As a nurse of Haitian descent, Marie Leblanc's volunteer stint in Haiti will be bittersweet as she knows she will be able to help many people desperately in need, but her help will have come too late for her 18-month-old cousin.

The baby boy was one of an estimated 200,000 people killed in the massive 7.0-magnitude earthquake on Jan. 12 that decimated the small country and left thousands more in urgent need of aid.

Leblanc travelled over the weekend to Port-au-Prince with a group of nurses from the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal, many of them with personal ties to Haiti. She expects to be there for three weeks.