ON a Monday evening last month in Liberia, at Grand Gedeh County’s main hospital, two nurses knocked on a patient’s door. The patient was being treated for malaria and typhoid, but had also recently tested positive for Ebola — though he didn’t know it yet. I was doing training on Ebola at the hospital, and had seen him from a distance just that morning. He smiled and gave me a thumbs up.

Dressed in their full Ebola combat gear — body suit, apron, head cover, face mask, goggles, face shield, boots and rubber gloves — the nurses tried to avoid alarming him by saying that they needed to take him to Monrovia, 300 miles to the northwest, for further testing. Then they walked him to an ambulance and began driving to their actual destination, the newly constructed Ebola treatment unit in the neighboring county of Bong.

On a road anywhere in the West, it would take less than four hours to cover the 190-mile trip. But the Liberian roads, especially in the rainy season, are deadly traps of red mud, riddled with craters sometimes as deep as a car. Add to this drivers’ testosterone and you soon have trucks and cars stuck in all directions.

This was the situation the nurses and their patient found themselves in after two hours of driving. It was midnight, pouring rain, and their only option was to wait until morning. Despite being drenched with sweat, the nurses could not risk removing their protective suits. The patient seemed to be getting a little sicker now, his eyes bloodshot and his temperature rising. During the night, they helped him out of the car several times to urinate, carefully spraying with chlorine everywhere he had stepped.