On the difficulty of keeping a low profile
I had only been in the consular agency 7 months when the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks took place in the US. In those first hours and days of confusion, no one really knew what, if anything, would be happening in sequence. In line with the policy drawn up the US State Department, I got a call from my supervisor, the Consul-General in Lisbon. Americans, as a whole, and anyone directly identified with the State Department or US Gov't. were considered especially at risk. I was therefore told that, among other things, I should "keep a low profile." I smiled to myself when the CG said that.
At 1.94m (6'4"), my profile when I walk on the streets of Funchal is anything but low. How often I have been painfully reminded of that with a knock on the head when walking through low doorways in old houses! Plus, we've lived here since 1976, thousands of students sat in my English classes over the 15 years I taught, and we had a bookstore and stationery shop in a downtown shopping center for over 10 years; we are known by people we don't recognize. "Keep a low profile." Maybe if I crawled along the sidewalks, no one would notice me.
It's no use. People always noticed us. When we first came, we stood out, not because of color---Madeira is close to Africa, but it was settled by Portuguese, so there were practically no black people on the island when we came (we only knew of 4 or 5 personally), a situation that has changed in recent years with the influx of immigrants---but because we were one of the few American families on the island (the only one with young children that we knew of), and because we were the first Baptists to come to Madeira.
Perhaps the one incident that most strikingly illustrates how evident our presence was in those early years was the reception of a picture post card. It was written in German, and I read German sufficiently well enough to know that the writer said he and his wife would be seeing us in two weeks' time. I tried matching the sender's name with a German-speaking tourist that might have come once to our church services, but that was getting me nowhere. I studied the postcard more carefully: it had been mailed from the Algarve, the southernmost region of Portugal, which is very popular with German and English tourists, because of the mild weather and sandy beaches. I looked at the addressee: "Bernhard Potter", but that was the sum total of the address...no street, no city, no country...just the name of a person. Suddenly it became very clear: the card wasn't meant for me. A German tourist had gone to the Algarve for a vacation, bought postcards to send to his friends back home ("wonderful time...see you in a couple of weeks"), forgotten to put an address under the name of his neighbor, Bernhard Potter, and the Portuguese Post Office delivered it to the only Potter they could find in Portugal. (Bernhard? Edgar? What's the difference? It's Potter all the same.) Chalk one up for the post office of that time; I'm sure it wouldn't happen today. Too often, even correctly addressed mail never gets delivered!
The implications on mission work are obvious. I spoke about pioneer mission work to a group at the Baptist Seminary near Lisbon last November when we were there. Among the particular aspects of pioneer church-planting missions is the fact that the lives of the missionary and his family set the standards for the new work in the minds of the people. For good or for bad, our lives defined "Baptist" to the Madeirans who had never heard of Baptists, much less seen any.
Joy, our youngest, was born in Madeira and did all her studies through secondary school here. You can read some of her impressions on the subject on her blog, where she has written about living "Where everybody knows your name...or your address..." Low profile? Not likely.
In fact, the afternoon of Sept. 11, just hours after the WTC so dramatically collapsed, and with a police guard dispatched to stake out our house as a precautionary measure, the local TV rushed out for an interview. The interview was inside the house, but when the piece aired on the news that night, there was a view of our "White House on Hill Where Cars Crash" as Joy described it in her blog. Maybe the TV did that on purpose in case terrorists were planning to blow up our house: the locals wanted to make sure Al-Qaeda got the right one.
At 1.94m (6'4"), my profile when I walk on the streets of Funchal is anything but low. How often I have been painfully reminded of that with a knock on the head when walking through low doorways in old houses! Plus, we've lived here since 1976, thousands of students sat in my English classes over the 15 years I taught, and we had a bookstore and stationery shop in a downtown shopping center for over 10 years; we are known by people we don't recognize. "Keep a low profile." Maybe if I crawled along the sidewalks, no one would notice me.
It's no use. People always noticed us. When we first came, we stood out, not because of color---Madeira is close to Africa, but it was settled by Portuguese, so there were practically no black people on the island when we came (we only knew of 4 or 5 personally), a situation that has changed in recent years with the influx of immigrants---but because we were one of the few American families on the island (the only one with young children that we knew of), and because we were the first Baptists to come to Madeira.
Perhaps the one incident that most strikingly illustrates how evident our presence was in those early years was the reception of a picture post card. It was written in German, and I read German sufficiently well enough to know that the writer said he and his wife would be seeing us in two weeks' time. I tried matching the sender's name with a German-speaking tourist that might have come once to our church services, but that was getting me nowhere. I studied the postcard more carefully: it had been mailed from the Algarve, the southernmost region of Portugal, which is very popular with German and English tourists, because of the mild weather and sandy beaches. I looked at the addressee: "Bernhard Potter", but that was the sum total of the address...no street, no city, no country...just the name of a person. Suddenly it became very clear: the card wasn't meant for me. A German tourist had gone to the Algarve for a vacation, bought postcards to send to his friends back home ("wonderful time...see you in a couple of weeks"), forgotten to put an address under the name of his neighbor, Bernhard Potter, and the Portuguese Post Office delivered it to the only Potter they could find in Portugal. (Bernhard? Edgar? What's the difference? It's Potter all the same.) Chalk one up for the post office of that time; I'm sure it wouldn't happen today. Too often, even correctly addressed mail never gets delivered!
The implications on mission work are obvious. I spoke about pioneer mission work to a group at the Baptist Seminary near Lisbon last November when we were there. Among the particular aspects of pioneer church-planting missions is the fact that the lives of the missionary and his family set the standards for the new work in the minds of the people. For good or for bad, our lives defined "Baptist" to the Madeirans who had never heard of Baptists, much less seen any.
Joy, our youngest, was born in Madeira and did all her studies through secondary school here. You can read some of her impressions on the subject on her blog, where she has written about living "Where everybody knows your name...or your address..." Low profile? Not likely.
In fact, the afternoon of Sept. 11, just hours after the WTC so dramatically collapsed, and with a police guard dispatched to stake out our house as a precautionary measure, the local TV rushed out for an interview. The interview was inside the house, but when the piece aired on the news that night, there was a view of our "White House on Hill Where Cars Crash" as Joy described it in her blog. Maybe the TV did that on purpose in case terrorists were planning to blow up our house: the locals wanted to make sure Al-Qaeda got the right one.
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