Our Aussie Elder

At the MTC.
None of the photos were labeled,
so I don't know the names of any of the other Elders

Obviously around Christmas time! A classic "in the car" pose!

Cool dudes outside the Melbourne Temple

Jared sent some photos recently, so I decided to post a few of them and write a bit of an update.
He was in the Chinese Program for one transfer, working in the middle of downtown Melbourne, and spent his days talking to people. He said it was a lot of fun, and he has definitely become braver about approaching and talking with people. He had his first baptism, a Chinese girl called Shirri. Here are some snippets from some emails including one about the baptism, where it sounds like anything that could go wrong - did!:

"We got to the chapel at 3pm to teach an English class. The closet to fill up the font was locked. I asked my comp if he could get a knife and just pop it open. He tells me that won't work. So he gets me to call and see if I can get a key. I called 5 people and no one had one. So I finished off the English Class and then I heard water running. I asked my comp how he did it and he told me he used a knife!!
Then the water was not hot, so me and President Lee (Mission Pres) were in the kitchen filling up buckets of hot water and throwing them into the font. Then my comp asks me to prepare a missionary moment. So I figured something out. The baptism was starting and no one from the Bishopric was there, so I got hold of the Bishop and told him what was going on and he said to continue with it anyway. My missionary moment was a talk I came up with about rainbows and how they came about, then I sang "When I Am Baptized" and bore my testimony. So it all turned out good."

"We have this Golden girl, named Jade. She is Korean. Her mom was baptized last week in Korea, so she referred her daughter to the missionaries here, and now we are teaching her. She is cool as. She's been playing the piano for 10 years. She came to church, and then to a musical fireside that all of us missionaries put on. We even got President Lee to speak at it on the Atonement. It was awesome."

He has since been transferred to a new area:
"I'm in Geelong now, you can google that if you want, right by the beach. It's sweet. We have a two storey house, it's mean (=cool), but like none of the doors close! haha
I'm the district leader, my comp has been out 11 months, and out of the other guys in the district, I think there is only one younger. So I really don't want to have to tell someone off that's older than me in the mission. But I'm excited for our new area. I didn't really do anything to become District Leader. It's just an opportunity to serve the Elders in the District and motivate them. The area is mean although we've had everyone tell us to watch out because a main part of the area is full of drug dealers and heaps of bad people. So that kinda freaked my comp out. He's very protective, always locks the doors, and shakes his sheets every morning to make sure there is nothing there. It's very funny, I find it amusing."

"We have two investigators Rose and Shawn. Rose is the mom, Shawn is 24 and he wants to go on a mission. Rose is cool but she is a little freaked out about things, like how we become spirits when we die, and baptisms for the dead really creeped her out because she thought for the longest time that we were grave robbers and would baptize dead bodies. I was like - what the heck???"

Elder Holland is coming here next month to talk to all the missionaries, so that should be awesome.
We have a baptismal date, although I've never met the guy because he's in America, staying with an American family. But he'll come back a week prior to his baptism, and then ya, that should be sweet.
We've been finding a lot, but we are almost over on our K's (kilometers) for the month, so we've been doing a lot of walking which is cool. We got honked at like 20 times the other day and they were all nice people. I was very surprised.
The ward is awesome, but there are about 700 members and only 100 come every week. So there are heaps and heaps of less actives as you can tell. So that will be one main focus we will have. My comp especially wants to hit up all the less actives because he himself was less active from 10 years old to about a year before his mission. But he's cool as, I love the guy."

I was telling him that I forgot how everything ( I mean absolutely everything) closes on Good Friday here.
"Everything is closed here as well, on Good Friday and Easter. How did I know that? Well...(sing..)"I'm hot blooded, check it and see. I got a fever of a hundred and three.."
So I got a fever of 103.5 or something like that. So we went out to find some medicine, and all the stores were closed. That was awesome! But ya, all good now."