June 18, 2012

G'Day!

 

How we going? I'm going to start using Aussie lingo in all my e-mails from now on so some words or phrases I use may seem different! So I'm in Australia now, obviously, and it is so awesome! It's very beautiful here and the people are so nice, especially from the ward which I went to for the first time yesterday. My first area that I'm serving in here is Pakenham, which is just about 40 minutes outside of the main city area of Melbourne. My companion/trainer's name is Elder Rafferty, and he's from London, England! He's really cool and we get along really well! I look forward to being able to work with him for at least 6 weeks (that's how long each transfer is and I may stay with him for a 2nd transfer but we'll see!). I met our mission president, President Lifferth, and his wife soon after I got off of the plane and they are really great! They're very nice and President Lifferth seems like he'll be awesome at working us hard and setting high goals for us. The goal he has right now is that every companionship should get 2 baptisms by July 29th, which is a pretty high goal for Australia. We had a mission wide fast this past Sunday in order to build our faith for completing this goal so that was a cool experience. It's definitely a little intimidating teaching real people here in Australia than the no-pressure situations you practice with in the MTC. I'm definitely learning a lot out here though and I'm getting to be a better teaching and missionary with each lesson we have. Something really cool that's happened so far is that on the 2nd day out here, in an area that this isn't known for, we saw heaps of Kangaroos in a field and got some cool pictures and videos of them! So that was really neat because it took Elder Rafferty a long time before he ever saw any Kangaroos (he's been out 7 months by the way) and I've seen over 20 already! It's kind of nice here in Pakenham seeing so many familiar stores and things such as McDonald's, KFC, Dominos pizza, Target, and a bunch of other stores. It definitely makes it feel like it's not too far from home which is good. So here in our mission (unless you're in Tasmania, which I hope to be in sometime while I'm out here) we use cars instead of bikes. So the first day when I got here and met Elder Rafferty I found out that he doesn't have his Driver's License yet...which meant that I had to drive 40 minutes from the mission home back to our Flat, on the opposite side of the road and with the steering wheel on the opposite side, and with me being really jet-lagged from the 15 hour flight! But luckily we made it back without any casualties and I've gotten the hang of driving here now. I've already taught heaps of lessons here, to non-members, less active members, and just regular member families, already. So far they've gone really well too which is a plus. I've been a little lost though because Elder Rafferty knows all about each one of them so he's following up on things and asking questions about things I didn't know about so I just kind of stand there and smile every once in a while, haha. But I've started to learn a little more about the people and we have some brand new people to teach this coming Saturday so eventually I'll be able to fit right in! One thing I didn't know about the mission now (which is probably something everybody else knew already but I'm just way behind the times!) is that we only do about an hour a day of just old-school tracting and talking to people. A lot of the time we get referrals from members and then the ward mission leader, Brother Atwater, gives us people to go see. We do get a lot of investigators from that short time though of tracting so I guess that's all that we really need to do at one time. I haven't had too many incredible experiences lesson-wise yet and most of them are kind of a blur so far but we have a lot set up for this week so I know that it'll be a good week! One funny thing is that our District, which consists of 4 Elders and 2 Sisters, happens to be the youngest District in the entire Melbourne mission! Elder Rafferty is the oldest (he's also the District Leader) and he's only been out for 7 months. I just thought that was kind of interesting! The days are already going by really fast and a lot of it has to do with the fact that we're always doing something and we're never just sitting idle at any point during the day. Well I hope everything is going really well back home! I look forward to hearing from you again soon! Cheers!

 

Elder Hopkins