Over Presidents’ Day weekend, the Blake Model United Nations Club travelled to Washington D.C. for a conference. Students landed on Feb. 13 and split into groups, some going to Senator Tina Smith’s office, while others went to the National Mall. That day students also attended the opening ceremony and their first committee. 

According to Andrew Chang ‘21, “A committee is usually three and a half hours where you’re giving speeches, you’re working on writing resolutions, and you’re listening to people, or other countries.” Chang shares that these committees have helped his team building skills: “[When] you go into committee you don’t know the people there, so you have to make new friends based off of your country’s policy.”

The next four days consisted of two committees each, where students had the opportunity to hear guest speakers and further their thinking. During a committee, students were “representing countries or important people,” according to Daria Haner ‘22. She discusses the purpose of these committees, saying, “You work together with delegates from other schools to find a solution and write a paper to solve a problem.”

Chang says that his favorite experience was with one of the guest speakers during a committee: “I was in the US senate and it was based in 2002 after 9/11, focusing on deradicalization of terrorists and also rebuilding the nation and then we had an ex-Jihadist, Al-Qaeda recruiter come in and speak to us about his experience, about how he got involved in all of that and how once he got caught.”

When they weren’t in committees Haner says, “we would either be doing activities as a group, or we would just have free time.” There were also opportunities to meet people from other schools, and Haner shares a valuable experience she had: “I made a new friend and she’s really nice, she’s an exchange student from Turkey that I met…she’s an exchange student to Washington D.C. and we really hit it off and we spoke for an hour and a half and now we text.” 

Clara Lee Molina ‘21 also had a unique experience during a crisis committee in which she was portraying a member of the Spanish Republican Cabinet, and she, along with the other students had to “to figure out how to quell the rebel resistance and how to rebuild the country after the war.” Furthermore, Lee Molina shares that “It was a bilingual committee, and it was really cool to meet other hispanic kids and speak in Spanish.”