The California Homeopath
Journal of the California Homeopathic Medical Society

June 5 – 7 2009, Amersfoort, The Netherlands

On a sunny June weekend in the cloistered halls of Het Klooster, once a monastery and now a modern conference centre set in Amersfoort, the Netherlandʼs greenest city, homeopathic history was being made. A hundred delegates from twenty-five different countries had travelled from Africa, India, Nepal, the Caribbean, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and across Europe to take part in the first ever International Conference on Homeopathy in the Developing World. The long held dream of Harry van der Zee finally took flight that Friday evening, and as an excited group of early arrivals met for soup and sandwiches, the agenda was clear: to celebrate, inspire and encourage the work being done. 

This was a gathering of diverse humanity, but all with a particular shared experience, a group used to working out in the field, used to relying on their own resources, used to living on the edge, and to putting themselves on the frontline for the greater good and for what they believed in. Meeting at last in one place to share ideas and offer mutual support was a rare and precious thing. 

By Carol Boyce

Carol Boyce, BSc, MCH, CCH, RSHom(NA)

Carol Boyce, homeopath, teacher, writer, graduated from the College of Homeopathy, London, in 1985. As a founder and director of the forerunner to Homeopaths Without Borders U.K., she set up homeopathic teaching and clinical projects from Calcutta to Cairo and took homeopathy to Baghdad after the first Gulf war and taught in medical schools in Cuba with HWB U.S.  She teaches in schools across the U.S. and is currently making a series of documentary films about homeopathy.  See Carol's film project, Saving a Lost Generation at: www.savingalostgeneration.com.