Geek Week
Thursday, July 12th, 2007AMUNC 07, one of many model united nations where students gather together for a week of debate and debauchery. AMUNC was held in Auckland and a crew of us from Canterbury headed up to represent Romania. Much like the real UN we spent far too long debating unanswerable questions and ending up with weak, unenforceable resolutions.
Myself, Kate and Joh along with Ben and Theon were team Romania and we were all designated specific committees with topics for the week. 2 days per topic and a General Assembly at the end.
This pretty much meant 4 very long days trying to draft together some sort of resolution that the majority of delegates could agree on. As each delegate had to follow their country’s foreign policy this proved to be a little difficult as Cuba don’t always want the same freedom of speech laws as the UK.
There were 50 people in my committee with total number of 500. We were from all around the Asia-Pacific area so great chance to meet lots of new and interesting people. There were a lot of people who had done this sort of thing before and used the whole way it was run. The procedural side of it is intense and very very controlled with every thing having to be passed as a motion, voted on, debated, proposed…etc etc. I pretty much had no idea what was going on the entire time.
Way too many over achieving law students dominated the debates while the rest of us used our unmoderated caucuses for coffee breaks rather than to draft up working papers.
It was a little surreal as I only know people by their country
“Hey Slovakia, wanna go get a coffee?”
and found it difficult to stop talking in the 3rd person and formal language used in committee sessions.
“Would the honorable delegate of Korea care to join the honorable delegate from Romania for a drink to discuss in more depth the activities of the previous night?”
Every night was a social event and big sponsors meant big funding so open bars and food almost every night. A harbour cruise, committee dinners, cocktail function and the grand finale ball meant far to many late nights, sleeping in and lots of gossip about what our director was up to with Chile the night before.
Possibly we didn’t take is seriously enough, preferring to take the piss out of any organized activity, especially the General Assembly where we voted on resolutions we hadn’t even read. But it was a flippin awesome week, we stayed in a great backpackers, survived the monsoon style rain of Auckland, actually made friends and had a lot of fun.
If I ever go again I might be a bit more prepared and participate more but less work in the holidays is better, at least I now know I DO NOT want to work for the UN, although it did make me feel smarter for the week.
admin