After working on the conference for weeks and surviving an endless amount of lunchtime meetings, I am quite pleased to say that my CAS project is over. Trying to make everything run as smoothly as possible and involve as many people from the international school community as we could, so I was really happy to see that over 90 people came Saturday (the 27th of September)! Champittet, Le Rosey, Eglon, Ecolint – you name it, everyone “important” was there.
What I really loved were the committees we had chosen, as they were centered around the theme Brave New World: Our future redefined (any Aldous Huxley fans?) – and we had a really great range of topics which we aimed to be as controversial as possible. What do we do with all the sentient AIs out there? Should transgender women take part in women’s sports? Better yet, should we ban wearing religious clothing in public? Not to mention the gossip box. The best part of every conference – because there’s no better thing to do than read out the smear campaign after arguing against 20 other people for 6 hours. There’s no better way to end a hotheaded debate by scramming down the most insightful, insulting things you can think of in a recycling bin, where pinned on is the humble yet pernicious sign “Gossip Box”.
I do believe that MUN Conferences are the very few times of the year that I see people under the age of 50 wear an unusually nice ensemble of blazers, well pressed shirts, dress skirts, collared button downs, and slacks. It’s unusually refreshing but rather disconcerting to see sweatpants to be replaced with dressier ones – it does help with pretending that your friends are rather “delegates” whom the world’s future lies in their hands, whilst mine are usually banging a gavel demanding order in the house (which is really just Ms. Smith’s classroom). Am I selling this?
Mr James Elder sent us an audio recording in the opening speech – he was in Gaza at the time. When Mr Elder recorded this, he was at his border crossing rotation entering the zone of conflict, hence he couldn’t film any videos – but he still wanted to do the next best thing. It wasn’t flashy in the least – we could only hear his voice – but it was my favorite part of the conference. I don’t have the heart to paraphrase what he’s said – and this is barely a quarter of his speech – but if you need to remember anything from this article, let it be this;
“…I was asked, you know, what drives me? lots of things drive me, but let me give you, and this is important in terms of what the sort of situations and people humanitarian aid supports. So let me give you just one example, okay? I was in Haiti at the start of this year. Now, the capital of Haiti is Port-au-Prince. About 85% of Port-au-Prince is controlled by gangs. It’s unlike any city in the world, including Mogadishu. But Haitians, like almost everyone I’ve found, take education very, very seriously. But in this situation, the little girl I met, Florence, was trapped in a school for three days because of gang violence. Three days of shooting going on all around her, three days of hiding under the desks. This little nine-year-old girl through a 72-hour siege. Anyway, We got her out, and after months and months, we found a safe place again to get these kids back into school. First time she’d been back for six months.
Without opportunity, even the brightest flame like Florence doesn’t catch. you all have that opportunity. You have it through the school you’ve been going to. You have it through doing something like you’re doing right now and you’ve been doing for months, maybe years. That’s your opportunity, people. But with that also comes a responsibility. So you know you’re stepping into a world that’s complex and it’s fragile, but it’s also full of possibility. Now that’s a burden and a privilege. Now this responsibility I talk of with you, it’s not only in the jobs you’ll take, but it’s in the values you’ll carry. So maximise your opportunity. Use your privilege. Use your energy. Channel it however you want. Channel it into effective altruism. Channel it into choosing the job that you’ll do. Channel it into making money and then using that effectively. But count your time, count all these things as something larger than yourself, right?
And you sit in a beautiful position, I think, to be able to sort of start redirecting the balance. You might never fail on any grand scale, but as long as you’re willing to take the risk, it’s impossible to live without failing at something unless you do it so cautiously, so free from risk that you might not as well lived at all, in which case you fail by default. Understand where your power lies. It lies in your opportunity. It lies in being able to take risks. It lies in knowing that happiness is not bought through consumption. It lies in when you do consume, know who the companies are. Use your fiscal vote well. All right, people, I’m going to end with a story because I am going back into Gaza. And I think it’s an important story. All the work we do in the United Nations, all the work those brave non-government organizations do on the ground, a lot of it’s frontline work, but you know who’s frontline?
You sit in a wonderful position, take it, maximize it and enjoy every single day.”
Sometimes it feels ironic watching ridiculously polished private school kids debate global crises in their neatly pressed suits while the real issues we’re “solving” burn on. Perhaps if we put half that energy into actual advocacy, we’d change more than just the placards on our desks. That said, I have to thank Ms. Pearcy and Ms. Geriege for spending so much time because they genuinely cared about helping us organise the conference. Even if MUN can feel performative at times, they helped us orchestrate something meaningful. I’m now going to have to do the obligatory thing and thank my fellow chairs for helping out too – and sorry to post your most horrible photos onto the School website.
To conclude – Made some enemies when handing out best delegate awards. Loved seeing people’s political opinions and being passionate for once. Highly recommended for anyone who are eager to challenge others – and need to fill out their CVs.
Photograph by Emma Laheij
