13 Nov 2005

Dear family and friends,

This week’s letter will focus on our Friday night movies. Sister Gilmore and I decided that the members of the Sagamu Branch need to be friendlier with each other. Many have been members under 1 year, don’t know each other and don’t socialize. As we discussed this problem, we thought that if we started showing movies on Friday night, it might make a difference.

Here they don’t have movie theaters so people don’t watch movies. Those few people with TVs don’t watch movies or American shows. They have Nigerian produced TV shows. We have never watched any, but they appear to be like Soap Operas.

So we took our 19-inch color TV and VCR machine downstairs to the where we hold church and tried it out. We placed the TV on a table and a box to raise it high enough so everyone could see and turned it on. The sound wasn’t loud enough so we rigged up a microphone in front of the TV speakers. With this system appearing to work we announced we would begin showing movies.

Our first movie night was two weeks ago. We showed “The Other Side of Heaven”. At 5PM we hold Branch PEC (priesthood executive committee meeting). At the same time Sister Gilmore teaches her piano class. Seven brethren attend PEC and Sister Gilmore’s piano class draws about the same. Both end at 6PM, and then we set up for the movie. At 6:30 we start the movie. Even though it isn’t dark yet, it is still ok.

For the first show, we discovered a couple of things. The sound system isn’t very good. That and the fact that the movie (The Other Side of Heaven) had a lot of dialogue contributed to many in the audience not understanding the dialogue. Also contributing is that for many of the audience, English is a second language. So we had some people explaining or interpreting for other watchers.

The second problem was that the movie was too long, 2 hours. We started a little late because not many people were here, but eventually about 30 people came. However, many left early (after 8PM) because many people don’t like to be out after 8:30-9PM. And since they walk, they left before it was over. When the movie ended at 8:50, we had about 15 left. Also contributing to the lateness of the movie was that half-way thru we lost power.

As I have explained in previous letters, the National Electrical Power Association (or Authority) (NEPA) is the national electrical utility. It is famous for going out all the time. On average I would say we lose power 3 or 4 times a day. Sometimes the power is off for 5 minutes, sometimes for hours. The longest it’s been out since we’ve been here was two days. When the power goes out we have a big diesel generator we start up to provide backup electricity. So of course during the movie, NEPA went out. We were sitting in total darkness. So I carefully walked over to the door, went out and started up the generator. We then restarted the movie at the closest point we could find. So we watched the hurricane scene twice.

Afterwards we had to consider the results as less than spectacular. So we decided that we would try something else. We can’t do anything about the sound system, so we decided that we would try a comedy, and maybe that would overcome the lack of understanding.

So last Friday we showed “Finding Nemo”. We thought this would be a perfect movie for them, it is funny, well made and is only 100 minutes long.

Well, we discovered problems with our choice again. While it is a comedy, there is a lot of dialogue, much of it spoken very fast and hard to understand. Also most of the people in our audience have never seen the ocean, even though we are only about 50 miles from the ocean, so they didn’t know anything about what they were watching. They didn’t know what a shark was, so the whole Bruce “fish are friends not food” thing just didn’t work. So while they all stayed (about 25) till the end, I don’t think any of them understood it all, and many of them probably didn’t understand any of it. I had to stand up during the movie and explain things like “sharks eat other fish”, Sidney is a city in Australia, a fish tank is where you keep pet fish, etc.

So after the movie, Sister Gilmore and I have decided to try a different approach. We are going to prescreen all our movies. We will look for little or no dialogue or dialogue that is simple and clear. Modern cartoons like Nemo, Toy Story, Monsters Inc, are out. They have too much fast dialogue and American humor. We have decided that we are going to try to get old Disney movies like Bambi, Cinderella, Snow White, etc. We don’t have any of these so we are going to try to get them from home. We will see how that goes.

We are also going to show more LDS produced videos like Legacy, Windows of Heaven, etc. This Friday we are going to show “The Restoration” followed by President Hinckley’s talk from April 2005 conference entitled “The Great Things Which God Has Revealed”. It is a great talk about the things revealed to Joseph Smith.

We brought the DVD of April Conference with us. We are glad we did. We like to watch the talks and choir. We even try to find Suzanne as the camera pans thru the choir. It is one of the best things we brought.

So we plan on showing more conference talks if it works out this Friday. We will let you know what happens.

This concludes this week’s letter.

Love, Elder Gilmore