Introduction.
In this project we were assigned a country, we investigated about the major leaders, main issues throughout history and in the modern world, type of government and other things that had recently happened or were happening at the moment. Also to explore international relations through participating in a model united nations.
I was assigned the country of Jordan and I was part of UNICEF 2. UNICEF stands for United Nations International Children's Emergency fund, the main topics of this committee are War-torn children refugees and Rape and Child abuse. The country of Jordan has taken more than 937,830 refugees over the past years;holding the second largest refugee camp in the world, Zaatari has over 120,000 refugees and it is currently struggling to protect women and children from sexual assault and/or exploitation.
During my process of refining my position paper I had to change various things such as grammar, punctuation and adding more details on the issues the country of Jordan has yet to overcome. Those three pieces of critique were given by Mr. Ted in the morning of the first day of MUN before first period started, this not only made it easier to understand but it gave people a good idea of what the Syrian women and children are currently struggling with. What im most proud of this piece is how it turned out even though I wrote it the night before Model UN due to my Google drive restarting which caused my original position paper to erase, so as you might imagine I rushed it.
I decided to write my opening speech very straightforward, in order to make the challenges Jordan is going clear to other countries. I didn't change anything about this because the peers who critiqued my opening speech told me that they liked how my point was stated clearly, so I decided to keep it. Now that I've read it after MUN I wish I could have eased my way through the point and used more details to describe the importance of the issue and how it's affecting women and girls not only physically but mentally.
Model UN ended up being my favorite project this sophomore year. I am very proud of myself for actually speaking up for my country during the conference and coming up with a resolution with one of my allies Honduras. My resolution was to enforce laws in refugee camps in order to stop rape and sexual assault within refugee camps, this resolution fortunately passed. On the other hand I am proud of my committee for taking this conference very seriously and not being afraid of disagreeing to the opinions of other countries, at the end we all agreed on two resolutions which were both reasonable and realistic. Overall I think the only thing I would like to do differently if we were to do this project again would be refining my opening speech since now I realize how important that is in order for countries to understand all the issues your country is facing. My advice for upcoming students would be to not stress out about this, because it's just like any other debates we usually have in class, as long as you have a throughout research of the things happening in your country that are related to the topics of your committee you will do fine, It's all about confidence and good research.
Extra Credit
I think a golden moment in my committee was on our second day of MUN, there was a moment when we all seemed a little lost because we didn't know what could possibly decrease the numbers of sexual assaults in refugee camps or a way to protect children, that pretty much took us all day to come up with a resolution to this problem, which as I already said was to enforce laws in refugee camps, also to maintain children and women in activities within the camp in order for them to be less vulnerable.