In 2014 the Ebola virus entered Sierra Leone, soon to become the epicentre of a global health crisis. A state of emergency was declared, propped up by a large-scale and far-reaching humanitarian intervention; characterised by stringent bureaucratic and biomedical protocols, restrictions on social and economic life, and novel monetary flows. The paper – centring on residents of an urban neighbourhood in Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital, as well as among young men recruited in the formal Ebola response – examines the interaction between the protocols and authoritative structures of the state of emergency and humanitarian intervention with established responses to ‘crisis’ in Sierra Leone. Residents were presented with contradictory, yet not unfamiliar, sets of social expectations, given a recent history of civil war and peace building intervention (1991-2002). The paper examines the ways that the intervention was interpreted and rendered meaningful locally, with particular attention to its everyday political and economic dimensions. The research demonstrates the blurry boundaries between humanitarian actors and local populations, and between what constitutes ‘crisis’ and ‘normality’ in contexts like Sierra Leone. The paper is informed by 17 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Freetown immediately before and during the Ebola outbreak.