Event: OSU Model United Nations conference (OSUMUN)
OSUMUN was essentially a high school Model United Nations conference that was held over the course of 3 days. For these 3 days I participated in the conference as a staffer which meant that I was basically one of the people who would help create the story for the purposes of the conference. The committee that I was assigned to was titled The Future of Yugoslavia. With rising nationalism, a bad economy, and a national government that was on the brink of collapse, some of the committee members possibly thought unity was needed the recover from the problems that they were facing while others may have thought that keeping Yugoslavia together was overall a lost cause. The goal of our delegates was to work together and find an appropriate solution to the struggles that Yugoslavia was having after they had separated as a nation and collapsed for the second time due to the death of their leader Tito.
We had a lot of very creative delegates. For instance, one of them whom I cannot remember his name, kept trying to blow up churches for who knows why. Another delegate, Hassani eventually became president and they limited his powers immediately to only being a speaker and figurehead for them because they were bitter it wasn’t them who ascended to presidency and emotionally biased. There were many poisonings too although not many people died, a few delegates would visit other delegates in jail to poison their food for weeks and even had me flood another one of the delegates houses. Overall the conference was fun and the delegates of our committee since they couldn’t come to a proper agreement or actually pass any useful directives all ended up dying due to nuclear warfare with the involvement of the USSR and the US.
This ties to international affairs in the fact that this was a model United Nations conference. Though it probably did not have much resemblance to an actual conference in the real world, the participation of the delegates allowed them to home their advocacy skills and to foster a stronger interest in world affairs in the United Nations. The conference allowed the high school students to show their abilities in critical thinking, debate, and both historical and current affairs. Within the individual committees students had to work together and fight to gain recognition within to either be recognized as new and independent nations or to come together for the unity that they sought.