Done

As I said in the previous post, last week was quite a week, and as I said earlier on May 29, the Consular Agency was scheduled to close on June 7.  That day came and went; on that day the US consular services in Funchal also went.

The Consul-General came on Tuesday afternoon, and from then until he left on Friday afternoon, it was almost non-stop activity... in the office (attending to all the details of closing down) and out of the office (meetings with various authorities explaining the change).

Even before the CG came, there was a lot to do: some materials could just be tossed in the trash; others could not. We had nothing in our office classified beyond Senstive But Unclassified and PII (Personally Identifiable Information), so there was never any "danger" of a leak at the level of Wikileaks or the current revelations making the news. PII and SBU had to be shipped back in a diplomatic pouch for secure shredding. (Our old WWII vintage shredder burned out a year or so ago when the first sets of files were destroyed.) But there were boxes of floppy disks and CDs with backup files on them. These had to be destroyed. There's a certain therapeutic value to being able to take a hammer and crush CDs.

Not so therapeutic was destroying stationery "for official use only". That box of manila envelopes was one type that had to be torn up. The reams of paper serving as my "work table" were another type.  And there were many other types with many other thousands of sheets of paper that had to be ripped up and rendered unusable.

After removing the hard drive and RAM from the last computer, my last "official" act was to guarantee there would never be another official act of the American Consular Agency of Funchal: destruction of the seals. The rubber stamp was easily cut up with a knife; the press with the raised/embossed seal required something a bit more forceful. We had to grind down the two plates until there was no impression left. Very definitively, the end.

The Consulate in Funchal was the first consulate opened by the new country called the United States of America, back in 1792 (the protection of their supply of Madeira Wine was a matter of national interest to the Founding Fathers--the Declaration of Independence was toasted with Madeira)...and in the intervening 221 years the office was closed and reopened a couple of times in the early 1900s. I don't foresee a comeback this time.

WHAT WAS NOT DESTROYED

Some items were not deemed important enough to return, or sensitive enough to be destoyed. Trash...a lot of things qualified as trash, but among the items were two that hark back to a time when it was OK to use the word "God" and be a public official, and to use the Word of God in official acts. There was a time when oaths had to be taken on a Bible.

Left: English Bible    Right: Portuguese Bible

 The flyleaf of each one reads:

        (English Bible)                                                     (Portuguese Bible)
AMERICAN CONSULATE                AMERICAN CONSULAR AGENCY
           APR  7  1923                                            AUG  20   1953

    FUNCHAL, MADEIRA                             FUNCHAL, MADEIRA


The English Bible is in especially fragile condition, but it's still all there. Jesus said that heaven and earth would pass away, but His Word would never pass away. Consulates come and go; nations rise and fall; empires flourish and fade; Bibles may become tattered, but the Word of God remains forever, as strong and true today as it was from the beginning.  My hope is built on nothing less....