Model UN- Part I

4:15 a.m. might seem a bit early to see an Ole Miss student up and about, (unless there's a Croft paper due), but this was exactly the scene yesterday morning as our group met to make the first leg of our trip to the NMUN conference in New york. The flight was uneventful, although something of a letdown after the dazzling extravaganza of awesome that is, of course, the Memphis airport. After a harrowing but swift ride from LaGuardia in the capable hands of trenchcoat-bedecked Argentine, my fellow Model UN-ers and I arrived at our hotel on Times Square only to find the place already swamped with other delegates to the convention: Latin Americans already dressed in business attire, Europeans smoking and looking dour in every available corner, and of course our fellow Americans yelling about Justin Bieber and sporting nike shorts.

The Rachels (Rojo and Willis) and I went out for a quick dinner of pasta before returning for the opening ceremonies and first conference meetings. I'm the sole representative of the Republic of Guinea in the United Nations Environment Programme, and luckily found myself in a conference of very dedicated delegates. After setting the agenda at 1,2,3, with our delegation's preferred topic of a review of the UN's water for life decade first in priority, our conference split into roughly regional groups who began to outline specific concerns for the topic. Before retiring for the night, our bloc of African nations decided to focus on the issues of education and infrastructural development in our working papers.

This morning, after a solid 3 1/2 hours at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I attended our session's next meeting, where I discovered that our African bloc was now more or less just a Sub-Saharan African Bloc, per the overnight betrayal of our neighbor Tunisia. The Tunisian delegation has decided that now that the water for life decade's aims have been accomplished in some countries (like, funnily enough, Tunisia), the UNEP should focus on rewarding those countries with further focus on development therein. While of course all countries could use a good dose of attention toward water-related environmental problems, our delegation and most of the rest of the African bloc believes that following through with the Decade's aims (the specific title of the issue at hand) and emphasizing those countries most behind (ahem, Guinea) will be the most effective use at hand. Guinea is emphasizing in particular the terrible lack of water and sanitation infrastructure in so many countries, the basis of so many other environmental and health issues. I'm on the speaker's list for tonight's meeting, and will stress the importance of these issues for the rest of the UNEP.

Until Part II..