Missions Support Team International

 Mexico

Look at this happy family! LeAnne works in village evangelism in Mexico. Her husband, Cio, has begun his own business. LeAnne and Cio are pictured here with their first child, Maxwell Jeremiah Martinez Morris. I'm waiting for a family photo with the new little one, Liliana!

LeAnne has been working in Mexico for several years. She and a Mexican national, Tony, are doing evangelism and social work in a village. Their church is working with them, as two ladies alone need special covering. They are feeding children, doing some crafts, teaching the children and reaching out to the parents.

If you are interested in supporting our work in La Fortuna, please make your check payable to Missions Support Team and write LeAnne Morris/ La Fortuna in the memo line. The mailing address is:

Here are two of LeAnne's most recent newsletters:

God is so good, all the time and all the time, God is so good!  So many things have happened since I last wrote.  I am going to break them down into 3 subjects, the rancho, the church and our new little girl, who arrived 2 months premature.  Things are still moving strong in the rancho, we have over 70 children and 15 adults that come weekly.  We also have 2 more teachers, which has been a great blessing, so now there are 2 teachers with the little kids and 2 teachers with the big kids.  We had our first heavy rains under the shelter that the group from Elk River, MN came to build this spring.  Tony said it was absolutely wonderful, all of the kids fit under the shelter and no one got wet!  Hooray!  What a blessing.  It was really hard to anticipate rains last year and more than once it affected our events, so now we don't have to worry about that!  There is a specific prayer request for the adults in the rancho.  Tony mentioned it is like there are blinders on the adults.  Like they can't see....  she has asked that we pray for those blinders to be removed, so please join us in prayer that the blinders be removed and that there be greater revelation in the rancho.  I would also ask for you to pray against spiritual attacks on the helpers (teachers and parents) who are involved with our work.  Protection for their families.  We are also getting ready to do a summer camp, so pray that all goes well and we are able to minister to kids and adults alike.  It should be a time of great fun.  If you want to help with a donation, please see the instructions at the bottom of this e-mail.  We supply all the crafts and food for the camp, so it will be important to get extra funds in to cover the additional expenses.  Thanks so much for your prayers and support....  Now onto our church.... This past month,  two wonderful bible studies were donated to the church, both will be used in the church and the rancho.  Thanks to North Heights Lutheran Church and Elk Rivers, River of Life Church, we have over 20 copies of Experiencing God and over 30 copies of ALPHA to work with.  These materials are great tools and thanks to so many friends in Minnesota, we have complete sets of both bible studies.  We started ALPHA 3 weeks ago in church and the pastors have said it has been going great.   I am looking forward to seeing the friendships that come out of this study, it will greatly enhance the relationships at our church and will be a wonderful tool for future growth.  Please pray that the leaders are guided by the Holy Spirit and the guests receive everything that God has for them during the 10 week coarse.  I am not sure when we will start Experiencing God, but it will be a great follow-up coarse to those coming out of ALPHA who are looking to learn more about having a relationship with Jesus.  Thank you Lord! OK, what I am really dying to write about is our new baby girl, Liliana Martinez Morris.  She was born July 1st weighing 3 pounds 12 ounces.  Her due date was August 21st, so she was over 7 weeks early.  This is a little long, but I don't want to miss a single point about how blessed we are to have her with us.  It all started June 25th, in the morning I was pretty sure that my water had broke, but tried to convince myself it was something else.  The following morning I went to the hospital and the doctor told me I had a high rupture in my waters, but it was something that we might be able to control.  He put me on bed rest and gave me a 6 day prescription of strong (injections) antibiotics.  He told me I would have to come daily so they could measure my white blood count for infections and also do an ultrasound to see how the baby was.  I sat there in amazement and cried.  I knew Lily would be fine.  God had previously given me two very specific scriptures for her.  Jeremiah 29:11 (For I know the plans I have for you declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future) and Psalms 23 (The Lord is my Shepard, I shall not want, He makes me lie down in green pastures, He leads me beside quiet waters, He restores my soul, He guides me in paths of righteousness for His names sake.  Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me, your rod and your staff, they comfort me.  You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.  You anoint my head with oil, my cup overflows.  Surely goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever).  