The President has given each district Ebola team a cow for Christmas. We are touched. Our cow grazes contentedly outside the Ebola Response Centre HQ. It would make a lovely pet with its large brown eyes, but I fear that by tomorrow morning it will be Christmas dinner.

The latest Ebola situation report (I can’t get myself to call it the sitrep) for the country is looking very good. Kenema and Kailahun have no patients left. Bo is down to ten. When I was there ten days ago they had more than 50.

Chris returns from a meeting in Freetown for all the new DFID-funded Ebola Centres and it appears that numbers of patients are low - 10 to 20 per centre. Hotspots remain, in Port Loko and Freetown, but there has been no surge in reported cases following the house-to-house searching.

My continuing sense is that we are nearing the end of the epidemic. There is genuine societal behavioural change on hand washing and hygiene; nearly all burials are now safe burials; we have plenty of isolation facility capacity now. This war may not be over by Christmas, but it won’t be too long afterwards.

A hugely frustrating day yesterday. Our bore holes have run dry, so we have no water. I am sceptical about all our fussiness over different brands of PPE and suspect we don't need most of the well-stocked pharmacy we have, but there is one thing we certainly do need for infection control, and that is water, and lots of it.

Recriminations inevitably begin. The local sub-contractor has apparently used cheap and shoddy materials that are already breaking up and the water may just be leaking away. The bore holes dug by the Royal Engineers were fine when they tested them in the rainy season, but now it is the dry season, the water level has fallen, and cannot meet our 24 hour needs.

All we need is to find a replacement water supply, but our efforts at finding available tankers to bring in water are falling on symbolically appropriate dry ground. It is Christmas eve - this is not a good time to set up a 20,000-litre daily water delivery. I wonder if we can use all the bottled Norwegian water from the camp. Finally Sandra, our wonderful new hospital coordinator, comes to the rescue and we are promised water for Christmas.

Our patients don't know this, of course, and ambulances continue to turn up unannounced at the gate, despite my efforts to get prior notification. Without water we have no choice but to turn them away, and back to the heroes at the Moyamba holding centre who manage with a couple of nurses and a cleaner what we can’t do with 200 staff. I still hold out hope that they will put in a January transfer window request for me.

It is a good time to take a rare trip out of town, to visit Ribbi district. Of particular interest to me is a visit to the main district town of Bradford, the namesake of the great city where I work as a NHS consultant.

Bradford, Sierra Leone, has been a very naughty town. At the Command and Control meetings there are regular alerts of secret burials and hiding of sick patients. There are reports of illegal gatherings and strangers being allowed to move through the area without being checked. Perhaps not surprisingly, the district is also a hotspot for Ebola. Out first three patients were all from Ribbi.

So a surprise raid is planned for Christmas eve to reclaim the lawless jungle paths of Bradford.

MORE BLOG POSTS FROM PROFESSOR JOHN WRIGHT