Special To The Daily Journal

Nicole Blake saw a lot of terrible things in Haiti, but she left that earthquake-ravaged island nation uplifted by the good she had observed as well.

A nurse in the Emergency Department at FirstHealth Moore Regional Hospital, Blake spent a memorable March week in Haiti working with the N.C. Baptist Men’s International Response Team. Although she had worked in disaster relief situations several times before, she was ill-prepared for the level of “unexplainable” chaos, devastation and human suffering she saw in a small village about an hour outside the capital city of Port au Prince.

Blake, who lives in Hamlet and attends Pine Grove Baptist Church in Rockingham, comes from a family that knows about giving. Her father is a retired Hamlet fire chief and EMT, and her husband, Mark, has also been involved in disaster relief, having made three mission trips to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Blake herself participated in relief efforts in Honduras, Mississippi and the North Carolina mountains before going to Haiti. She and Mark are raising their 7-year-old son, Noah, to understand the value of helping others, too.

“This was the hardest one I’ve ever had to talk about,” Blake says. “The devastation, it’s hard to get somebody to imagine.”

There was, or actually had been, a hospital, but the non-profit Haiti Community Hospital was so damaged by the earthquake that it was usually safer to treat patients outdoors. Because so many members of the hospital’s medical and nursing staff had been killed or injured, Blake and her U.S. team of 14 took on any job that needed to be done, repairing open fractures, changing dressings and treating people with terrible burns.

Blake did triage and assessments, worked in the operating room, in wound care and in the pharmacy. Sometimes she just sat with children whose parents had died.

Volunteers had converged on the place from all over the world, and supplies were everywhere. Even if a building had survived the earthquake, its residents usually chose to live in tents. “People were afraid to sleep,” says Blake.

Still there were moments of hope. Blake saw tiny C-section twins who were born after their mother was pulled from the rubble of a building. She befriended a Haitian doctor with whom she maintains contact and who recently spent three days with her and her family while on a visit to the U.S. She made it a personal mission to put a smile on the face of a badly burned boy who “became my little friend.”

Even before she left for Haiti, Blake was helping, participating in the North American Mission Board’s “Buckets of Hope” project to collect food for Haitian families. One bucket holding such staples as flour, oil, dried beans, peanut butter, pasta and sugar would sustain a family of four for a week, she was told. When emptied, the bucket could be used for carrying water.

Blake collected more than 200 filled buckets within two weeks.

“It means I can help people,” she says about her volunteer work. “Nursing is a calling. It’s not just taking care of the sick; it’s taking care of the whole person. I feel like I’m called to help people.”