Moyamba is Mende for ‘Send for Us’ and it feels quite appropriate today. The community has asked for help and we have come.

We have built and opened this specialist hospital in the middle of the jungle, and now finally we have patients to care for.

The focus on clinical work is a much needed distraction from the sectarian debates about protocols and risk. All the tensions that have been running between the different camps melt away and there is a mood of achievement and celebration.

Chris and I have taken to walking each morning across town along the dusty red roads to the Ebola hospital. This army of 30 Europeans descending on the town must seem threatening, and our transport like American presidential convoys appear elitist. So walking gives us a much-needed opportunity to engage - to talk and laugh and share with local people, to play with the curious children.

The town clings to long-forgotten colonial past when the railway ran through the town on the way to mines to the East. Crumbling grandeur is mingled with mud and wattle homes. Goats graze on the verges and dogs chase chickens across the road (the answer to the perennial riddle).

I am worried about a quasi-apartheid in the hospital. Our senior management team is all white, and our clinical office has become the preserve of the Norwegian clinicians.

It is so critical that we tap the wisdom and expertise of the national staff and move rapidly to putting them in charge. However, the structure of our international invasion excludes any Sierra Leonean co-production, and there is a vested interest to maintain the status quo. My efforts to make steps towards real integration are met with unanimous agreement, but nothing happens.

I do the dawn ward round on our three patients who lie on their ‘Britishaid’ hospital beds, dwarfed and lonely in our neat row of circus tents. There is pattern of symptoms from Ebola that is quickly recognisable. Our patients have extreme exhaustion, dyspepsia, nausea and diarrhoea that is typical.

The older woman, Saffie is conscious, but barely able to sit up. IV fluids and antibiotics are having little noticeable benefit. Her age is against her in this life-and-death race. The younger patients are stable, but need better pain relief and more fluids.

This is cookbook medicine at its most simple. With our biohazard suits and fear of contagion it is easy to forget to be human, and I make an effort to hold and embrace them, to show some compassion, to share their suffering.

There are still teething problems. Using goggles are a nightmare - after five minutes in the red zone our vision is seriously impaired, and clinical procedures become games of blind man’s bluff. There must be some international consensus to move to face visors quickly.

MSF apparently won’t change from goggles to visors mid-epidemic and WHO, who are supportive, have less credibility due to their late entry into the epidemic. In the meantime, we stagger through the high-risk red zone in a Sottish mist, our heads held back to catch a glimmer of vision at the bottom of the lenses where the water pools. We try anti-fogging agents, toothpaste, spittle - but to no avail. Our double-glazed masks seem to hinder any solution. 

Our kitchen is still not operational, but our cooks just revert back to traditional cooking techniques and are soon rustling up spicy fried rice for the patients' breakfast and the staff lunch.

Back in town everyone is busy cleaning their yards and sweeping their houses. The President has announced a national cleaning day as part of the defeat Ebola efforts. I express surprise about the degree of compliance, but am told that those who disobey face arrest.

One of my MSF colleagues explains about the unprecedented global response to Ebola. “You don’t bring home famine on the sole of your boot”.

MORE BLOG POSTS FROM PROFESSOR JOHN WRIGHT