7 May 2006

Friends and Family,

Just a short note about the village of Atoyo I wrote about before. We have received news back that the LDS Charities which does humanitarian work for the Church will fund the projects we requested. If you recall, the village of a few thousand has no safe water supply. They fetch water from a nearby river. The Church will drill them a borehole (well). This project will not get under way until the next humanitarian missionary couple arrives from the US. They are due in June or July. So hopefully, in August or September the borehole will be drilled and equipped.

The Church will also reconstruct the roof of the primary school. We will be responsible for managing this project. The Church will pay for the building materials and the local residents will volunteer their labor to build it. If we can get it done for less than the budget, we are hoping to do some additional work at the school, such as maybe painting the building, buying some desks, and blackboards.

Recently, the LDS District Centre (church meetinghouse) in Ijebu-Ode was repainted and the chalkboards in all the classrooms were replaced with whiteboards. We are going to see if we can get the old chalkboards and donate them to the school.

Last week, Ike Ferguson, the Area humanitarian representative came over from Ghana. He gave us a box of books donated by Deseret Book. It is a collection of about 50 books that they put together to donate to schools in developing countries. We will take them to the primary school for their library. As I mentioned earlier, the school has a room they call the library, but it has no books. With these books, the students can spend a class period in the library reading.

We will keep you posted on the progress of these little projects.

Love

Elder and Sister Gilmore