LEWISTON — Brittany Crush figures she won’t miss home, even when she’s working 18-hour days and living inside a steel shipping container.

On Thursday, the registered nurse from Turner will begin a year of service in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Though she’s only 24, she will serve as the chief nursing officer in the country’s only critical-care hospital.

“I can’t imagine going back to a traditional hospital on a permanent basis,” Crush said during a break from packing. “I’m kind of prepared for it in a way. This really is what I want. I have always wanted to do Third World medicine.”

She has visited Haiti three times this year, first working in a MASH-like field hospital. During two other trips, she worked at the Port-au-Prince hospital she’ll help lead.

There will be little time to miss her parents and sister or the pleasures of an ice-cold Diet Coke, she said.

As a nurse at Haiti’s only critical-care hospital, she will see the sickest people in the country. She also will have the most equipment and medicine in the area.

Though it won’t be like home.

Since graduating from nursing school in 2006, Crush has worked steadily. She worked for a while at Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston. For the past two and a half years, she served as a pediatric nurse at Children’s Hospital Boston.

In April, three months after a devastating earthquake shook the capital, Crush visited Port-au-Prince with an organization called Project Medishare.

Children were begging at the airport: “Money! Money! Food! Food!”

“They tell you, ‘Keep on walking,'” Crush said. “‘Don’t even look.”

A couple of days later, she and other visitors toured Port-au-Prince. She saw her first tent city. She saw children bathing in a ditch.

“That’s when it hit me,” she said. “This is their new reality.”

The visit exposed her to a kind of pure medicine, away from the bureaucracy of modern U.S. hospitals.

“You’re there just to take care of people,” she said.

She also felt the frustration that comes with knowing that a child might be saved in Boston or Lewiston but die in Haiti, she said.

“I saw a lot,” she said quietly. “I did a lot. A lot of people died.”

The initial weeklong stay led to a six-week return visit this summer. She returned again in November, coming home a week before Thanksgiving.

Crush has never felt frightened in Haiti and she is eager to go back, she said.

This time, rather than the tents she stayed in during her first visit, she’ll be staying in a community created for visiting medical workers. The housing was made from steel containers.

Crush will get her own container, with a bed, a refrigerator and air conditioning. Nearby containers will have showers, a cafeteria, a gym and a laundry room.

There will be little time for luxuries, though.

A cholera epidemic that began outside the capital has now struck the city, she said.

Though it’s entirely treatable, too many people die from the aggressive bacteria that attacks people’s digestive systems, leaving them dangerously dehydrated in only a few hours.

The key is getting fluids to people quickly, she said.

During her year-long stay, she plans to come home for a few breaks, but Christmas will be spent there. She has even begun a small charity in hopes of supplying the hospital’s staff and patients with a holiday meal. She opened an account at TD Bank under the heading “Christmas in Haiti.” People may donate by visiting any local TD Bank branch.

The meal is unlikely to feature American holiday staples such as fruitcake or eggnog. Rather it will likely include rice, beans, chicken and fried plantains, staples of a Haitian diet.

Crush aims to give people a small Christmas luxury, something so many Haitians miss.

Yet, they are an unbroken people, she said.

“I have been amazed at how positive they are,” she said. “They just picked up their stuff and kept going.”

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