Every few days, usually in the late afternoon, two new friends meet for a long talk. Sometimes it lasts three hours, and sometimes people come from other huts to listen. They talk about other patients in the hospital who died around them, painfully, in pools of blood. They compare what it felt like to be so sick themselves.

Their talk, a bit dumbfounded, all turns around a strange miracle: that they were not struck dead after contracting Ebola, when at least 162 others have died since an epidemic erupted in Uganda in September.

The Ebola virus is one of the world's deadliest, at times killing 90 percent of its victims.

''We both say we never thought we would survive Ebola,'' one of the friends, Pido Jibinino, 39, said in a huge encampment of mud huts about 20 miles north of here called Pabbo. ''We say it is good enough that we are alive and can still enjoy the world.''

The epidemic appears to be running its course. Three people died this week, half as many as died in one day at the epidemic's height in October. Now much of the concern has shifted to those who have made it through.