The second of three articles on the 4 June 2026 Teach to Reach launch event, this one explores health worker responses to the Bundibugyo virus disease outbreak and asks the question an epidemiologist cannot dodge: what is a roomful of self-selected stories actually good for, and why might it matters.
A suspected Ebola patient walked into a private clinic in Uganda, and the staff backed away.
They had no training for this and no protective equipment, so they left the patient alone until someone could call the incident command team to come and take over.
John Kamulegeya, the Ugandan epidemiologist who told this story, named the cause without softening it.
“There is fear in every health worker about Ebola and the possibility of contracting the disease. So everyone almost left the patient there.”
Hold that scene, because it is the one a surveillance system cannot record.
The case will appear in the data as a number, eventually, once the incident team arrives and logs it.
What is unlikely to appear is the minutes when a frightened, untrained staff stood at a distance from a human being because no one had equipped them to do otherwise.
That gap, between what the count captures and what actually happened in the room, is the subject of this article.
Teach to Reach, run by The Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF), is the largest peer learning event in global health, drawing more than 24,000 health and humanitarian workers from over 70 countries since 2021.
Its whole purpose is to put the experience of frontline workers at the centre instead of asking them to sit and receive a presentation, and it is built to be the opposite of extractive: across each cycle the community shares between 1,500 and 3,000 first-hand experiences, which TGLF curates and gives back to the community as shared learning.
The first article in this series described the whole launch event.
This one stays with its Bundibugyo virus disease dialogue, because it is the part an epidemiologist is most tempted to dismiss, and the part that most repays a second look.
The objection, in its strongest form
Here is the case for the prosecution, stated fairly.
A handful of people chose to speak.
They selected themselves, no one sampled them.
No one checked their accounts against case records.
Some were not even in the affected districts.
Elizabeth Ezeorah was in Nigeria, where there are no cases.
Gabriel Omony was in Kampala, working on something else.
Hillary Okello was describing an outbreak from years ago in another town.
What can a national Ebola response take from a few unverified stories told by whoever managed to keep a microphone working in the rain?
TGLF makes the case for the prosecution itself, on a slide the whole audience saw.
Contributors chose to take part and are not a representative sample.
Accounts are self-reported and were not checked against outside records.
A single account cannot prove a general rule.
Translation across languages can shift meaning.
Where experience and routine data disagree, the report cannot say which is right.
The slide ends with the only honest conclusion: “These accounts show what to test and fund, not what to assume. They open a path that data must then confirm.”
So the question was never whether these stories are proof.
Nobody pretended they were.
The question is what they are for, and the workers themselves answer it.
Mechanism is the thing the number cannot hold
A case count answers how many, where, and how fast.
It is the right tool for those questions, and a story is no substitute for it.
But an outbreak response is not only a problem of counting.
It is a problem of what people do when they are afraid, and fear leaves no trace in a line list.
Watch where Kamulegeya put the difficulty.
Not in the laboratory, not in the supply chain, but at the exact seam where a frightened private clinic meets a patient it cannot handle.
When TGLF’s Reda Sadki asked him for the words he uses to steady such a colleague, he handed the room a tool another worker can pick up tomorrow.
“It is okay to take care of this patient, but you need to take care of yourself, observe the infection prevention and control, and I call the technical people to take care of the situation.”
This sentence lives in the practice of someone who has said it and watched it work.
Bwango Benjamin Mukaapa carried the room to the place where the virus actually moves.
He works in Fort Portal, a short drive from Bundibugyo.
“From Fort Portal to Bundibugyo, they are just a few kilometres. We use the markets with those people from Bundibugyo. They normally come gather for prayers.”
A national holiday had been suspended.
And as he spoke, the emergency was unfolding in real time around him.
“I am talking now, the president of the country is addressing the nation over the same issue of Ebola. So everyone is like, the president may close the schools, they may close worship centres. We are waiting for the outcome.”
Then the rain took his connection and he was gone mid-sentence.
The voice nearest the outbreak was the one the bandwidth could not hold.
Before he dropped, Mukaapa mapped a terrain no guideline charts: the contest for belief itself.
“In Africa, everyone is a doctor on his own,” he said. “One says, for me, I can just take these plants. So it is two-way, science with culture. So people are fighting it in that way.”
A contact tracer needs to know about that market day, that prayer gathering, and that two-way fight between science and custom before the counting can even begin, and only someone living it can supply it.
This is the social weather of an outbreak, and it is difficult to discern from a dashboard.
The most authoritative voice in the room had no official role
We have written before about the second microphone, the structural space that lets a worker without rank or title be heard when the first microphone belongs to people with slide decks and credentials.
The Bundibugyo dialogue was the second microphone operating in an emergency, and the proof is whose voice carried the most weight.
It was not a specialist on a panel.
It was Hillary Okello, from Lira City Council, a man who was not part of this response at all and who had fought Ebola in Gulu years before.
Asked for one lesson, Okello delivered a concept of operations a technical working group would be glad to own.
He started where Kamulegeya started, with fear.
“It takes all the courage for somebody to work on Ebola, which is not very easy. Many people are overwhelmed with fear. So override the fear, take full control and observe the SOPs.”
