In Mutumbi, 25 kilometres outside Bunia in Ituri province, northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, a safe and dignified burial of an Ebola case was delayed for over 24 hours. The family refused the intervention of response teams, believing that the use of body bags did not respect their cultural practice, stating that it felt as if the soul of the deceased were condemned. Community funeral rites require lying on the body of the deceased to express love and attachment. An improvised community dialogue was urgently convened, led by Kennedy Muhindo Wema, a specialist in risk communication and community engagement deployed through the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN), to reconcile response protocols with sociocultural realities.
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