Baptism in Abolição!

HI FAMILY,

My first week in Abolição was certainly a great one. Full of work and sweat, and happiness, and singing, and more work. Before I forget, I sent home about two months ago an sd card with ALL of my photos since the beginning of my mission until september of this year. Did you guys every get that sd card. If not, at least I have a backup. Just let me know if it still hasn´t gotten there.

My first week in Abolição with Elder Gonzales was full of cool little milagres. Just to explain the area a bit, It´s not the safest area in the mission. You don´t have to worry too much, Mom. We´re smart and we don´t do anything dumb that would encourage men bigger than me to steal my pants and whatnot. BUT There´s a big favela called O Complexo do Alemão (The German Complex), which is a pretty big and dangerous area. It´s also a good portion of of area. One half of this favela is in Abolição, and the other half is in one of my past areas, Ramos. So now I can say, I´ve served in the entire Complexo do Alemão! I think they made a movie about this favela, too, called Alemão. Anyway, as you can see in the picture I included in the email, there´s lots of morros (hills) with communities and stuff. We also have to walk for an hour just to arrive in our area. We´re living with missionaries from a different ward, and even though we have a house all settled for us in this area, we´re just waiting on the secretaries from the mission office to buy some furniture for the house. and this has been the case for over a transfer #frustration #walkmyfaceoff

BUT We had a baptism! A lady named Maria da Luz, who Elder Gonzales started teaching last transfer, accepted our invite to be baptized last saturday. She is a very humble lady, who has a big heart. It was a beautiful and simple baptismal meeting and we´re as excited as ever to continue finding people to get to know the Lord´s true church. 

We had a SICK service project on saturday morning. We helped build a house! Funny how mom asked me about that last week, and a member asked us for some help putting in concrete on the roof of this guys house he was building. Normally, our president wouldn't let us do labor like that, but since there were men who aren´t members of the church there, we were able to help out! We did some serious MANual labor, including filling buckets with rocks, carrying them up the stairs, mixing sand with cement mix with the rocks and water, refilling the buckets with this new mix, carrying it up to the roof, and putting it in the mold-things. All in the hot sun. I loved it! It was my first experience in building a house, and we got some good referrals of people to teach.

We also had the Christmas/Book of Mormon mission choir performance yesterday. We´ll be passing each of the stake centers this transfer to sing. The spirit was way strong, and many people´s hearts were touched by the Christmas message that the Book of Mormon offers us. This Saturday, we´ll pass the stake that I passed over a year serving in, the Arsenal Stake!

I love you all so much and am so happy to be where I am serving the Lord in Abolição, Save a slice of pie for me, okay? 

Love,

Elder Braun