THAIMUN II Conference
4 - 6 APRIL 2015 - YEAR 12, TERM 3
The Thailand MUN Conference took place on the 4th to the 6th of April in 2015, and provided a ton of new experiences for me. I chaired in the Human Rights Committee and practiced a number of skills.
I did some work in advance to help plan the conference; my co-chair Holly and I wrote three research papers to give to the delegates, in order to get the debate at a high standard. Informed debate is good debate in the MUN. For me this really underlined the service aspect to being a chair; it isn’t about you, it’s about helping everyone else get the best out of it they can. Especially for new people MUN is about learning about yourself and making yourself better, and how good or bad your chair is really makes a lot of difference. It’s a lot of responsibility but ultimately, it’s fun.
I worked closely with Holly to make sure everyone got the best out of the conference. We had set ourselves a goal that everyone would speak at least once. We encouraged the delegates to speak, but we weren’t aware that for some, this was their first conference. We spoke to them during the lobbying time and helped them formulate their speeches. Working with Holly was especially important at this point because we had to really persevere in order for everyone to learn something, but we did it in the end. Everyone spoke and two delegates approached us and thanked us for our efforts, saying that they were grateful we had helped them to speak in public, which was very rewarding to hear.
The biggest challenge I had to face was how to deal with delegates who don’t behave properly. We had a slight issue with one delegate being inappropriate (really creepy) to the female delegates and we also found out he was telling other, less experienced delegates what to say in their speeches. We received a signed note from some delegates detailing how irritating he was being and how he was ruining the debate. This was difficult to deal with because I’m not a teacher and I don’t generally feel like telling people off is my job - but as a chair, I found out that it was, so I dealt with the problem. Ultimately, it’s a very difficult social dynamic, because we’re both students, but my job is to help other delegates get as much out of the conference as possible and to do that I had to have a private word with someone and revoke speaking rights. It’s easy to overcomplicate it and feel intimidated but I learned that in this situation the way to handle it is to just deal with it.
Chairing at an international conference was new to me but I learned a huge amount both about the activity and about myself. On the last day, I represented Iraq in the General Assembly. This presented a new challenge as I was only informed that I would be changing the day before the debate, and as we were discussing ISIL, Iraq was a very central country and had to be kept in the loop.
All in all, it helped me practice old skills and develop new ones, so was a very rewarding experience!