Lilah Hegnauer completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Portland, a small Catholic college in Portland, Oregon. She taught English in the Kiganda Highway Secondary School in Uganda and worked in the local medical clinic during the summer of 2003, living with the family of a Ugandan priest, Father Achilles Kiwanuka. She was given several classes of students, a caning stick, and was told to "teach anything." In the clinic she was soon helping to deliver babies and tending to people with AIDS. Lilah Hegnauer is now a graduate creative writing student at Ohio State University in Columbus.