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Nurse Takes Aid to Needy of the World

Muriel Gordon looked at the supplies stacked high on her driveway yesterday, then at the interior of the 18-wheeler that was fast filling up.

“We’re praying that it all goes in,” she said.

It’s all going to the poverty-stricken villages of Haiti. As part of a 20-year, one-woman effort to heal the world, Gordon, a pediatric nurse practitioner with the Suffolk Department of Health Services, loads 18-wheelers with food, clothing, medical supplies and everything usable, eatable or wearable for impoverished people, sometimes twice a year.

To help load the truck in her Central Islip driveway yesterday, 20 volunteers of all ages perspired under the midday sun, lugging furniture, mattresses, wheelchairs, crutches, toys, shoes, coats, blankets and operating room supplies.

“Everyone helps Muriel,” said Dr. Linda Varlotta of Stony Brook, who came with her daughter, Geena, 6, and water for the workers. The two recognized a dollhouse donated by Geena among the piles of toys.

“Muriel will take everything because it’s going to people who have nothing,” Varlotta said.

Helpers and donors are inspired by Gordon’s determination to deliver the supplies. Gordon, 61, will fly to Haiti in November to pick up the supplies from a warehouse and distribute the items to families or hospital pediatric wards. “I love giving out the toys,” she said.

Gordon, born on the island of Jamaica, began her mission in 1988 after witnessing poverty on a trip to China. She founded the nonprofit Muriel Gordon Foundation in 2003 and has been ferrying truckloads of supplies most recently to Nigeria, Kenya and other African nations, always following up with a visit to make sure the supplies get to the communities and are not sold.

How does she collect so much? “I love to beg,” she said. But she doesn’t have to anymore. Workers at Southside Hospital in Bay Shore, where she was a nurse, or Good Samaritan Hospital Hospice remember her if, for example, a patient dies and “the family wants to donate their wheelchair.”

Families take the day off to help with loading. Mary Robinson, 59, a friend from Hope Missionary Baptist Church in Central Islip, brought her daughter, Linnay, 16. “It’s overwhelming, but we’re doing this from the heart,” Robinson said.

Harold Lindner, 43, of Copiague, planned to go to work last night as a bouncer after a day of loading the truck. “I have friends from Haiti who tell me how bad it is there,” he said.

(c) YellowBrix 2008

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