American doctor who recovered from Ebola back in U.S., says he's "feeling well"

The crowd, gathered at the entrance to the hospital in Rwampara, Congo, was distraught. Family, friends, and teammates of Eli Munongo, a beloved local soccer player, had been told on this day in late May that they could not take him home to bury him. All because hospital officials suspected he had died of Ebola.

The crowd’s grief sharpened into anger. A group of young men stormed the compound. Soon, the large tents pitched in the hospital garden for Ebola patients were aflame.

The same day, anthropologist Julienne Anoko was preparing to board a flight to join the Ebola response team in eastern Congo organized by the World Health Organization (WHO). But she wasn’t coming to diagnose and treat the disease that hospital workers said probably killed Mr. Munongo. She was looking, instead, for a cure for the anger that surrounded it.

Why We Wrote This

The current Ebola outbreak in eastern Congo has elicited an enormous public health response. Alongside that, anthropologists and community workers are working to build trust between affected communities and outside responders.

“We can bring in hundreds of the best experts, thousands of brilliant doctors, but all of what we’re doing will fail if people don’t trust us,” Dr. Anoko says. “Everything else we do depends on winning that trust.”

Dr. Anoko joins a wider effort to assuage fear and skepticism in the communities at the heart of the Ebola outbreak in eastern Congo’s Ituri province. Since the disease was first identified there in late April, there have been more than 500 confirmed cases. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention  recently warned that if the disease is not quickly contained, it could become one of the largest outbreaks of Ebola in recorded history.

“Misinformation is almost as dangerous as the virus itself and spreads just as fast,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus last Friday. “Earning and keeping the trust of communities is at the heart of everything we do.”

Moses Sawasawa/AP

Congolese police provide security for Red Cross workers during a burial for an Ebola victim at the Rwampara Cemetery in Rwampara, Congo, May 23, 2026.

For more than a decade, Dr. Anoko has been among the leading proponents of a radical front-line response for Ebola: building trust between communities and those who come in to help them.

But trust can be vanishingly hard to come by in this part of Congo.

Ituri, the province where the current Ebola outbreak is centered, has spent more than two decades at war with itself. Fighting between the Congolese government and a rotating cast of insurgent groups has turned communities there against each other, displaced nearly a million people, and left the mineral-rich region around them impoverished.

Meanwhile, residents have become accustomed to a parade of wealthy outsiders – United Nations peacekeepers, sweet-talking politicians from the capital, big international nongovernmental organizations – passing through the region with their own, often inscrutable agendas.

In recent weeks, outsiders have begun pouring into Ituri again, this time to quell Ebola, which the WHO calls “a public health emergency of international concern.”

They might arrive with a crisis plan, but they also come “with significant resources in an area where the population lacks almost everything, and where the economy is devastated by war,” says Kennedy Wema, who studies social responses to Ebola outbreaks at the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg, Germany. “People don’t understand how so many resources can be mobilized just for one disease, when such resources have never been mobilized for their security.”

That confusion breeds suspicion and anger, he says, especially when local responders are paid less than those brought in from the outside, as his research showed was the case during Congo’s last major Ebola outbreak from 2018 to 2020.

This skepticism also helps fuel rumors that tear through communities fast: that people are dying in treatment centers because the doctors and nurses are poisoning them, for example.

And then there is the problem of the approach itself. Responders are often so frantic to stop the spread of the disease, Dr. Anoko says, that they can sometimes lose track of the fact that numbers on their spreadsheets – cases suspected and confirmed, deaths and recoveries – are people, too.

During the 2018-2020 outbreak, she tried to right this approach by putting herself in the place of the people at the center of the crisis – at times quite literally.

Moses Sawasawa/AP

Health workers collect meals for Ebola patients at the treatment center in Rwampara, Congo, May 29, 2026.

Once, she crawled into a body bag and allowed herself to be carried by a burial team in order to understand a complaint that the dead weren’t being handled gently.

And when communities stoned ambulances or burned treatment centers to the ground, Dr. Anoko tried to crawl inside their grief, too. She imagin…