Sandy Freiwald winces and rolls two pinwheel eyes at the thought of her alma mater. As well she should. On Oct. 11, her once-mighty University of Michigan Wolverines — proud stewards of the country’s winningest college football program — lost to the lowly University of Toledo Rockets, at the time a 1–4 also-ran out of the so-so Mid-American Conference. The defeat marks the program’s slow and very public demise, which seemed to start with last year’s season-opening bump to tiny Appalachian State. “They’re a disgrace,” Freiwald laughed, the last word drawn out uneasily amid the program’s iconic stature. “It’s pretty sad.” Sure is, buddy. But they’ll be back someday soon — we’re talkin’ the Wolverines here. Besides, it’s only a game, and man has a way of inventing those as a refinement of his tendency toward the alternative. Depending on whom you talk to, as many as 15,000 wars have been waged in human history, with far more lethal effects than Wolverine football’s worst season start since the mid-1960s. Freiwald, who at 39 doesn’t remember Michigan’s last wave of mediocrity, has a pretty good handle on that real-life side of the ledger too. The critical-care surgeon and assistant surgery department chief for the Southern California Permanente Medical Group has been to the African nation of Liberia twice, more recently in 2006 following that country’s second modern-day civil war, rendering care to those made homeless by the conflicts. And through this weekend, she’ll be part of an educational exhibit at Balboa Park that asks us to assume her patients’ roles, their plight a world removed from the amusements that mark a handful of Saturdays in the placid Ann Arbor autumn. “A Refugee Camp in the Heart of the City” is the brainchild of Doctors Without Borders (DWB), the humanitarian group that delivers emergency aid to people whose survival is threatened by violence and other catastrophes. DWB reports that some 42 million have been uprooted by war worldwide, with 26 million seeking safety from conflict within their own countries. Of the latter, about 1 million live in Liberia; the Sudan, with close to six times that number, leads the world in this category. The figures, of course, don’t begin to reflect the suffering. Freiwald, who as a DWB member was stationed in the Liberian capital of Monrovia, said major swaths of the city had no electricity or running water. Tropical diseases, which Freiwald had never seen in her Western practice, were endemic in some quarters. Access to health care was virtually nil. In some pockets of the city, garbage hadn’t been collected for 15 or 20 years, even as people freely relieved themselves in public. “It was overwhelming if you thought about trying to fix all the problems,” Freiwald said. “But on a one-on-one basis with each patient, it became very manageable. I think that’s how we got through a lot of our days.” Now, it’s the community’s turn for some of that one-on-one. The mock refugee camp, which will be set up at Balboa Park’s Presidents Way lawn at the corner of Presidents Way and Park Boulevard, is open from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. today through Sunday; admission is free. The 8,000-square-foot exhibit is designed to accommodate as many as 1,200 visitors a day, with each visit taking 40 minutes to an hour. DWB aid workers will act as tour guides, explaining the crucial elements for survival in refugee crisis situations. Those elements include shelter, food distribution, latrine and water areas and creation of a health clinic, cholera treatment center and vaccination station. San Diego is this year’s last stop for the exhibit, which has also toured San Francisco, Santa Monica, L.A. and four locales in western Canada. It also ran in eight other U.S. cities the last two years. It has visited 13 countries since its inaugural opening in France in 1995. Matthew Spitzer, a San Francisco family practitioner and president of DWB’s American board of directors, said the San Diego choice was a logical one. “After the New York metropolitan area,” Spitzer explained, “the West Coast has been the biggest area for supporters, donors and also volunteers who’ve gone into the field. Southern California has been up and down over the years, but there’s a large immigrant population [here], and they could be particularly receptive to this. A large portion of immigrants in San Diego are from Mexico and Central America, so they have a perspective as to what’s going on in other places as well.” Latinos make up 29 percent of San Diego County’s population. About 1 in 5 county residents is foreign-born. San Diego also has a large population of deportees from around the world. DWB, founded in France in 1971 as Medecins Sans Frontieres, opened its American section in 1990. In 2007, more than 543,000 private physicians contributed over $153 million to the American side; the group took in nearly $815 million that year worldwide. Spitzer said that about 87 percent of those proceeds go toward program services in 60 countries, with most of the rest earmarked for fundraising efforts. Some 200 American aid workers assisted in DWB programs in 2007, usually dedicating 6 to 12 months to each assignment. In 1999, DWB won the Nobel Prize for Peace. But for San Diego’s Freiwald, the money and manpower and accolades blur against the greater cause. She’s full of stories that justify her resolve, stories that pale against weird diseases and 20 years’ refuse on the streets. One such event involved a young Liberian’s errant pregnancy; Freiwald and her team terminated the fetus and saved the woman’s life, but at a grave cost. Motherhood, Freiwald explained, is a prime directive in Liberian culture — and since the woman’s surgery also robbed her of her capacity for childbirth, her future was altered in incalculable ways. Another interlude involved a displaced 5-year-old boy, burned over 40 percent of his body in a propane explosion. He later died of infections from his wounds, and Freiwald is persuaded he would have survived in a Western medical setting. “But the thing that was really profound about that,” Freiwald said, “was that he was the child of one of the men who was working with us in the operating room. He was a surgical tech, and he did an excellent job; he taught me a lot about things I had never seen in my practice in the West. “He was very gracious about his child’s death… [but] to be exposed to children dying on a regular basis and then to realize that you’ve been working one on one with a person whose child has just died under your care was really, really tough, probably the emotional low point the time I was there.” The last few words come haltingly as the clinician defers to her exhaustive spirit. While the planet is mired in tragedy, it’s equally as generous in dispensing its reasons for hope (Michigan’s suckoid football team notwithstanding). For the next few days, San Diego has a chance to experience some of the latter, with Downtown’s Balboa Park the focus of a world in some serious transformation. For more on the exhibit, visit www.balboapark.org, search for “refugee camp” and click on the link about the event. For further information on Doctors Without Borders, please visit www.doctorswithoutborders.org.