Every year all Sophomore's have to do MUN. Doing this project was made to help us: Find resolution in conflict, researching skills, communication, writing, public speaking, problem solving, consensus building, compromise, and cooperation. This year the topic was focused around refugees, although there were different committees, like UNHRC, WHO, and UNICEF. There was also two of each of these. I was in UNICEF 1 and represented Syria.
This article is where I got a lot of my facts from. It also really let me know what was going on with UNICEF and what they were doing about it, that was especially helpful because my committee was UNICEF. It was after I read the background guide that I knew what to research specifically, so I believe I googled, Syria UNICEF or something along those lines. There are many interesting pieces of information in this article, even the title is a fact, UNICEF: More than 80 percent of Syria children harmed by war, it also let me know that almost 300,000 have died so far, and that groups are recruiting more and more children, and much more, I recommend reading it if your interested.
After tons of research, we had to make a Position Paper, which would tell others what our country thinks about the topic, and what our country has done about it, and what the UN has done about it, and what we think would would be a good way to resolve these issues. There was three primary drafts for this. For the first draft I was just thinking about the way Assad would talk about things (always blaming the "west"), and filling it with facts. We then did a whole big critique session, and all said my first paragraph was great, it did pretty much stay the same, save some phrasing and additional sentences. The second paragraph is where we say what our country has done to help, but Syria's main focus is to get rid of/stop opposing forces. That what I talked about in the first draft. The critique for that was, to say what my country has done, but since Syria's action being only stopping opposing forces, and Assad always blaming things on the west I felt it was more appropriate to dodge that and put in some facts (which it was lacking). The third paragraph is supposed to be about what the UN has done, I had a lot of information on that so I crammed all that in there. The critique was to actually put less facts, and so I did. The fourth paragraph was what we proposed as a solution to the problem, not having had one I decided to say that UN should keep doing what it's doing, quote Assad (literally), and blame the west. The critique for that was to come up with a plan, although I still hadn't thought of one, so it remained. The second critique: this time they said that I should add a bit more emotion into my first paragraph, and so I did, just a sentence or two. For the second paragraph they said to add who the opposing forces are, and what I meant when I had said full force against the opposing sides. I put in the opposing forces names, and got rid of full force, know that guns and bombs wouldn't sound so good. All I got for the third paragraph was to take out the word thankfully. For the fourth paragraph they said to list my resolutions. I am proud of the way I got into my country's state of mind and didn't make myself sound like the bad guy.
The opening speech is a speech we give that briefly introduces to the others our stance on things so they can see if we would make good allies or not. My opening speech was a combination of the first paragraph from my position paper and the last, which is commonly done. Not much changed from my first to my second draft. Most of the critique I got was with the way I was saying it. Although some good feedback that I got to help me with that was to write out any numbers I had into word form. If I could back I don't think I would change anything everything worked out well and I think I made a lot of allies because of that too.
The Experience
The conference felt a lot more relaxed than I thought it would, I envisioned a bunch of nervous kids too afraid to speak up. But I actually tried to get into a character, like what a real representative of Syria would act like. So I instinctively tried to be first up on the speakers list, even though I was quite nervous. I was pretty proud of that and the way I delivered my speech, I felt like I was really in the zone of this acting like I know what I'm doing. I am also proud of when I worked together with Nigeria to make a resolution. In his opening speech, he felt strongly that countries shouldn't just focus on Syria and that there are other countries in major crises too, like El Salvador, Congo, and Nigeria, he said this with a bit of a spite towards Syria, so I quickly wrote a note saying, "I agree, we should work together." The last thing I wanted to do was get on a good delegates bad side. Our resolution was conceived in our first unmoderated caucus about 20 minutes into the MUN, which is very ahead of schedule. It was to get all the countries who could give donations and put them into a pool then split those resources proportionally to how much the countries needed them. The committee was very good at working together, there was almost no noticeable arguments that came up, I am very proud of that. If I could do it again I would probably just try to speak up more, I felt my character trying to get me to talk more, but even then I couldn't think of much to say. But I know now that even if what you say is not so good, you still get marked down for saying it (good thing). Advice for other kids going to do it would be, just to have a bunch of facts, it really helps when you want to be sure on something, it also helps you look like you know what you're doing.
Key moment
A golden moment during the conference was on the second day, when the topic was what to do about the rape that happens in camps. During an unmoderated caucus I got together with germany, and we started to talk about how in many cultures it's still the girls fault for sleeping with another before she is married, and many times they get literally stoned for coming out about it. So we got to thinking of a way that people could report rape without others knowing. The idea was to have a report center where people could ask for some extra food, report a broken tent, or rape. So if you see someone going in there you wouldn't definitely know that they are reporting a rape. When we spoke of this to the rest of the committee everyone jumped on board.