“Honey, I Lost the Conference Room!”

by EUNJI RHEE, INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL OF BEIJING

Imagine: you’re a THIMUN officer. You’ve just been to your officer meeting, discussed what officers discuss, and walked back to your committee room. You open the door and… you are greeted by a sea of people. Not only all the members of your committee, but a deluge of people from other committees as well.
No, they didn’t appear from thin air. No, they weren’t brought by shiny, green aliens on a shiny, green UFO. And no, nobody told them that there would be free scoops of Ben and Jerry’s in the auditorium. All of this chaos in the meeting room started with a little error.
As it turned out, the conference room for General Assembly (GA) 3 served a double purpose on Wednesday.In addition to housing the GA3 debates, it also became the spot where the opening speeches for all the GAs were placed. “Hwa Chong Institution made some last minute changes for room arrangements without informing any officers, any members of the THIMUN board, or practically anybody; even amongst the administrative staff, the word of change didn’t spread widely,” chuckled Mr. Boyle-Woods, member of Advisory Board. Hence, when the officers of General Assembly 3 came back from their officer meetings, nobody had a clue about what happened in the supersaturated conference room. “It was really hectic. It took around twenty minutes to sort everything out,” reflected Officer Yuta Ando, from Nagoya International School.
The level of confusion was the same for the delegates too: “All of a sudden, people started to come in, [and] then they went out. That happened again, and finally somebody told the delegates of GA3 that there would be opening speeches in this room,” said Hyo-Sung Joo, from The Association of Korean Schools. “We [then] had the choice to either remain in the room and listen to the speech, or go to the library to work on our resolutions,” remembered Till Schoefer, from Taipei European School.
The sudden change of arrangements generated a lot of confusion, but it also helped break the ice in the committee as Krisztina Pjeczka from United World College reflects: “We wasted a lot of time, but it was fun [as] we had time to have casual conversations. I think the social bonds made between the countries even made the outcome of the day better!”
All in all, we can learn a golden lesson from this chaotic incident: when you get lemons, make fat-free, vitamin C-loaded, ice cold lemonade.