On the engine of containment: “Map all those lines, reach them, those who have contact, follow them to the dot. Break the cycle of transmission.”
On the cultural fault line that has broken responses before, he did not flinch. “Once somebody has died of Ebola, let the burial team handle it, not you the family member. I remember the other one in Gulu, what made it spread most was at the burial site.”
Then he spoke directly to people he had never met across the border, and his voice lifted out of procedure into something closer to a hand on a shoulder.
“My brothers and sisters in Bundibugyo, this one can be done. We have not fought Ebola only once. We have fought it many times and defeated it. So you can still do it. Just have that confidence and courage.”
Now set Okello beside the climate and health insights report TGLF published the same day, and the dismissal starts to wobble.
Working entirely alone, inside one outbreak, he reached the same conclusions the report drew from a hundred accounts across nineteen countries: trust governs whether people engage, local actors move first, frontline workers carry hidden risk.
When a single practitioner’s hard-won lessons converge with a pattern documented across a continent, you are no longer looking at a random anecdote.
You are looking at a hypothesis with two independent sources, which is precisely the signal that tells a planner where to point the verified data next.
That climate impacts on health are treated by global health in a ‘silo’ adjacent to the ‘silo’ for epidemic outbreaks matters less when the protagonists are confronted with both, simultaneously.
How to read these voices without overreading them
The discipline TGLF applies to its reports is the real answer to the epidemiologist, and it is simple to state.
Read each account as a description of what is possible in one place, not a law about everywhere.
Okello’s burial lesson is not a claim that burials dominate transmission in this outbreak.
It is a grounded hypothesis about where to look and what to resource.
Kamulegeya’s abandoned patient is not a measure of how often abandonment happens.
It is a named failure mode a preparedness plan can now design against, by training private clinics and pre-positioning equipment before the suspected case arrives instead of after.
Read for mechanism, not magnitude, and the questions become as valuable as the answers.
Elizabeth Ezeorah, far from any case, asked the responders “how are they combating it, how are they going about containing the spread,” and framed it as preparation rather than alarm.
Gabriel Omony voiced a worry that doubles as intelligence.
“Initially I thought, since the last time Uganda had Ebola, there was already a vaccine. But I am told for this one, it is not yet there. And this calls for a bit more extra care, because in most cases, the frontline health workers get the consequences more.”
A question like that tells a response system, in advance, what its own workforce does not yet understand.
If you are a planner, that is a gift.
Knowledge built to move ahead of the virus
The geography of who spoke was the design, not a flaw in it.
TGLF built the call to action in three versions: one for workers in the thick of the response, one for those who had fought a past Ebola outbreak, and one for those whose communities had not yet faced one but felt the dread anyway.
The design treats preparedness as participation.
Ezeorah, with no cases near her, is not an audience to be educated later.
She is a future first responder whose question, asked now, can shape the support that reaches her before her first case.
The once-bitten teach, the not-yet-touched ask, and knowledge starts traveling ahead of the disease instead of chasing it.
The cross-border framing carried the same intent.
Two phrases anchored the opening slides, support each other and learn from each other, and the DRC Scholars announced their own experience-sharing meeting for 13 June in Kinshasa, in French, with the link offered live.
A virus that ignores the line between the DRC and Uganda is met, officially, by two national systems, two languages, and two sets of guidelines.
Peer learning does what those systems struggle to do quickly.
It lets a Ugandan contact tracer and a Congolese community worker hear each other directly about the same virus crossing the same border.
The call to action closed with the request that says what it is all for: to a colleague across the border facing the same thing, what is the one tip you would share?
The two kinds of knowledge, and what each is for
The peer learning course that grew out of the dialogue draws the line between the two kinds of knowledge cleanly.
TGLF is co-creating it with Scholars from Uganda and the DRC, it is open to anyone doing health and humanitarian work in an affected community with no title required, and it ties each worker’s experience to trusted WHO and IFRC guidance.
It will launch only when enough peers have joined, because a peer learning course without peers is a reading list.
Bundibugyo virus outbreak response: learn, take action, and get certified
Share your experience and learn from colleagues about Bundibugyo virus outbreak response in Uganda and the DRC. Learn more and enrol in this certification from The Geneva Learning Foundation: HH-EN-01 Share experience: Bundibugyo virus outbreak response in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo
The reason it exists, Charlotte told the room, is that the technical guidance already exists, and what is missing is the lived experience of how to engage families and communities when the guidance meets a frightened street.
That is the right division of labour, and it ends the false fight.
Verified, expert knowledge sets the bounds of what is true.
The experiential knowledge of peers fills in what it is actually like to do the work, names the failure modes the guidelines skip, and surfaces the questions that show the system where it is blind.
Reda drew the line for the audience in one breath.
“If you came expecting experts telling you what to know, what to think, this is not that session. We are doing something very different and complementary here.”
The epidemiologist who waves away the second microphone as self-selected anecdotes is right that it is not a sample, and wrong about its job.
It is the part of the response that lives in people, that moves faster than any document, and that a serious response needs a way to hear before the next patient is left standing alone.