Being Creative in Goma

Norbert Soke gets creative by using a teapot to create an echo so that he could hear during the phone calls.

Here’s something you don’t see every day: A man talking into a coffee pot.

But for CDC epidemiologist Norbert Soke and a team of colleagues in a hotel in Kinshasa, it was a way to break through a technological communication barrier. The pot held not coffee, but a cell phone—and speaking into it created an echo chamber that let the team power through a poor connection with colleagues in Goma.

“That’s the beauty of field work. You need to be creative sometimes,” Soke says.

Soke grew up in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and earned a medical degree at the University of Kinshasa in 1995. After living and working the United States for almost two decades, he returned to DRC in March as CDC and other global health agencies battled the current outbreak of Ebola virus disease in the eastern part of the country.

Not only is he a Congolese native, but he worked in the affected area as a health project manager for the relief agency World Vision in the late 1990s.