I always associated that verse with funerals and death, but thankfully several years ago a good friend (from ALPHA) talked about how this is a verse for life, that God is always with us.  So when God gave me this verse for Lily, I knew that it was for her life and that combined with the verse from Jeremiah, He had plans for Lily.  It gave me so much comfort as I sat there and listened to the doctor telling me about daily doctor visits and how premature she was.  The reason I was crying is because I was thinking, how in the world am I going to pay for all this.  It is $45 each doctor visit and $50 each time they did blood work.  I know that is really cheap compared to in the states, but for us it is like $300 a day....  so I sat there and sobbed.  When I came back in the afternoon with my blood work, the doctor (who owns the hospital where Lily was born) told me, "I am not going to charge you for all the consultations, you will only have to pay for the lab work and your medicines".  This was much easier to take, it cut the bill in half, but believe me, I was still worried about how we were going to pay for this.  The good thing was that Lily's heart rate was strong and stable.   Those were signs that she was not under stress.  So, every other day I went to the hospital and had an ultrasound, on the following Monday, the doctor gave me a 3 day prescription for medicine to develop Lily's lungs, it was $150 in total.....  another unexpected expense.  On the way home, I just started to really pray and confess to God that there was absolutely no way we could pay for this.  I told him how much we really needed Him and just surrendered it to Him asking Him to give me peace about it and just HELP please.  So, I got home and within the hour our pastors just happened to stop by.  They were checking to see if we needed anything and if everything was OK and also making a house call to pray with us for healing and protection.  Well, before they left, they gave me 3000 pesos (about $250 dollars) and told me it was the least they could do to help with our situation.  I was just totally amazed.  That is like a whole weeks work for one of them (they have professional jobs outside of pastoring our church) and they just gave it to me and said they wanted us to use it for the medical expenses....  WOW, thank you God.  So I started to see that God was answering our prayers.  Then 2 more days went by and I went back to the hospital for my check up (my neighbor brought me).  The doctor seemed concerned with Lily's heart rate, it had gone up from her normal 140 to almost 160 (160 is the max that it should be), so he asked me to rest for 15 minutes and not move or talk and then he wanted to look at her heart rate again, so I did just that, her heart rate was still almost 160, so he hooked me up to another machine to measure her heart rate and see if I was having contractions, which I was, like every 3 or 4 minutes....  With every contraction, her heart rate jumped, sometimes over 160.  As all this was going on, I knew that God was with Lily (because of Psalm 23) and that she would be fine (because of Jeremiah 29:11) so I just prayed, Lord, if it is time for her to come out, please give the doctor clear direction.  Your time is better than ours and if you say it is time, I want it to be time.....  After the 3rd test the doctor said, call your husband, we are doing an emergency c-section now.  The story is really just getting started.  Lily has always been very strong and active.  She moved much more than Max and I felt her move very early on.  With that being said, every appointment I had in the past week, the doctor made it a point to tell me that she had moved completely in my womb.  The first visit she was laying across my abdomen, the second she was sitting up, the third she was head down and the forth she was sitting up again, the doctor was amazed at how she moved daily.  So two hours after doing my last ultrasound he went in to operate.  Foolishly, he expected her to be in the same position she was in just 2 hours ago.  He made an incision really low on my abdomen.  Well, when he got in there, her arm popped out right away, but it was like she was reaching backwards and there was no good way for him to pull her out.  He knew that if she breathed in any of the amnotic fluid, it would likely lead to pneumonia and death, because of the infection and how premature she was.  When her arm popped out, I literally felt the temperature in the room change.  They did not knock me out because I had eaten that morning and they were afraid I would vomit, so I was awake for this whole thing.  The doctor immediately started moving her arm back into the womb and had his whole forearm inside of me trying to move her around to pull her out by her legs.  She had moved way up to the top of my abdomen and the incision was as low as it could have been, so literally, I could only see from his elbow up.  There were 2 or 3 people holding my body on the table as he was trying to maneuver her around and I could feel a lot of force moving back and forth.  I looked at Cio's face and could tell he could see there was a problem and he was seriously praying.  So, I remembered my verses.  Calm as could be, I trusted the Lord to get us through this.  There was only one point in all of this day that I cried and it was less than a minute.  It was from being overwhelmed with not having "everything ready", I didn't even have a diaper bag with me.....  so much for the list that you are supposed to have prepared ahead of time.  