My Week in the City

After a fun, tiresome week in New York City at the National Model United Nations Conference, I am getting back into the swing of things at Cortland. My fellow delegates and I had the pleasure of staying at the Marriot Marquis smack in the middle of Times Square. My room was on the 37^th floor and with very little and at times no wi-fi. This definitely hindered my blogger flow, but luckily, in accordance to the club, I had to keep a journal the entire week outlining my days. This experience definitely added to my repertoire of working with and even at times teaching diverse populations.

In a typical Model UN each school represents a different country. This year SUNY Cortland represented Nepal. Schools form all over the world were lucky enough to participate in this event, including school from Germany, Italy, and even Australia.  The groups are broken into different committees, each with separate issues that they must help solve by coming together with all the different delegations. The goal of the convention is, along with the different countries or delegations, create a working paper with resolutions solving the main topic. Normally, there are three topics for each committee, but in four days there is only time to cover just one, which shows how in depth, creative, and organized each paper must be. The last day is devoted to voting on the several papers that have been conjured up throughout the week. My particular committee was the General Assembly first committee and the topic we were focusing on was the Small Arms and Light Weapons Trade in Africa. Prior to the actual convention I had been working all semester researching Nepal’s stance on the situation and coming up with my own position paper. At the actual conference I had the opportunity to find Nepal’s allies and countries that had similar views. During the week, I worked closely with Lichtenstein, who came from the Universiy of Tennessee, and Ireland, who came from the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, Italy.  Our working paper focused on creating a system, which would track the weapons and institute a trade system where countries could trade their weapons for necessities, such as food and water. Not only did we create a working paper to be voted on, but I got to know these delegates very well. It was convenient that we all stayed in the same hotel, where we got to engage and hang out outside of committee. One of the girls from Italy, Guilia, was shocked how many days a week the average American goes and drinks. I learned quite a few curse words in Italy and we exchanged our tastes in music. Thanks to facebook, I will be able to keep the relationships that I started and always keep in touch.  Here is the crazy view from our hotel.