The Hague, August 2006

Dear friends and colleagues,

I would like to thank you all for your comments, advice and help in making our annual conference the continual success it is. My thanks go out particularly to the Advisory Board members, the excellent and efficient office team with Irene Crepin at the helm and my fellow Board members. I would also like to give a special mention to Fokke de Jong for all his work and collaboration on setting up the very successful Advisory Panel which we are keeping - this year with a special focus on Kosovo. You will also notice some changes to the week that should enable those who want to, to have a free afternoon for excursions and so no longer take out delegates from the debates. We hope this will solve the problem of absenteeism in the week.

Please note that we have been able, due to the cooperation of the Convention Centre with Irene to keep the costs of the conference to within the current level of inflation. Irene has been the key in the negotiations of this, and in spite of the reduced space all the committees will be able to be accommodated in the Convention Centre, the OPCW building or a nearby hotel as was the case in 2006.

The Reports Book has been edited by Chris Ellison and will be available from the website soon. Many thanks for all his hard work on it. In future we will probably reduce the number of hard copies since many of you prefer to download those parts that are relevant to your delegates. We look forward to hearing your views on that.

We affiliated several new conferences this year, as you can see on the website. Please refer to their specific websites in order to get dates and issues. This year the MINIMUN and the workshop for new MUN Directors will take place in November at the German International School in The Hague. Unlike former years, the MUNISH conference will precede it in October. We shall, therefore, be announcing both the country assignments and the student officer appointments on the web-site.

Finally, I would like to congratulate Katharina Haucke on making the first THIMUN Singapore Conference such a tremendous success. I took a delegation there and was most impressed with the organisation, the cooperation of the Chinese School as well as the standard of debate. Special thanks go to all the volunteers, Dennis Boyle-Woods for training the Student Officers, Seref Isler and David Williams. The conference in November 2006 will be approximately twice the size of last year's.

The Youth Assembly continues to be very popular. Last year, as an experiment it was held both in January and in July. This was so successful that it was repeated this year. Many thanks to the German International School and the Lycee Francais Vincent Van Gogh for hosting the conferences.

In the office we have lost Reinhardt Smit who has been with THIMUN for 7 years going from delegate to Conference Management. We wish Reinhardt all the best with his studies. In his place comes Dirk van Leeuwen - another well-known THIMUN face. Dirk worked on the rules of Procedure last year and is now officially employed to look after the web-site as well as the Youth Assembly. Esmeralda and Tanya will be joined by Seref Isler in the Management team for the 2008 Conference. Irene will be staying as our very competent and charming Managing Director.

All that remains to be said for the moment is, have a great new beginning of the school year and please keep letting us know how we can improve.

I look forward to seeing you at the January Conference,

Yours sincerely,

Linda M. Dubock (current Chair of the THIMUN Foundation)