PAXMUN 2008

To prepare for our simulation/model UN in NY in mid-march with the international student community, CalstateLA seems to do a practice run at a local model United Nations called PAXMUN. It's generally southern california, but has some visitors from AZ, northern CA, etc. High Schools are also invited but most of the delegates are college students.

Ill-prepared and very tired due to 4 hours of sleep and having to leave at 6am to pick up a bunch of people, we arrived in Buena Park, which I've decided is one of the shittiest places in Los Angeles. You can always tell what people are like in Southern California by 1) what they drive and 2) how they drive. For example, in downtown LA, you will find slow, confused drivers in very nice cars. In Buena Park, I found a lot of rude, aggressive drivers in monster trucks.

But anyhow, back to PAXMUN. It was my first time, and I was very scared. I'm not a natural public speaker, I can get aggressive and defensive just like any other person. And I can't stand bullshit. I don't like people who speak for the sake of hearing their own voice. But I had a great group with a lot of really knowledgeable, if not nervous people. The funny thing about model UN is that you know people by their countries and not their names. You will literally respond to your country, and it's rare that you ask anyone their name.

My favorite people/countries were Algeria (Jessica) - she was so calm and confident and competant. If I were a manager, I'd hire her no matter what I did because she's just one of those extremely capable people you want to have on your team. Djibouti was kind of crazy and he ended up winning an award. Botswana was AWESOME, and she was from my class! I didn't even know her name was Fabiola until I asked our President! I suck, I know..

I'm really glad I got to go to a simulation for practice before the big international one in NYC. Man I made some mistakes, and multi-tasking was so important. You had to write proposals, explain your proposals to people who you were convincing to sponsor the paper, and run around to get drafts printed, approved and handed out. It is very important to have a team you can trust and assign duties to each person and have them respect you/be loyal enough that they will carry it out as if it were their own idea. And in the 2 min downtime that I had - I snapped these pictures =)

I think it was twice as stressful for me though because we were working on agriculture programs for food security and found that HIV/AIDS was a big issue among agriculture workers. So we divided our own question (this is a term for creating distinct clauses or papers so that each can be voted on separately - which is good so that one of your ideas can pass which won't put it at risk of being rejected if it's tied to another, more controversial topic) and wrote TWO separate proposals. For a committee that only ended up writing 5 proposals, being responsible for 2 of them was an amazing thing for my first go. The good thing is knowing that we're capable of it, but on the negative side, neither paper was extremely polished or had lots of back up research in it. But it's good to know for next time! =) I wish Algeria would have been at the NY conference, but she'll be at the one in April rather than March. =(