The Victorian president of the Sierra Leone Australia Community, Alhaji Sankoh, has lived through civil war in Sierra Leone, but what Ebola is doing to his home country, he says, is far worse.

"If you hear the bullet, fighting and hear guns you will run. You know where it is. You know how to escape it,"  Mr Sankoh said.

"Ebola, it's not something you see, you hear or you smell."

There are reports that 20 people are dying a day from Ebola in Sierra Leone. Mr Sankoh has lost five members of his own family in the past month - four adult cousins and a child.

"It is very terrible," Mr Sankoh said.

His voice, fracturing, echoes in a hall in Oakleigh in Melbourne's south-east, home to the New Hope Foundation, which supports migrants and refugees.

He has had little sleep, his phone is kept on 24-hours a day and often rings at night with news from Sierra Leone.

"When you receive an international call, all you're thinking, your mind, your focus is maybe somebody from this family has passed away," he said.

Mr Sankoh is a case worker for New Hope and a member of the Salone Ebola Action Group Australia.

He described a silent mourning that is occurring in the Sierra Leone community in Melbourne, a community consisting of about 500 migrants who are watching from afar as their loved ones die, unable to do anything about it.

"When you have a family member who dies in our culture, people stay home and mourn and they will have the support of community members," he said.

"Some people don't have that support, because they don't have family here, they are not part of a community, they don't know people."

He said a lecturer recently contacted the Sierra Leone Australia Community after one of his students at a Melbourne university lost a family member to Ebola and had nobody to support her.

"This [is] what I mean by suffering in silence. They deal with it on their own," Mr Sankoh said.

He said the community in Melbourne began to hear about Ebola back in April, when a colleague from Tasmania returned from a trip home.

"That was the time when the virus started killing people, but people didn't take it seriously and we didn't think it would spread this much," he said.

Mr Sankoh said people were told to ignore funeral customs - washing, wrapping and looking after the body before it is buried - to stop the spread of the disease.

"The people, they refuse to, the don't accept it, they decided to say 'no', we're going to look after them and in that process they become infected," Mr Sankoh said.

"For a dad not be able to be there for their child or maybe a partner, it makes it hard, it makes it so hard."

Mr Sankoh called on the Australian government to send medical staff to his home country to help with education, treatment and equipment.

"The Australian government response has been vital because they have helped with a lot of money, but people are asking for more, not just money, they want trained and qualified staff to go and give training on the ground," he said.