A guest article by Raya Sawalha (Head of Media) who wrote a recap for National Orthodox School MUN (NOSMUN) in Jordan.
NOSMUN was a miniscule club in the National Orthodox School, founded in 2006 by a group of ambitious students. Little did they know that NOSMUN would grow into one of the most prestigious local conferences in Amman.
With double the number of delegates we had last year, NOSMUN’16 hosted around 400 participants. The Secretariat Team worked day and night for months before-hand to ensure a very successful conference, and now that NOSMUN’16 is over, we’re proud to say our hard work payed off. The outstanding feedback we received proved to us that the sleepless nights and uncountable meetings were all worth it.
The theme for NOSMUN’16 was ‘The Demand for identity’, and all the topics related to incidents that occurred in 2015, the ‘Year of Identity’ as we like to call it. In relation to the theme, our opening ceremony hosted outstanding key-note speakers. The two outspoken local feminists, Lina Khalifeh, founder of SheFighter, and journalist Rana Husseini, who gave inspiring speeches to start off the conference.
This year’s NOSMUN had 9 committees, including two new additions to our conference, the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND), as well as the exciting Crisis Security Council (CSC), which aims to showcase the elevated potential of delegates through a fabricated storyline that contains crises with developments and expansions of its security-threat-conflicts. However, crisis did not only take place in the CSC, but NOSMUN introduced several crises to all the committees on day ‘3’ of the conferences. Delegates were surprised with pre-made video news reports, as well as articles and fact sheets (all prepared by our very own crisis specialists). The videos introduced a made-up terrorist organization called the Deti-Imperia, and the reports and fact sheets specified the role of each committee in overcoming the effects of the Deti-Imperia.
Being the first ever Amman conference to introduce a crisis, delegates were enlightened with the idea of the need to produce clauses to a made-up topic that they have just been introduced to, with no previous knowledge or research of any kind. The crisis greatly improved the quality of debate, as delegates became more enthusiastic and eager to find solutions and produce effective resolutions.
Other than the thrilling debate sessions, the delegates enjoyed their time during lunch and coffee breaks, and surprisingly continued to discuss their topics during their free time.
The Closing Ceremony marked the end of the high school MUN career for our senior secretariats. The prestigious presidents and chairs introduced the best delegates of their committees, with a very stiff competition between many eager delegates. The bittersweet end to NOSMUN’16 was full of tearful goodbyes yet satisfied smiles from the feedback we received.
Raya Sawalha, NOSMUN.
