Retired medical missionary still making an impact

Lee Baggett and his colleagues teach people in Mexico how they can purify a 55-gallon barrel of water with just two tablespoons of chlorine bleach. (Photo courtesy of Manos Hermanas)

image_pdfimage_print

Access to pure water eliminated deaths due to water-borne diseases in multiple Mexican villages, and about 2.5 million nutritious meals have been provided to hungry people, thanks to a pair of nonprofit organizations that grew out of the vision of veteran medical missionary Lee Baggett and his colleagues.

Manos Hermanas provides sacks of corn to provide for the immediate needs of hungry people in Mexico and seed corn for future harvests. (Photo courtesy of Manos Hermanas)

Baggett is president of Manos Hermanas, based in Guadalajara, Mexico, and executive director of Hands in Service Ministries in Amarillo—partner organizations devoted to meeting physical needs in Christ’s name.

When Baggett began his studies at Wayland Baptist College, he was a self-described “preacher boy.”

“I felt called to preach. I was not going to stoop to being a doctor,” he said.

However, God used his experiences as a summer missionary to redirect his life. In Juarez, he and his future wife, Ruthie, and other student missionaries helped teach people about water-borne diseases and how to prevent them.

“Ruthie helped a mother bury her baby in a shoebox after the child died of dehydration caused by diarrhea,” he recalled.

Missions volunteers taught local residents how to purify a 55-gallon barrel filled with contaminated water simply by adding two tablespoons of readily available chlorine bleach.

“When we arrived, the news reported about 200 children a day were dying of dehydration,” Baggett said. “In our area, when we left, there had been no more deaths due to dehydration.”

Serve according to needs

At a student missions conference at Glorieta Baptist Assembly, Baggett committed to follow God’s leading into medical missions.


Sign up for our weekly edition and get all our headlines in your inbox on Thursdays


After he graduated from Wayland and married, the newlywed couple relocated to Mexico, where Lee entered medical school and Ruthie worked as a schoolteacher.

As a medical student in 1964, Baggett began serving with the outreach clinics of the Hospital Mexico Americano in Guadalajara. That experience taught him a lesson he has applied for nearly six decades: Serve according to people’s needs, wherever the needs are.

In 1994, Baggett helped found Manos Hermanas as a broad-based lay nonprofit organization that responds to medical and humanitarian needs throughout Mexico.

Manos Hermanas provides nutritious food for orphanages and homes for the elderly in Mexico. (Photo courtesy of Manos Hermanas)

Manos Hermanas helps individuals and local groups who care about meeting local needs by working in cooperation with businesses, other interested people and government officials at federal, state, regional and local levels. Manos Hermanas seeks to improve the lives of people in some of the most isolated and underserved areas of Mexico.

The Baggetts retired from the International Mission Board in 2002. Five years later, they left the Guadalajara hospital’s outreach program and returned to Texas.

“When we left, we knew of about 300 nurses, doctors and dentists doing medical outreach,” Baggett said.

From 1974 to 2007, the Hospital Mexico Americano’s medical outreach clinics served about 140,000 medical patients and more than 35,500 dental patients. The program resulted in 5,327 recorded professions of faith in Christ.

A couple of years after the Baggetts relocated to Texas, they and Don Sewell—a former missionary to Mexico who went on to lead Texas Baptist Partnerships and the Faith in Action Initiatives for Baylor Scott & White Health—founded Hands in Service Ministries.

The nonprofit organization’s purpose is to promote awareness, enlist volunteers and raise funds for Manos Hermanas, which has served more than 25,000 people in the past 28 years.

Working with multiple ministry partners

Ministry partners include the Christian Life Commission’s Texas Baptist Hunger Offering, Texas Baptist Men, Baylor Scott & White’s Faith in Action Initiatives and the Texas Baptist Missions Foundation.

Manos Hermanas and its ministry partners drilled four deep-water wells serving communities in Zacatecas, worked with hospitals in the United States to provide medical equipment for charitable clinics at multiple sites in Mexico, fitted more than 150 leg amputees with prosthetic limbs, and drastically improved childhood nutrition through simple supplements such as a daily tablespoon of an alfalfa extract concentrate.

TBM has worked with Manos Hermanas to provide lifesaving water purification and decontamination, as well as facilitate delivery of food supplement shipments.

The Texas Baptist Hunger Offering provides funds to help Manos Hermanas personnel teach family gardening techniques, such as vertical gardens. (Photo courtesy of Manos Hermanas)

Through its partnership with Amarillo Baptist Association, HIS Ministries has received hunger offering funds that not only provide food baskets for people in need, but also enabled Manos Hermanas volunteers to train and equip Mexican families for gardening, small-animal husbandry and poultry-raising.

In a quarterly report, Baggett quoted Lidia, whose family benefited from laying hens: “Our family now has a source of good protein for our diet in our own home, without having to buy at a high price in the supermarket.”

Manos Hermanas teams taught families with limited space how to grow vertical gardens by planting seeds in soil-filled plastic bottles mounted on old wooden pallets.

In another quarterly report, Baggett noted gardening classes had to be temporarily suspended when group meetings were prohibited due to a spike in COVID-19. However, 22 families that already had received instruction continued to benefit from the gardens they had started.

“They produced crops for their families and seed to share with others,” the report stated.

God provides the tools and resources

The hunger offering and the Texas Baptist Missions Foundation also provided funding to enable families to build ecological latrines. One quarterly report includes a testimony by Isabel, whose family now has a sanitary outhouse.

“We are glad that now we do not have to go out to the corral behind the trees,” she said. “It is dangerous, especially at night in the cold while my two children are sick.”

All Manos Hermanas services are based on community needs and provided with no distinction as to sex, race, creed or political affiliation, Baggett noted.

“It has been our privilege since the beginning to watch our Lord provide all the tools and all the resources we have needed to work with multiple teams of colleagues alongside each local team to help their people meet their needs,” Baggett said.

Citing 1 Peter 4:10-11, he added: “Our Lord is fair. He always provides what is needed for each task he gives us. It is his kingdom, not ours.”


We seek to connect God’s story and God’s people around the world. To learn more about God’s story, click here.

Send comments and feedback to Eric Black, our editor. For comments to be published, please specify “letter to the editor.” Maximum length for publication is 300 words.

More from Baptist Standard