October 21, 2005

Dear Friends and Family

E Ka son. (Good afternoon) We are just about to finish our 7^th week on our mission. I don’t know if it is going fast for you but it is speeding by for us. We are very busy though I don’t think that I could tell you at what specific thing we are so busy. Here are some of the things we are involved in. We travel a lot going from our city to other cities for worship, open houses, missionary meetings and training and to give leadership training. We proselyte all over the district with the missionaries when asked which has ended up being our favorite activity. We visit with the local seminary class. I’m preparing to teach reading and piano to the local branch members. We contact and teach new converts. Today we visited the local teaching hospital to help facilitate the welfare/humanitarian missionaries set up neo-natal resuscitation training. We have been asked to locate some potential sites for the Church to dig wells for the local people who are without adequate clean water in our city. Shopping at the market takes morning or traveling to a grocery store in Lagos takes a day.

We have helped the mission president locate and move missionaries to new apartments. Doug and I have just started a program of missionary apartment inspections so that the apartments never get into the condition that we found them when we got here. (I can just hear my kids say…yup that’s mom for you.) One apartment of 4 missionaries had not had any lights or water for 4 months through their own fault. Another group of 4 missionaries was being evicted by a machete threatening landlord, through no fault of their own, with 1 year left on their pre-paid lease. Another missionary apartment went without lights or water whenever the landlord didn’t pay his utility bills. We had no control over it so we moved them elsewhere. A pair of sisters have to walk through “gray water” in order to get to their apartment…by miraculous means we found them a new apartment yesterday! When I walked through the apartment for a preliminary inspection I asked when I could move in-it was so nice with bright light and inlayed marble floors. The mission president wants all the missionaries to have good living conditions and has made an all-out effort to make it happen. In Nigeria, apartments are leased for 2 years payable up front. There is no recourse if a landlord won’t maintain the building or do what he promised in the lease. 2 of the apartments we have vacated still have 1 year lease left but it has become impossible to keep the missionaries in them. Most of these missionaries have never had such good living conditions their whole loves and don’t have the skills to know how to maintain them. We hope to help train the missionaries to take care of their apartments. Every other month each apartment will get inspected and graded. The missionaries in the best kept apartment will earn a prize. I told them it would be a vase of flowers to beautify itJ I think they think I’m joking about the flowers!

When I say we are busy, it isn’t the kind of busy we lived with at home before our mission. Our life is full of doing good things for others and in turn doing them for our Heavenly Father…it is so far from stress-filled busy-ness that I can’t imagine how we will be able to go back to it. Miracles happen every day…some would call them coincidence but I know that when you are in the service of God, nothing is coincidental. Take the new apartment for the sisters I mentioned. They live across the street from us where we can keep an eye on them for safety reasons. We knew we needed to keep them where we could watch over them. We asked all the missionaries to pray that we would find the sisters a good apartment across the street from us and to ask everybody they came across if they knew of an available place. I have to admit that the “across the street” part was a problem because their current complex was the only apartment we knew that fit that requirement. That landlord was dishonest but the mission president felt he had no choice but to try to negotiate a better apartment in the same complex. Negotiations were going badly. He commented that after several weeks of negotiating he wanted nothing better than to tell the attorney to forget it-and go somewhere else. Our own landlord’s agent has been to see us a couple of times. We have begun a personal relationship with him and his wife. He has become very interested in the church since finding out that all the missionaries including the mission president are volunteers spending their own money and not getting paid to serve. (He asks what kind of church could stimulate such sacrifice from its members!) He came to visit us. In the conversation we mentioned that we were looking for a new apartment close to us. He said…”I’m the agent for the apartment across the street. There are two apartments that are available.” We wondered where? Looking out our window, he pointed out a small 4-plex partially hidden by the larger apartment complex. I had previously noticed it but thought it was a private home. It was very attractive and well kept. He told us the price which was so very reasonable and took us to see the inside. Inside the gate the grounds were landscaped and well-wept. The apartment was a palace compared to what I’ve seen here. We asked him if he believed in miracles…because he was the instrument in God’s hand to answer our prayer. Actually 2 prayers were answered. The mission president did get the pure pleasure of calling the dishonest attorney for the other complex and telling him to forget it!

Everyday I can write down in my journal these types of miracles. They happen when we need to find something. They happen when we need to go somewhere. They happen out of the blue. A miracle happened when we needed to find an apartment for another set of missionaries. Even though they are used to miracles, finding their apartment even stunned them with how specifically their needs, expressed in prayer, were answered. We are looking for a bank to set up accounts for the church branch and the missionaries to have their monthly stipend withdrawn. Getting an account here is like trying to get access to Fort Knox. It has been a problem that has gone unresolved since we got here. Today, 2 representatives from another bank came to our apartment. They had been looking for us…the church has been banking with their bank in another area and they wanted to know if we would be interested in doing the same in Sagamu. Here was a bank that solicited our business…unlike the other bank whose reps acted like they were condescending to allow us to use their bank. Doug had been going to meet with them next week to try and finalize something…it isn’t a coincidence that this other bank found us before any papers were signed.

We really love our mission. 6 weeks ago, I wouldn’t have believed it could happen so quickly. The people of Nigeria have worked their way into our hearts. We see their poverty, their meager wages, and their lack of schooling or possessions and wonder how they can be so happy without having all the things we think we need to be happy. Yet they are happy without it. We love serving them. The teaching that you love those you serve is not an abstract idea…it is reality for us. Our friends from South Jordan, Margaret and Craig Summers, live and work in Lagos. We were able to spend 2 nights with them last week. They live in a lovely apartment that looks out over the ocean. We dined on wonderful food. We shopped and found things we couldn’t find in our town. They treated us like royalty…but we were still glad to get back to our humble apartment and return to missionary work.

If you get a chance send us an email. I probably can’t write back but it is always good to get news from home.

Love,

Sister and Elder Gilmore