Ever since I could remember, I’ve always wanted to go to college. While I was in middle and high school I felt like I was always restricted and never really quite understood, but I knew that going into college would change all of that, and I was more than right. In college you get to fit school and activities to your convenience, you get to pick the person you are going to be for the rest of your life. Here, I was lucky enough to become part of my university's Model United Nations team. Within that, I found my director, a man that tried to do all he could to help us succeed in the team and outside of it. Thanks to him I was able to be a part of a two week internship with UNESCO, where I learned that not fitting in was okay and that being different was, for once, what it was all about.
To be able to become camp facilitators for the IMUN-STEM program, all 25 of us had to undergo a training in which we learned to be “culturally sensitive.” This may sound odd and quite confusing for many of you, but in reality it's quite simple. It’s a training that allowed us to better understand the needs of the international students we were going to be training. For the facilitators, it became sort of a joke at many times, and how we could not be “insensitive” even when we couldn’t, or didn’t want to, understand the culture of others. The training was simple enough for all of us taking part of it, but it was not until you had the students right in front of you that you really had a grasp of it.
Being a facilitator and understanding each other was easy, but with the kids it was a totally different story. From finding out that China’s government had Facebook blocked, to having to find meals for kids that were Muslim, it was all new to me. The training prepared me for what I could experience, but facing it in person was a whole other story. I, like many of them, was not born in the States, therefore most of the time I related to that feeling of being a foreigner. From the first to the very last night, some still were not comfortable with being so far away from home, but with every day that passed their experience managed to become a little better. Even as facilitators, we whined about missing home and our friends, but just like the kids, we were able to become a small family and even planned visits to see one another.
Teaching the students how Model United Nations worked, and seeing how day after day they became better at it, filled me with excitement. Watching them work in groups at the Human Rights Council Committee and helping them solve issues step by step was one of the most rewarding experiences I have ever had.
Every night in our counselor meeting we had endless jokes, and throughout the day we continued them through a group chat we had. In fact we had to make two, a serious and a fun one, yet at the end they both ended up as a mix. Every day and night we learned something about ourselves or about a new student. Going on field trips and having to handle more than one hundred of them at times got exhausting, but it became more than worth it.
Throughout my internship my main goal, and I’m sure the one of my colleagues as well, was to try to impact these students. Yet, the way they impacted me was something I never expected, it was definitely something that could not be taught over a 3-day course.
