While most people who venture to the Caribbean during the summer are there to relax or have a good time on vacation, most people aren’t Tiffany Pittman. The Foxworth nurse recently traveled to Guatemala, an impoverished country in Central America, on a surgical mission trip to help perform 86 orthopedic surgeries in four days and also hiked a treacherous mountain volcano to raise money for Hopeful Hearts Animal Rescue.
Pittman works with two organizations on medical mission trips — Baptist Medical & Dental Mission International (BMDMI) and Faith in Practice. She does village medicine with BMDMI, but she worked with Faith in Practice during this trip to perform orthopedic surgeries on people who desperately need them.
As a nurse of 35 years, she uses her emergency room and intensive care unit experience on the village medicine mission trips and her more recent surgery experience with Faith in Practice. The 86 surgeries in four days were primarily on hips, knees and ankles.
One case she was involved in featured a young girl who had been forced to walk on her tiptoes since she was 3 years old following an Achilles tear. A woman who they helped had been walking on the side of her foot since she was a little girl, and the surgeon removed her talus (ankle) and inserted screws and pins to straighten her foot for the first time. The woman’s injury was only getting worse and had kept her from her job making tortillas, but she needed mobility to take care of her children and get back to work.
One of the surgeries performed during Tiffany Pittman’s surgical mission trip was on this Guatemalan’s foot, which was straightened out after it was turned at a near 90-degree angle.
Another case Pittman worked on featured a woman with polio whose leg jetted outward. The surgeon replaced her knee and straightened her femur. That woman is a nurse and worked for years with her leg in that condition.
One of the primary tenants in the medical field is “see one, do one, teach one,” which means observing another physician perform a procedure then doing it yourself so that you can teach the next physician. Pittman put that saying to practice on the mission, resetting a woman’s broken wrist for the first time in her career. It’s a task almost exclusively performed by doctors, but it’s all hands on deck during the mission trips.
“It was such wonderful things that this team did. It was great doing that and being a part of it,” Pittman said.
Pittman said while Guatemala is beautiful with extremely nice people, which makes it a popular tourist destination, it is very impoverished and a third-world nation.
“They’re poor, but they work hard. They’re polite. They’re kind and very humble and grateful,” she explained. “In the village, that’s when you really get to see (what it’s like). When you’re in the hospital, you don’t see how they live. But when we go out into the villages, a lot of them have respiratory problems because they’re cooking in their house with wood and all that smoke in their house has nowhere to go.
“They’re not even really houses — it’s kind of like a shanty. They’re shanties with dirt floors and chickens running around, cats and dogs running around everywhere. It’s very impoverished. They all live in one room.”
Healthcare for people living in these areas is virtually nonexistent. Even if they can manage to get to a hospital, it’s nearly impossible to simply fix a broken leg like it is in America, according to Pittman. She described seeing a man panhandling on the side of the road with a broken leg that looked like a “V” and that there was a visible wound on his leg where the bone was protruding through his skin. She said even the ones who do manage to go to the hospital to receive care cannot keep going back for additional treatment because the hospitals charge more every time.
“It’s really something going down there and helping. It’s worth it. I went on five (mission trips) last year, and this year I’ve gone on three,” Pittman said. “I do it because the good Lord has been so good to me. He has just taken care of me when I didn’t deserve it. When I finally started getting my life and myself back together, I was like, ‘OK, it’s time. It’s time for you to go work for Him and to share the love of Jesus with people.’
“That’s why I go. You see people accept Jesus while you’re there. They want to be witnessed to. You’re getting all these great benefits just being there, being a part of this and just knowing not only are you helping somebody with their health, you’re helping them know Jesus.”
On her trips with BMDMI, she helps diagnose patients and gets them the help they need. Pittman said oftentimes the patients they see and help are excited when they return and come back for more medication.
Pittman has been a travel nurse and works at Tulane and University Medical Center in New Orleans. She said she loves working at teaching hospitals with students and residents and has learned a lot that she’s been able to put to use on the mission trips.
Pittman’s late mother, Diane, her best friend, Melissa Pounds Bracey, and her church family at Hurricane Creek Baptist Church have been extremely supportive of her missions, giving her the strength to keep going back for more.
But after the mission greatly helped 86 people in four days, Pittman wasn’t ready to stop giving back before she returned home to Mississippi.
Pittman, who previously did hiking fundraisers for the Columbia Animal Shelter and Hopeful Hearts, has been hiking since 2017 and hiked Acatenango Volcano once previously. Although it was a treacherous adventure, she talked herself into hiking it again for Hopeful Hearts, which takes care of special needs and senior dogs.
“It was terrible, just terrible, and I said I was never going to do it again. But I know that all the rescues around are in dire straits for funds, so I decided I would re-hike this volcano to help raise money,” she explained. “With it being so hard for me the last time, I wanted to be more driven to get people to donate.”
While she hiked on a different trail this time around, Pittman said it was just as terrible and she was reminded why she told herself she was never going to do it again. But she likes a challenge and wasn’t going to back down even though she was well aware of how difficult the hike is.
As tough as the terrain is on the hike, especially because she went without a guide, the weather conditions were just as challenging. Pittman said it was extremely cold atop the mountain and started raining while she was near the peak.
“I just had to do it. I wasn’t going to give up. I was going to make it to that volcano because that was my intention. I knew if it just took me a while, I would get there. But I wasn’t going to turn around and not make it to that volcano,” she recalled. “When I made it, right when I saw the volcano, I could see the black sand and how the volcano is shaped going up.
Tiffany Pittman raised more than $2,000 for Hopeful Hearts Animal Rescue while hiking the treacherous Acatenango Volcano, a hike she braved for a second time after promising herself to never do it again.
“(The first time) we didn’t see this volcano. We saw Fuego, which is the one that erupts. This is Acatenango, and I actually got to see this volcano up close. … It’s really cool (when you reach the top). I like the hard hikes, and it’s like you’re in a competition in a sport. It’s like you have really done something when you reached the height of wherever you’re going. You have to push yourself, and I really pushed myself.”
Pittman set the fundraising goal to $2,000 on Facebook, and $1,901 had been donated as of Tuesday morning on the social media site. However, she said several people donated to Hopeful Hearts directly that made her fundraiser clear the desired amount.
“I feel like if you get out there and you do something, that stirs up people because people care about animals and they want to help,” she said. “I kept updating so they watch what you're doing, and that's what I would do with my other hikes. They see what progress you're making and all that, and people just want to help the animals. So it's a win when I get to help them, then other people get to donate and the animals end up winning.”
Pittman has no designs on slowing down her philanthropic endeavors and will be returning to Guatemala next month with BMDMI.
