LO2- Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process
Being in Inkling, the newspaper club in school, I had the chance to attend this year’s MUN conference at UWC East as part of the press team. Our job was to listen in on a few debates as well as talk to some of the delegates and chairs, and then write articles based on those conversations. I chose to focus on the World Health Organization (WHO) and Advisory Panel Committees.
The conference was 3 days long. The first day was largely the opening ceremony with only a bit of discussion in committees, thus we didn’t have much to do. However, near the end of the day, we had a chance to strike up a conversation with the chairs of the committees we were going to write about. However, being the shy person I am, I didn’t end up talking and leaned on a friend to hold the discussion. I felt relieved but at the same time a bit regretful that I didn’t at least try. Having said that, the next two days served to be much more challenging.
Saturday and Sunday were filled with non-stop debate. This time, everyone had to go by themselves. I felt out of place as I was at the back quietly listening to their conversation. Most of them gave me confused looks and some even thought I was part of the admin team. The jargon they used did not help make things any clearer.
Because I had no one to lean on, I was forced to talk and interview the delegates by myself. Although I messed up a bit, they were actually very nice and I ended up having good conversations with a few people. I even saw an old friend I lost in touch with many years ago.
Along the way, I started to pick up on the slang as well as how the debates worked. This made me more confident, which was when I began to really focus on the conversations at hand and thus found some of the topics to be very interesting. I especially thought the detainment of Uighur Muslims to be such a shocking and fascinating discussion I knew very little about before the conference. This was something I didn’t think I’d take from this experience.
With everything else that happened, I found writing the articles to be easier than I thought. Although my grammar or sentence structures could have been better, I was happy with what I was writing about. These are all the articles that the team wrote about the conference.
In the end, I was genuinely happy with what I took away from this experience and I will gladly attend next year’s conference again.
