After one and a half months of hiatus, it's time to head back to the Youth Assembly organised by United Nations Association Malaysia, also known as UNAM youth. I was browsing through my Instagram account and it popped out of nowhere that there was another UNAM Youth Assembly, this time to include sustainability education into the Malaysian education system. I was filling up the form, I didn't realise it was two days from the conference. It was a last-minute sign-up.
How am I going to prepare a position paper in two days, I thought. Usually, position papers in normal MUN conferences, we would take weeks to get it done and hand them to our respective chairs. I quickly messaged Tuck and Ernest - they are the chairs for the conferences, on submitting the position papers, and to my relief, we didn't need to hand in one because it was a mini-conference.
On the day of the conference, it's really a mini one, with only three delegates - Rueben, Roshen and me. For everyone's benefit, we went through the rules of procedures on how the youth assembly would run. In this case, we were representing ourselves as youths, how are we going to convince the "big people" to implement sustainability education into the Malaysian education system. It was firing in the beginning, until the end, we were starting to slow down as we were running out of topic during the General Speakers List (GSL). Our chair, Tuck, gave us the remaining hours of the council to write a resolution.
The second day, things got a little better because we have our second chair, Ernest, also known as Sherlock, came in as a delegate, alongside Sarah, that did spice up the council for a while. When Tuck asked about delegate to put in the GSL, I decided to step back and let the newcomers - Rueben and Roshen to hop on. We did have a little "controversial topic" in council which really got us into full debate mode, but the rest of the session was really chill. This is the most chill youth assembly I have been to yet compared to the first one on the status of Rohingya Refugees in Malaysia which was a little intense.
Finally, we got into voting on the draft resolution as a whole. Roshen and I spoke for it while Ernest and Sandra spoke against. In the end, we passed the resolution! I amended a couple of clauses in the draft resolution, which was a first. Usually, I would just comment on the resolution. I did send an amendment once but it failed. Throughout this two-day conference, I learned a lot on climate change and environmental sustainability. I have to admit that I'm not an outdoor person to appreciate Mother Nature, hopefully, after the pandemic is over, we could go out to feel the grass and dirt like how we used to and plan a new seed to brand new dawn.
I'm happy to be back on board to help out newcomers. Thank you, Ernest (Sherlock) and Tuck for guiding us, looking forward to the next youth assembly.
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| iGem Mini Youth MUN 2020 |
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