Gunfire shattered the darkness. Night after night, the 44-year-old physician from Guinea held onto hope that the besieged city would somehow endure. Then, one morning in late January, the call came: he and the remaining international staff had to evacuate immediately.
“We took the last flight out,” he remembered.
Hours later, M23 controlled Goma. The Tutsi-led rebel group, supported by neighboring Rwanda, had achieved its boldest military victory in the region yet.
For most, that would have been the story’s end: a narrow escape, a mission cut short. But as the aircraft took off, he knew he would return. The question was: how soon?
Dr. Thierno Baldé, 45, led the WHO response in Goma after the city fell to M23 rebels in early 2025. (file)
A Reluctant Interlude
Back in Dakar, where he heads the World Health Organization (WHO) emergency hub for West and Central Africa, Dr. Balde grew restless. Reports of civilian massacres trickled out of North Kivu, each new detail cutting deeper. The colleagues he left haunted him. With every grim report, his conviction deepened: his place was at their side.
Two weeks later, on his 45th birthday, he was tapped to lead the agency’s response in eastern DRC. He withheld the assignment from his parents in Conakry, his hometown, to spare them the dread.
“I only told them once I was already there,” he admitted, almost sheepishly. His wife and two children had become accustomed to him vanishing into the world’s most dangerous crises.
Return to Ruins
It took him five days to reach Goma. By then, the airport was shut, and roads were riddled with checkpoints.
The city he found was hollowed out. Power lines were down, hospitals crammed with the wounded, and streets were rumored to be littered with bodies. Fear blanketed every face like ash after a blaze. “In 15 days, everything had changed.”
His team was broken. Some 20 Congolese staffers, gaunt from exhaustion, tried to hold the city’s fragile health system together. He gave half of them time off to recover, knowing every pair of hands was desperately needed. It was the least he could do.
Yet, amid the wreckage, there was one stroke of good fortune. Unlike most other UN agencies, the WHO warehouses hadn’t been looted. They became lifelines, providing fuel to power hospitals, surgical kits for the wounded, and cell phones to coordinate emergency evacuations.
Still, the numbers were crushing, with as many as 3,000 dead, according to initial reports. The bodies needed swift handling before disease spread.
“We had to bury everyone intensely, in a very specific timeframe,” he said, noting WHO ended up paying local gravediggers to collect the corpses.
Bodies are being buried with WHO personnel’s assistance in the aftermath of Goma’s fall to M23 rebels in early February 2025. (file)
The Spectre of Cholera
On the day of his return, another illness announced itself: cholera. The first cases were confirmed in a MONUSCO camp, where hundreds of disarmed Congolese soldiers and their families sought shelter after losing the city to the M23 militia. The UN peacekeeping mission’s bases, designed for Blue Helmets, were not built to accommodate a large number of civilians. Sanitation conditions were dire, and the disease spread fast.
That night, Dr. Balde couldn’t sleep.
The next morning, he walked into the camp and saw patients stretched out on the floor. There were 20 or 30 people, with only one doctor, he remembered. Two were already dead.
For days, his team scrambled to hold back the tide, with chlorine for disinfection, protective gear, makeshift triage, and staff recruited and trained on the spot. Vaccines were rushed in from Kinshasa.
Rumours Rippling Through the City
Still, rumors rippled through the city.
“People began saying ‘cholera is exploding in Goma and WHO is overwhelmed.’” He, who had come for humanitarian relief, now found himself with an epidemic on his hands.
“We had to completely re-orient ourselves,” he said. The ghost of another Haiti, where the UN played a role in a cholera outbreak in 2010, hovered over his every decision.
As if on cue, another disease was spreading. Mpox, once confined to the sprawling camps of displaced people on Goma’s outskirts, now spilled into the city itself. Those camps, home to hundreds of thousands uprooted by earlier waves of violence in the region, were emptied in the chaos of Goma’s fall.
“The patients ended up in the community,” he explained.
Dr. Thierno Baldé (center left) and colleagues visit a
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