Week 83

This should give you a good idea of where I got transferred to! :)

Another transfer has come and right now i am sitting at the Kogarah(pronounced cogra) library. It's technically in our area because we don't actually have an area. i'm in Bankstown 3rd branch! It's the chinese branch and we cover pretty much all of sydney. The picture i sent you is actually from the north mission. we went there last night to meet an investigator. Apparently the only way to get to our branch mission leader's house using public transport is to take the harbor ferry under the harbor bridge.... bahahaha i'm so flippin excited. My companion is elder Ward from the MTC days! haha now i've been companions with everyone from my MTC room. I really am so excited. We are getting smashed with the chinese, but it's all good. Elder Ward has been here for 2 transfers already so his chinese is pretty good. He understands a lot more than i do. Haha i'm amazed at how its possible for so many people to live in australia and survive with speaking zero english. We have 2 investigators on date right now and neither of them can speak any english. We met with Matt last night. He is getting baptised this weekend. He's the man. We had dinner and talked about his baptism. Apparently he has given up smoking and he told us that when he feels a temptation to smoke, he prays and it goes away. He's awesome. and i can't understand a lot of what he says, but that's okay. we get through. The other guy we have on date is Shu xiansheng. everyone just calls him mr shu. he was supposed to get baptised this weekend, but his wife got caught up in customs and is being held in the airport as we speak. SO we are trying to help him out because he doesn't speak any english so he needs us to translate, but they won't give us any information because we are a third party. haha it's a bit of a mess so the baptism is post-poned for a bit. but we'll get him back on. Elder Ward said he's extremely keen and he wants his wife to get baptised. so if we can get her into the country then she'll be sweet! haha  Our flat is in hurstville, which is pretty much china town. We were talking to a guy last night that was telling us that Hurstville is better than the actual chinatown in downtown sydney because it's cleaner and there's just as many chinese people. We went street contacting for like 2 hours last night and got to talk to HEAPS of people. I really love it here. It's going to be a great area. I told elder ward that i hope the next time i unpack is in my bedroom at home. I want to die here! The branch is technically a cantonese branch, but president said the long term goal is to turn it into a mandarin branch. So we'll see what we can do for that. I'll have to tell you about our investigators and stuff next week. i'm still learning it all. We have to do a FHE tonight and the family can't speak english so it will be very interesting. I guess that's the problem when you replace a missionary from beijing with a missionary from Utah.... that's alright. pray for me to get the gift of tongues! oh also, there's a group of old chinese men that play chinese chess in the park and i have made it my goal to learn how to play, and then challenge one of them to a game. so we'll see how that goes. There's a kid from hong kong in our flat that i will get to teach me and train me. His name is elder Lam and his comp is elder Fisher.

Last week was pretty sweet. It was sad to say goodbye to everyone but it was still good. I really loved mudgee branch and i hope to be able to go back to visit sometime. They have such awesome members. Very excited to serve here for now. I think it will help me not be too trunky. SHould be pretty sweet. I had a hectic experience last week that i've been dying to tellyou all about, but there's a picture that goes with it so i'll wait to send the picture to tell yous. IT was cool.

SHout out to the cutest newborn in the world right now, Gracie Hanks! Can't wait to meet her! haha i'm pretty sure it's like totally against the rules to have a child while your sibling is on a mission, but i guess i'll get over it. Love you Sarah and John! Congrats!

Have a good week everyone. I'm sure there are some questions so just email them to me and i will answer them for you:) WO AI NIMEN!!!!!

-田长老

THis is what we call a skucks delux

This man's name is Luigi. A few weeks ago the elders in cowra told me they had someone they wanted me to meet. SO we went on trade-offs and we drove out to this tiny town in the middle of nowhere to meet him. He said he lived in sydney about 30 years ago and he used to do personal Bible studies with President Burton Tingey. He said grandpa thought his beliefs were interesting and he got him to speak at a fireside one time. He said he met grandma, but it was only once and it was just in passing. His surname is like Debelissimo or something italian like that. He was a cool guy and it was so cool to talk to him about grandpa. He said grandpa was a great man and that he taught him a lot about the book of mormon. Pretty sweet, eh?

An artsy pic of Mudgee through our dirty windshield