September 5, 2011- I´m Serving in...Germany

Hey everyone!!
So this last week was pretty crazy, lots and lots of changes but they were all good. The area I was serving in, Itapoá, was a really interesting town and about 80% of the houses were empty because it is just a Summer vacation town so it complicates missionary work a bit. Our President wanted us to see if it was even worth keeping open so that´s what we´ve been doing the last 4 weeks. We told our President everything about the town and our situation and he said he would pray about it and make a decision. So he did, he prayed and then called us and told us that he´d like us to open a new area in the mission, a town named Brusque. It was bittersweet to leave Itapoá but now that we´ve gotten here to Brusque we have seen that it truly was revelation for us to come here. We already had a few baptisms last night and we had 3 other families not of our faith come and attend the baptismal service. The Spirit was super strong and everybody was crying, inlcuding people from those 3 families. We then grabbed 2 of the families after the baptismal service and brought them into a room where we taught them briefly about temples and everybody just kept on crying haha it was such an incredible experience. The branch here just got a brand new chapel and we are the first missionaries they´ve had for 3 years so they are all super excited about missionary work, it is so great! The city of Brusque is such a cool place, like it´s this super super nice German town in the middle of the Brasilian forest. Everyone here is German or Italian and it definitely feels like we are serving in Europe, and the people here are pretty rich, which is kind of a bust but it´s all good. The city is super well known for it´s clothing factories and apparently everything here (clothing wise) is super cheap. We´ve got a really nice house to and it´s just super good to be here, the people are so excited. I´m really happy to be with my same companion too, Elder Emerson, he is a super good guy and we get along and work super good with each other. This place is supposed to get super super hot during the Summer tho and it´s a lot of hills so we will see how that goes! Everything is great tho, life is grand. I love you all so much and hope you give the little ones some loves for me!!!
Love,
Elder Michael J. Neilson