It took the doctor a really long time to "put me back together", and being awake the whole time, I wondered if there was something wrong, because I could feel him working to accomodate the top part of my abdomen, then the bottom, then back up to the top, then back to the bottom.  Later he explained that they had to really "clean me out" to make sure there would not be further infection.  So that evening, I was able to see Lily.  They told me if I wanted to see her, I had to be able to get out of the bed and go down to the nursery, but that meant standing.  I got to see her about 7 PM.  She spent the next few days in an incubator, except when we came to see her.  They had her on low oxygen for a couple days and with an IV.  We had been feeding her with a dropper, kind of like when you find a lost baby bunny.....  Well, on Saturday morning I was at home and Lily was still in the hospital.  I woke up at 5 AM and went to the computer thinking, I need to write some of my friends back hom and ask for help....  I knew the doctor bill was going to be over $2000 and likely $3000....  My medical insurance is more for catostrophic events....  it has a $2000 deductible and Lily did not have insurance, so I was once again thinking, how in the world are we going to pay for this.  As I sat there at 5 AM I did not feel the go ahead from God to write anything, in fact I felt like He was saying, "not now Leanne".....  well if not now, then WHEN?  So, I left the computer and went on about getting ready to go to the hospital to see Lily.   That evening when I came home, a friend had written and said she wanted to send Lily a gift, but since she had already been born, she asked if she could send a little money for me to buy her something, I explained the situation to her and said that any money she sent would go to pay the hospital visit.  She wrote back on Sunday morning and said she would cover the whole bill, the whole $3000.  I sat at the computer and sobbed.  God, just how is it that you use people to bless us in so many ways.  For those of you who work at Wells, this lady was a client of mine several years ago, for those CSR's, do you remember the 2 huge bouquets of flowers sent to my desk 9 years ago?  Well, this client has become a friend over the years and has supported my work here in the orphanage and now in the rancho since I came to Mexico.  She is someone I have never met face to face, but God has used her to speak volumes to me.  Ellen, you are the most generous person I have ever met, thank you for helping me!  Here I go crying again.  So, we stayed a few more days in the hospital with Lily.  She never stopped breathing, she never stopped eating, her temperature is always right where it should be, the doctor told me he thought I would get an infection in my incision where Max's c-section crosses Lily's, but it healed just fine, and when he took my stitches out he commented that that was a miracle too.  Throughout these 3 weeks, I have been amazed at how many people here have come to help me, a couple ladies were bringing me food while I was on bedrest, two other ladies came over daily to give me my injections, someone else came to help me keep the house clean and another friend took care of Max daily for 2 weeks.  I guess I am not used to needing so much help and at times have likely commented to some of you that being here is sometimes lonely.  You aren't really an outsider, but you are different and don't always know how to read things in the culture.  Anyhow, I guess I can't say that anymore either.  There was such an outpouring of help for me here in Mexico that God even used that to show me that I am not alone.  I have made deeper relationships with so many people because of this experience.  So, as crazy as it sounds, I can see God's handywork all over this situation.....  It seems as though Lily is going to be perfectly fine, despite being almost 2 months premature and God is already using her life to give testimony to how absolutely great He is!  No matter how bad your circumstances, give all your petitions to the Lord, He hears them all, and I can't believe how He had everything under control.  It is still hard for me to believe that the hospital bill is paid.  I was sure I was going to have to use a credit card to pay it, with no idea how we would ever pay it off.....  It is like you know it happened, but you just can't believe it.  And I also am so grateful for all the ladies here in Tepic that literally came out of the woodwork to help me.  May God bless every one of them! My mom also was able to come down (she brought all those great bible studies down).  She arrived the night before we were able to bring Lily home from the hospital.  Without her help, I am not sure how I would have survived the last week.  It has truly been a whirlwind.  Well, I wish you all the best.  I hope this e-mail encouraged you.  My faith has been renewed, and I am so grateful to God for using what could have been a nightmare to show me just how great HE is!  Love and Blessings to you! LeAnne, Cio, Max and Lily To help with the summer camp in the rancho, please make your check payable to Missions Support Team and write La Fortuna in the memo line. The mailing address is: Missions Support Team PO Box 277 Waxahachie TX 75168