Week of April 30 from Braunschweig

Hey fam and friends! My first week in the beatiful city of Braunschweig is in the books. It was totally insane! I´ll try and recap it all a bit.

Braunschweig is a very beautiful city with about 250,000 inhabitants. It´s famous for its university and science. I don't know too much about it really, but it´s super similar to Kiel in lots of respects. I´m working on getting the bus system down and stuff and trying to figure out where I am. It´s been pretty hot outside lately and there are just people all over the place. There´s definitely lots of work to do here and we dove in head first this week!

So the transition from the office to the field is not as hard as I had pictured it, but definitely not as easy as I had hoped. The rust knocked off pretty quickly though and we got things rolling off to a blazing start. Basically there was already a lot going on here, but this week we found 10 new investigators made out almost 20 new appointments, made out 2 new baptismal dates, had about 7 walk-ins and taught close to 30 lessons. It was literally INSANE. The Lord blessed us in ways I had never seen before. People just opened their doors and asked us to come in before we had even said anything. The hard part is trying to keep all of the names straight and plan for all of these people at this point. We focused a lot on student housing here at the universtiy and have so many new Chinese investigators I hardly know what to do. We´ve got a great ward with about 120 there most Sundays, and I think the big next step to take is going to be getting them involved in missionary work.

The new district is pretty fun as well. I forgot what it´s like to be a District Leader. We have the "sisters district" here in the mission, so it consists of my companion and I with 4 sisters. It´s kind of fun to have a little district where you can be every week. It´s a lot more fun to take numbers from 2 areas instead of 78 as well. :) It will be a good transfer.

Today we were in the neighboring city of Wolfsburg at a huge VW factory/museum like place. It was pretty cool to see the ways the car industry has effected this are. We were there with our ward mission leader and it was good to get to know him better as well. There are lots of really cool members here. West Germany is just still so different from East Germany. It really has got this feel to it that I haven't felt since I was a golden, so it´s kind of refreshing in a way.

Well the work is really hard, and every day I´m getting closer to my goal of wanting to not hate sweating in missionary clothes, but it´s good experience. My testimony grows every single day. I really miss my last area, companion, and the office staff sometimes, but I know this is where I need to be so I'm more than happy to lift where I stand! Hope you all have a great week back home- love you all lots!