St. Michael goes MUN!

At the end of January, five students from St. Michael Gymnasium (Alyssa Gunnemann, Lennart Hegemann, Nils Hüttermann, Leonie Klammer and Hendrik Vauss) participated in a MUN-conference, MUNAU 2016 in Augsburg.

MUN (short for Model United Nations) is a simulation of the United Nations. In international conferences students from all over the world meet and, representing diplomats from different countries or NGOs, discuss current political topics from their perspective.

Our delegation went to Augsburg from 28th  to  30th January to take part in an international conference with delegates from all over the world. We met students from the Netherlands, Denmark, Great Britain, China and Germany.

Before the conference we collected information on the United Nations and researched and prepared the topics of our individual committees and, most importantly, ‘our’ country’s view on these issues. In Augsburg, our school had to represent the delegation of Japan!

Finally, on 27th January we went to Augsburg by train and met our host families. The following morning, the conference started with a festive opening ceremony in the assembly hall of the Maria-Ward-Gymnasium in the centre of Augsburg with important guest speakers and speeches of the leaders of the different delegations. Then work in the committees started.

In our different committees (Alyssa and Hendrik in two committees of the General Assembly, Lennart in the ECOSOC, Leonie in the United Nations Environment Programme and Nils in the Security Council) we gave speeches and statements on topics like ‘Prohibition of the development and manufacture of new typies of weaposns of mass destruction’, ‘Promotion of sustainable tourism, including ecotourism, for poverty eradication and enviroment protection’, ‘Violence against children’, ‘Illegal trade in wildlife’ or ‘The situation in Syria’. We all thought it was very interesting to seriously discuss issues that we had heard about on the news, but had never talked about in such a way, considering it from someone else’s perspective, fighting for and finally finding compromises and solutions together.
Another thing resembling real United Nations conferences is that you are expected to follow a dress code. As a delegate you have to wear formal clothing: girls wear a skirt (not too short, please!! and no high heels either, please!!) or formal trousers, boys a suit and tie. First it felt quite unusual, but in the end, we all agreed that formal clothing makes a Model United Nations conference much more special.

Apart from hard work in the committees we had a lot of fun. It was great to get to know other delegates from lots of different countries and make new friends. It was a good experience to see that we could communicate even about complicated topics in English.

So, let’s go MUNAU 2017!!

Alyssa Gunnemann, Lennart Hegemann, Nils Hüttermann, Leonie Klammer, Hendrik Vauss, Doris Fiedler

 

Ende Januar war es wieder so weit. Die Schüler und Schülerinnen des Projektkurses Model United Nations der Q1 (Alyssa Gunnemann, Lennart Hegemann, Nils Hüttermann, Leonie Klammer und Hendrik Vauss) schlüpften in einer UN-Simulation in die Rolle von Delegierten einer anderen Nation. Auf der internationalen Model United Nations-Conference in Augsburg diskutierten sie als Delegierte Japans mit Schülern aus England, Dänemark, den Niederlanden, China und Deutschland in verschiedenen Gremien der UN (z.B. General Assembly, ECOSOC, United Nations Environment Programme und Security Council) u.a. über das Problem der Produktion und Verbreitung von Massenvernichtungswaffen, Gewalt gegen Kinder, die Förderung von nachhaltigem Tourismus, den illegalen Handel mit Wildtieren oder die Situation in Syrien, suchten engagiert nach Lösungen und erlebten die Schwierigkeit auf breiter Ebene Kompromisse zu finden aus erster Hand.

Dies war bereits die zweite Konferenz der Schüler und Schülerinnen dieses Kurses: schon im September 2015 nahmen sie an einer MUN-Konferenz in Leiden (Niederlande) teil.