Holly Jimenez, a Spanish teacher at Pace Academy, was surprised Wednesday morning as she toured a mock refugee camp in the heart of Piedmont Park.

Set up by the medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres, it included watering stations, a pit latrine and a cholera treatment center, constructed out of the sort of makeshift plastic tarp and PVC tubing that one might find in Sudan or Afghanistan.

Photos by RICH ADDICKS/Staff (ENLARGE)

Epidemiologist Ya-Ching Lin (in orange), an aid worker for Doctors Without Borders, gives a tour Wednesday through the mock refugee camp, which is nicer than conditions usually allow.

(ENLARGE)

Caitlin Meredith (left), a Doctors Without Borders aid worker just back from Chad and Sudan, talks to eighth-graders from Pace Academy in Atlanta about the camp at Piedmont Park.

(ENLARGE)

A "no guns" sign shows the group's policy in the field.

(ENLARGE)

This low-tech diagnostic tool used at refugee camps by Doctors Without Borders is a simple paper bracelet, marked off in millimeters, for determining malnutrition in children. Wrapped around a child's upper arm, the bracelet measures the circumference. Anything less than 110 millimeters (smaller than the circle enclosed by an adult's thumb and forefinger) means that the child is dying; above 137 millimeters means the child is not at risk.

IF YOU GO "A Refugee Camp in the Heart of the City" is free and open 9:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. through Sunday, at Piedmont Park, just north of the Charles Allen gate on 10th Street. For more information, go to www.doctorswithoutborders.org.

As tour guides led a school group through the camp, explaining how 15,000 people can be fed, sheltered and cared for in the middle of a wilderness, Jimenez learned that her in-laws' homeland, Colombia, has the third-highest number of internally displaced people in the world, just behind Sudan and the Congo, and is the site of several operations by the medical aid organization.

"It surprised me to see that on the sign, because my husband is from Colombia," said Jimenez, who was helping shepherd a group of eighth-grade students through the exhibit.

"I didn't know it was that bad there." Of the exhibit, she said, "It's kind of scary. It puts you in somebody else's shoes."

Bringing home the experience of the refugee is the purpose of the exhibit, which was constructed Tuesday on the shores of Lake Clara Meer, just down the hill from the park's Charles Allen gates. It is free and open to the public 9:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. through Sunday.

"It's weird," said Randolph Goulding, a Pace eighth-grader from Sandy Springs, after he examined the 2,500-gallon rubber tank at the watering station, the kind of tank used for providing treated water in refugee camps. At some camps, such a tank will be filled from local wells, but most often the water must be brought to the camp by truck. "I'm so used to having water and electricity," said Randolph. "And we find out they have to have water shipped in."

Randolph, who is interested in medicine, thought the exhibit was effective, "because it's all visual, and I'm more of a visual learner."

That's exactly what Nicolas de Torrente, executive director of Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres, which is abbreviated MSF, hopes to accomplish with the exhibit, which debuted in New York's Central Park this month then moved to Brooklyn, N.Y., before coming to Atlanta. The next stop will be Nashville, beginning Oct. 4.

The exhibit "is a window," he said. "We've all read about this, we've seen TV footage, but there is something very powerful in terms of walking through and taking the time to think about these issues."

Of course, some details don't exactly match the reality that one might find in Angola or Chechnya. A checkpoint hut made of corrugated tin and plywood was deemed "a little too solid" by epidemiologist Ya-Ching Lin, a tour guide at the exhibit, who, like all her fellow guides, has served in refugee camps around the world.

Ditto the nice wooden hut that serves to cover the latrine. Structures as substantial as these would soon be scavenged, she said, and transformed into parts of shacks and huts for refugees.

Also out of place was the sound of mowing equipment and weed-eaters, the music from the marching band at nearby Grady High School and the flights of spandex-clad runners and skaters zooming past on Piedmont Park's sidewalks.

Yet there were experiences that kids in Chad and kids in New York City held in common, said guide Caitlin Meredith, who was just back from Chad and neighboring Sudan. "When they put this on in Central Park, and talked about post-traumatic stress syndrome, the kids in New York City knew what that was all about," said Meredith. "After Sept. 11, they knew if a friend became paranoid, or their hair fell out, or they couldn't sleep," that stress could be the cause.

MSF was created in 1971 by a small group of French doctors determined to provide aid to the civilian victims of war. The organization adopted the philosophy that the rights of such victims "superseded respect for national borders."

It now has chapters in 17 countries and provides care for those affected by armed conflict, epidemics and natural or man-made disasters in more than 70 countries.

The group staged the exhibit as part of its educational program. It planned to bring the exhibit to Atlanta a year ago, before Hurricane Katrina intervened.

Exhibit planners expect to see up to 1,000 visitors a day. In conjunction with the exhibit at Piedmont Park is a showing at the Atlanta Photography Group's Harry Callahan Gallery of photos from five artists who traveled with MSF to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the death toll is said to be the highest attributed to conflict since World War II.

"Democratic Republic of the Congo: The Forgotten War" is free and open to the public at the APG Gallery-Tula Art Center, 75 Bennett St. Space B-1, Atlanta.