Vacations out for Canadian chief of aid group Doctors Without Borders

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Vacations are a time for relaxing at the cottage or sunning on a beach – unless you're Joanne Liu, the Canadian physician who is the loudest and most insistent voice in the global rally to contain the Ebola epidemic.

For nearly two decades, the chief of the international aid group Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) used annual leave to step away from a staff job in the emergency room at Montreal's Sainte-Justine children's hospital to complete more than 20 overseas missions for MSF, or to do fill-in work in remote Quebec hospitals. In recent years she turned around the equation, using her vacation time away from leadership positions at MSF to work and recharge in Montreal.

This spring, six months after taking on the role as top doctor at MSF, she and her husband contemplated taking a real vacation, but then medical teams on the ground in West Africa sent word Ebola had reappeared and seemed to be spreading faster than usual outbreaks. Once again, her holidays could be spent only on the frontline.

Since her visit in the early summer, the Ebola epidemic has spun out of control in three West African countries, infecting more than 9,000 people and killing half of them while sending North America and Europe into a fear-induced tizzy.

"We knew right away it wasn't the usual deal. It was clear if the world didn't act fast, it would become a major disaster," Dr. Liu said in an interview. The World Health Organization has warned more than 1.4 million people could be infected this winter if growth patterns hold.

The first-hand contact with Ebola this summer gave Dr. Liu the rare ability to confront presidents and top diplomats in the strongest terms on the reality of the fight against Ebola in the border area shared by Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea.

Dr. Liu's demands for action have been unflinching. She declared the world was losing the battle against an out-of-control epidemic. She was accused of being alarmist but international assistance is starting to ramp up, giving her cautious optimism that a strained MSF will be relieved by a broader international effort.

The spine required to take the lead and confront some of the most powerful people in the world about their inaction was forged in the most unlikely of places: the tranquil Quebec City suburb of Charlesbourg, where Ms. Liu was born and raised.

A rare visible minority in a city that was and is overwhelmingly white, Dr. Liu, 48, was bullied mercilessly in grade school, from minor teasing to racist taunts and pushes and punches. "It shapes your mind, consciously or unconsciously. When I was young, I would tell myself it's not because I'm different I won't be as good. I always made a huge deal of being good at everything. That's how I coped with it. You react by overperforming, or underperforming."

Inspired by reading Camus's The Plague and Jean-Pierre Willem's memoir of working in Afghanistan in the 1980s, Dr. Liu decided in her early teens she would become a physician who treats the world's poorest patients. She trained at McGill University and obtained specialties in pediatrics and emergency medicine with those goals in mind.

In 1993, when she was doing an internship in intensive care at Sainte-Justine, her supervising physician, Dr. Joaquim Miro, invited her to her first MSF meeting. Three years later, she would complete her first mission to a refugee camp in Mauritania.

Dr. Miro was struck by her kindness, her calm under pressure and her great capacity for analysis. "If you had told me she would be president of MSF, I might have been surprised because I could not have predicted the leadership abilities she also had," Dr. Miro said. "But her commitment and perseverance are no surprise."

She went on to serve in war zones such as Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo and other disaster zones, such as Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. She's frequently been under fire over the years, has slept with boots on for a quick escape, and worked undercover in Syria in the past year to avoid being kidnapped.

"She wants to save the world," said her good friend Conrad Sauvé, the Red Cross Canada CEO who studied with her at McGill for a master's degree in health leadership.

"She's everything she appears to be. She's extremely hard working, has great integrity." Mr. Sauvé noted that in the middle of the Ebola crisis Dr. Liu took a moment to call him after recent hip surgery.

"She's that type of person. She also has a great sense of humour and will laugh at all your jokes, whether they're funny or not."

Dr. Liu bristles at such kind words, ending an interview with a reminder that for every one of the 250 international staff MSF has sent into the Ebola zone, 10 local staff, many of whom have lost friends and family, are toiling away with no respite.

For Dr. Liu, there is no vacation, either. Before taking on her new role last year, she and her engineer husband, who splits his time between Montreal and her new home in Geneva, attempted to get away to a beach for a few days for the first time in memory.

The husband, who prefers to remain out of his wife's spotlight, immediately fell ill.

"It was no vacation, at all. We just figured out we were not meant for vacation," Dr. Liu said.