We’ll pick up where we left off, which was me leaving the first day feeling slightly disheartened. I don’t give up that easily, though. The next day, we had the morning off, so my partner and I went on a tour of Boston. Boston’s a great city, even when it’s minus 20 outside. I learnt a lot about it in such a short space of time, and would always recommend doing one of these tours if you don’t have a lot of time in a city. When we got back to the hotel, we had an hour’s break before turning our attention straight back to the real world of work. Work, and committee sessions.
I knew I had 8 hours in an intense committee room with some really serious people, so I decided to take some snacks in. I’m a big fan of snacks, and I get hungry very easily. One of these snacks was Cadbury’s – well, Cadbury’s Dairy Milk Oreo, to be precise. It’s one of my favourites. Anyway, after the biscuits went down a storm the day before, I thought I’d go around offering everybody chocolate (again). Thus, I became known as “chocolate girl”, rather than the people I was actually supposed to be representing (which was an NGO called Medair, by the way).
Chocolate girl had decided to continue the strategy of making friends. It seemed to work pretty well, especially because chocolate was involved. You may have noticed chocolate is a bit of a recurring theme in my life. But, you know, it keeps me sane, especially when under artificial lighting for hours because the snow is coming down so hard you can’t even go outside.
The others took this opportunity to lobby (this is a political word for harassing someone about something you want to get done) the other members of the committee, who could do nothing but listen as we were all stuck in the hotel. I’ve never been a fan of lobbying or being harassed, so if they dared try at 1AM in the lift (which, for the record, they did), I would either ignore them or simply go “Hmmmmm” each time they said something. Chocolate girl is here to make friends, it’s outside of working hours, let’s have fun.
The next day comes around, but by this point I’ve buddied up with some equally chilled out Australians, and instead of using a discussion session to further lobby others, we chat and we take selfies. With a little bit of discussion about the resolution we were supposed to be discussing. But mainly selfies. My speeches at this point have really dried up and I’m improvising by now, using knowledge from my own experience (big no-no) and not my research. At one point I even mentioned that in the UK, we have celebrity-endorsed vaccination programmes, and I was very close to saying the name of aforementioned celeb, Jade Goody. Happily for me, I ran out of time, because I’m fairly sure if I mentioned the name of a Big Brother contestant in my speech it would have been MUN suicide.
So what happens at the end of the conference? Do we pass a resolution? Does chocolate girl make friends? Which chocolate does she bring next time? Tune in (or look out) next time to find out more.
Image from: http://metalab.harvard.edu/about/
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