Report from the Netherlands

I want to report the most important things that happened in the L.E.Group of the Netherlands.

Last year in the Netherlands everythings goes well. We exist now for 15 years.

We just have, for the second time, the national skin-week. The skin-federation travels along 8 cities in the Netherland and have a big promotion-tour on important places in the cities like markets, musical festivals etc. The children get a balloon and the parents an information package. It was a big success. We also promoted the skin-fund.

In February a very important happening took place into our group. We had a weekend with our young patients in a youth-hostel near a city. There were 40 young people and they talked about their problems with Lupus. The problems are mutual. For instance the problems with their studies. Especially the students of the secondary schools and universities. The program is too long and they can't follow the whole program. So they need a year longer than the healthy students and it cost another year payment. Then the problem with falling in love and the sexual problems. Especially the young people with the skin-problems. It was a great help for everyone of them that they were not the only ones.

In the past years on every last page of our magazine we add a list of medical words in an alphabetic order. Now they are listed together in a dictionary and it will come out this month.

Recently we have a new region in our group. It is not in the Netherlands but in Curacao. They are very enthousiastic and they have grown from 5 members to 70 members in 2 months. They found 2 doctors to support them and they report to the Netherlands every month.The secretary came to the Netherlands and took all the papers that they need there.

Willy and myself are invited to Curacao at Christmas. I don't think we can go, but I will say with this sentence how good we work together.

So, this was the small report of the Netherlands.