¿dónde está mi piña?

Emma Matthews' Photography

Hola lectores!  I'd love to say that I've returned from Mexico fluent in Spanish but, alas, that just isn't the case. So luckily for you my blog posts will still be in English*.
About the only phrases I learnt or used were:
Casa | House Baño | Toilet Me gusta | I like Hola | Hello Adios | Goodbye Dios | God  ¿dónde está mi piña? | Where is my pineapple?
That last phrase was definitely said the most within our ReBuild team. The story behind it is simple yet hilarious. Emma and myself were on site for kid's club. It was the first kid's club of the week so there were only a few children around before word got out. This meant that to start with we had more than one volunteer per child. So Emma and I stepped back and chatted to a lady from Amor. She taught us how to ask an older lad, who looked about 15, what school year he was in. Emma tried it out loud a few times before approaching the young boy and asking ' ¿dónde está mi piña? '. The confusion on his face scared Emma into asking again, this time she altered the intonation in her question. An even more confused look arose on his face as he realised she actually had asked where her pineapple was the first time. Much to Emma's distress we all found it extremely funny. Emma then learnt how to say sorry and the lady from Amor explained to the boy that she had played a trick on Emma. He laughed along too.
Over the next few days I plan to share some of my stories about my first trip to Mexico, my first ever mission trip, and my first house built by myself and an amazing team in just 30 working hours.
A little story that I've got to share upon returning to the UK is probably different to what you would expect. This afternoon I begun to upload my videos from the trip ready to make a few videos to show my friends and family. As I copied the files across from my SD card to my laptop I got a notification saying something along the lines of 'Your startup disk is nearly full, delete some files.' I stopped the upload of any further files and went downstairs to find my back up hard drive. As I was plugging the lead into my laptop, the entire thing shut down. It had been on 90% battery just a few minutes previously. Much to my disappointment, I couldn't get the computer to turn back on. In the back of my mind I was actually very much at peace with the situation. Still knowing where we'd just come from and how I hadn't missed my laptop at all, I felt all the more detached from the heap of metal I was once inseparable from. After over an hour talking to Keith from Apple, who happened to be extremely nice, I still hadn't seen light from my laptop. Considering I hadn't freaked out earlier now would've been the ideal opportunity, but I didn't. I didn't feel the urge to scream, to cry, to press random buttons harder and harder until something worked. I was level-headed and kept a conscious new perspective in the back of my mind the entire time.  As of yet my laptop is still unusable. I'm writing this from Emma's (thank you to my bestest friend in the whole world forever and forever, I love you) which she has lent to me for the next few days to get the Mexico film editing done. I'll be taking my laptop into Apple to be seen by an Apple doctor very soon but in the meantime I'm so thankful to God for keeping me calm and showing me the perspective I need since returning to my 'luxury' home after camping in a desert for a week.
Amy xo
*You can now translate my posts to most languages using the translate button on the right hand side of my blog page.