After a long fight against cancer, our dear colleague Claude Froidevaux passed away on the 10th of August, at Lausanne in Switzerland.
Claude was 66 years old and for the last 30 years he has been one of the most famous voices of  Radio Suisse Romande. He was a very friendly person, spontaneous and close to his listeners. He loved meeting and interviewing people and maintained his spirit until the end of his life.
Claude and I spoke on the phone at the end of July. I knew it was probably our last contact, but such was his enthusiasm, I could hardly get in a word. He wanted to know all about the planning for our SCIJ meeting in Morocco. That was Claude, very open to the concerns of others, but modest about himself.
Claude Froidevaux has been a leading figure of SCIJ, climbing the peak of Mont Blanc -in a memorable SCIJ expedition at the end of the 1980s- participating in many international meetings. In the 1970s, he was one of the small SCIJ group who travelled to Soviet Georgia with Marcel Pasche. He liked to say that with skis on your shoulder it was easier to get a visa.
Claude learned that he had cancer during the SCIJ Meeting in les Diablerets in 2003. In 2004, he talked about it in a radio show, in a sort of public exorcism of his disease.
He loved SCIJ so much that in 2007, even though requiring dialysis every two days, he asked to come to Font Romeu. Last year he couldn't make it to Jasna, only because it was too far from his treatment centre. But as recently as last January he managed to join friends of the Swiss SCIJ at La Vue des Alpes for one last meeting.
Now Claude has gone, and the Swiss SCIJ will always remember him, for his jokes, his deep blue eyes, his humanity.

Goodbye Claude. We weep for our loss.
Miguel