A Hall County-based organization is preparing for a trip this week to Haiti, joining up with groups worldwide to help the country broken by last week’s earthquake.

Jessica Matthews of Helping Hands Foreign Missions and others worked Tuesday at a South Hall home to pull together medical supplies the group keeps in storage, throwing out products that have expired.

Also, “we’re going to go through the donations we’ve received and use to supplement what we’re lacking,” she said.

Helping Hands, founded in 2003 by doctors Richard and Brenda Kowalske, plans to head out Friday morning.

The group may first arrive in the Dominican Republic, then cross the border into Haiti. Both countries share an island in the Caribbean.

“We’re going to be there for an indefinite amount of time. We’re going to do as much medical (work) as we can, although I’ve heard that we’re going to run out of supplies really fast.”

Matthews said the most-needed supplies include gauze, medical tape and antibiotics.

“And then we need stuff for eye infections and that kind of stuff because of the debris that’s in the air,” she said.

The group also plans to help in search-and-rescue efforts, said the 30-year-old Matthews, who serves as the group’s international education director.

A former math teacher at Johnson High School in South Hall, she runs a bilingual school in Bolivia and just arrived from that South American country on Monday.

“I’ll be (in Haiti) for two weeks, at least,” Matthews said.

She said the good thing about the group’s stay “is we have a contact who says he can get our food and water while we’re there. ... We’re still going to take food in our backpacks.”

And there’s the matter of getting prepared to witness what has been called Haiti’s worst natural disaster in two centuries, believed to have killed as many as 200,000 people.

“I’m having to prepare my mind for it, because I know there’s going to be a lot of death and destruction,” Matthews said.

“I don’t want to arrive and be in shock and not be able to help people. I’d like to be effective in my work.”

Stan Bell, the group’s secretary-treasurer, said the initial work will “be to help in any way we possibly can.”

As far as medical relief, the group’s main focus, “we don’t even know what that will entail until we can get on the ground there and get established in some way,” he said. “Everything is just kind of up in the air right now.”

The group would like to fly into Haiti, but air travel has been restricted because of the disaster.

“Plan B would be to fly to the Dominican Republic. We do have some contacts there and people who have offered to help us,” Bell said.