I feel guilty for not being back in Moyamba where conveys of trucks continue to arrive to fit out our Ebola hospital. However, I have settled in to a simple life in Bo.

In my house I find an old travel guidebook to Sierra Leone, which informs me that Bo is the country’s second city and the nightclub capital - ‘Sierra Leone’s Manchester to Freetown’s London’.

Like the Specials song goes, all the clubs have been closed down, and the Chinese-built stadium lies grandly empty. There are no public gatherings now, no parties, no football matches. This is a self-imposed curfew.

Living and working with a local community gives me first chance to get to know Sierra Leoneans. I have escaped the endless NGO/WHO/Ministry meetings and settled back down to earth.

I am greeted with great warmth wherever I walk - sometimes in Arabic, mostly in English.

This is a country that loves England more than the English do. Three lion shirts are worn by all the young men, BBC World Service calls out from the transistor radios under corrugated metal roofs, union jacks cover beat up taxis.

I am touched with the joie de vivre and resilience of this people. It is a cliché, but happiness bears little relationship with wealth. Despite the harshness of people’s lives - the daily routines of carrying water and firewood to drink and provide heat, the legacy of the civil war, the new Ebola onslaught.

As I stand in the middle of the main street I am immersed in a gallery of smiles and a concert of laughter. While our global market economy would love them to yearn for the latest fashions or the newest smart TV, these are people quietly content with their lives, friendships and loves.

At the Ebola hospital I ask Medlin, one of the clinical officers, about the impact of Ebola on his life. International health workers like myself will come and go, rotating for a few weeks, maybe a few months. However, he has been working on the frontline from the start and will stay until the end.

He tells me how he rationalises his risks with the benefits to his community. How he has become a leper to his friends and family who stay away in fear of his direct daily link with the Ebola menace. He lies to his mother about his prestigious job.

I ask him if any of his health colleagues have had Ebola and he reels of a football team of names of classmates and co-workers (one just last week) who have died from Ebola as a result of their exposure in health care centres. It is tragic.

Meanwhile there is trouble at t’Ebola mill. All but one of my 12 NHS colleagues working with the Italian NGO Emergency at Laka have resigned. I wrote about Emergency in an earlier blog - a noble philosophy of offering Western standards of medical care to Africa, but one I felt was mis-guided.

Apparently my colleagues feel so too, and have revolted over the blanket interventional approach given to patients - catheters, IV lines, central lines, toxic drugs injected into all of them, even though many just need a compassionate end-of-life care.

Interestingly, the mortality rate in Bo (45%) with their very conservative management approach (only 10% get IV lines) is a lot lower than Laka (est. 60-70%).

In Bo they spray your feet with 0.5% chlorine in addition to the 0.05% hand washing routines. As I leave my shift at the Ebola centre I look down and notice that the bottom of my trousers have Jackson Pollock bleached patterns all over them - ah, I remember when I used to do this deliberately.

As I am admiring my neo-punk legwear a large rat scurries across the path right in front of me. Behind me Ebola, ahead of me Lassa, it’s the devil and the deep blue sea of viral haemorrhagic fevers.

My daughter plays an endless game of ‘Would you rather…’ but this choice is easy - Lassa for me, and so I step forward rather than back.

MORE BLOG POSTS FROM PROFESSOR JOHN WRIGHT