog. “For under the blanket lay a small, but very, very swollen, pale baby girl. Her breaths were frighteningly slow. … The baby’s name is Patricia. She is 9 months old.”
Bach went on to write that Patricia had fallen sick three weeks earlier. But her parents had been unable to find anyone closer to home who could cure her.
Then, wrote Bach, “One of their relatives told them about a ‘hospital’ … with a ‘White Doctor.’ ”
Except Bach was not a doctor. She was a 20-year-old high school graduate with no medical training. And not only was her center not a hospital — at the time it didn’t employ a single doctor.
Yet from 2010 through 2015, Bach says, she took in 940 severely malnourished children. And 105 of them died.
Now Bach is being sued in Ugandan civil court.
“Something that I was supposed to do”
How could a young American with no medical training even contemplate caring for critically ill children in a foreign country? To understand, it helps to know that the place where Bach set up her operation — the city of Jinja — had already become a hub of American volunteerism by the time she arrived.
A sprawling city of tens of thousands of people on the shores of Lake Victoria, Jinja is surrounded by rural villages of considerable poverty. U.S. missionaries had set up a host of charities there. And soon American teens raised in mostly evangelical churches were streaming in to volunteer at them.
Bach was one of these teens. On her first trip, in 2007, she worked at a missionary-run orphanage — staying on for nine months.
Once back home in Virginia, Bach — now 19 years old — came to a life-changing conclusion: She should move to Jinja full time and set up her own charity.