Meeting with David de Waal, the new Consul General of the Netherlands in Cape Town

This afternoon, March 11, 2009 I visited David de Waal, the new Consul General of the Netherlands in Cape Town.

What a delightful meeting that was.
In the short time that he has been Consul General he has already visited our Health Information Centre at Baphumelele in Khayelitsha together with the Dutch Ambassador in South Africa, Rob de Vos.

They were both very impressed which led to today’s meeting at the Consulate Generals office in Cape Town.

One of the issues we discussed is to see if our YOELL ladies will be able to produce a little momentum that the guests will receive when they visit the Consulate on Queens Birthday on April 30th coming up.

David De Waal is defenitely a man after my own heart as he indicated that he supports small grassroots organizations that are there to empower local people.

An important new friendship has began today in Cape Town.
Many thanks David for your time this afternoon.


Picture: Together with Paul de Waal in front of a official picture of Queen Beatrix.

Rhena Schweitzer Miller, an old personal friend for so many years has passed away

Rhena Schweitzer Miller, the only child of the Nobel laureate Dr. Albert Schweitzer and the director, in the late 1960s, of the hospital that her father and mother opened 96 years ago in a jungle of west central Africa, died Sunday February 22 at the home of one of her daughters in Pacific Palisades, Calif. She was 90.
Rhena Schweitzer was born on Jan. 14, 1919, in Alsace-Lorraine, which was returned to France later that year; for more than 45 years before World War I it was part of Germany. Two years earlier, during the war, her parents had been arrested by the authorities in French Equatorial Africa because they were German and sent to a prison camp in France; their hospital was closed. Dr. Schweitzer returned to Africa in 1924, leaving his family in Europe. His wife and daughter were at the hospital intermittently over the next 20 years.
I met Rhena for the first time in 1969 and we became very good friends. Rhena was very instrumental when I founded the Albert Schweitzer Institute for the Humanities in the United States in 1979. We organized many events together and she and her late husband Dr. David Miller were very much involved when I, together with a group of volunteers organized the largest NGO gathering ever at the United Nations in New York in August 1990; “The Relevance of Albert Schweitzer at the Dawn of the 21st Century”. The long life and spiritual legacy of Albert Schweitzer was the inspiration for the creation of the International Albert Schweitzer Colloquium at the United Nations. It was by no means just a fond tribute to a man of the past, great as he was as a humanitarian, physician, philosopher, theologian, musician and author. Rather, it was a future-oriented study of his ideas and ideals, and of their application to the world of today and tomorrow.
Rhena’s foreword in one of my books about her father exemplified the friendship which we enjoyed for so many years. This is what she wrote: “So often I meet medical doctors, ministers, musicians, and students who tell me that what they are doing is done under the influence of my father. Harold Robles is one of those who, while still a child, was deeply impressed by Schweitzer. His mother once told me rather sadly, “When he was eight years old I lost my son to your father.”
Rhena is survived by four children from her first marriage: a son, Philippe; three daughters, Monique Egli, Christiane Engel and Catherine Eckert; eight grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.
Rhena will be buried next to her parents’ graves in Lambaréné.

PICTURE: Together with Rhena Schweitzer in 1974 in Deventer/Holland