Pack up and load out to Berlin day. Walter (our interpreter) joined us shortly after breakfast and then we were off to Ilobosco, the pottery community.
We started out at the pottery shop Bob likes to frequent. They have unique stuff and also help ex-gang members learn a trade and find a way to make a living outside the gang. The pottery everywhere tends to be terra cotta but they do something to it at this shop that blackens it. It’s the only shop that has it. Most of the other shops have ceramics that must come from a mold…you see the exact same designs in most of the shops, only with different painting. This shop has hand-made designs that you won’t see in any of the other shops. I absolutely loved some…I don’t know for sure what they were, vases, maybe?...things they had that were basically large cylinders made of the dark pottery with leaf or branch impressions in the surface. I’m not sure if they were actual impressions or hand made designs that just looked like it but there were a couple that really, really wanted to come home with me. I just couldn’t see how I’d get them home all in one piece, though. So I left them there. I got a couple pair of earrings and another Mayan flask sort of thing to go with the two I’d bought in La Palma ($6).
In another shop, I got a trio of tiny, vase-shaped pots that fit the color scheme of my living room (another $6).
We loaded up in the van again and headed for Berlin. It took a good long while to get the van unloaded once we arrived at the Casa Pastoral where we’d be staying as everyone had to hug and greet everyone else. The women of the delegation moved into the room above the chapel and the men into the room across from the office, inside the house. Walter got the room adjacent to Bob’s house.
Randy and I spent most of the rest of the evening working on Bob’s PC. He’d been having internet woes and was also unable to log into his bank’s web site. We didn’t really get very far, other than to determine that they really were 2 separate problems.
