News & Events

Senior students united at symposium

By Sarah Frodsham

On November 12 we boarded the train to Montreal to attend the 16th Secondary Schools’ United Nations Symposium, SSUNS hosted by McGill University students. After weeks of preparation, researching and writing position papers, we were all prepared for an exciting weekend of resolving today’s world issues. This year we stayed at the Delta Centre-Ville hotel in downtown Montreal with 50 other schools and over 1,000 students. The hotel was beautiful and very accommodating with a nice view of downtown Montreal from the window. With over 1,000 students there, there were many opportunities to meet new people from across Canada, USA and Trinidad especially in the overcrowded and very slow elevators.

This year’s theme for SSUNS 2009 was Global Impact from Local Initiatives, seeks to recognize the growing influence that a younger generation can have on world affairs. With new media such as blogs growing in political importance from generating awareness to presidential campaigns there is more opportunity than ever for today's youth to create an impact on both local and international events.

Elmwood made up a  delegation of 10 girls and two teachers, Ms. Grass and Ms. Delanghe. All the students had the difficult task of representing their country’s opinions in the committee sessions, no matter what their own opinions were. Each girl was in a different committee, which debated about various international topics and drafted resolutions for each topic. Some students represented the United Arab Emirates while others were involved in the Mexico and Quebec crisis committees. Many of the girls were new to the club this year so before our first committee session we set a goal to accomplish before the end of the conference; this definitely helped get rid of some nerves.

In the SPECPOL committee, Sabrina Villeneuve represented UAE and actively participated in the debate, finding resolutions to the international law to overseas military bases and the protection of civilians during the armed conflict while Heidi Fahim in UNSCD debated about the access to water and sustainable development. In the small LAS committee, I discussed the rising and controversial issues of Somali pirates and Palestinian refugees—many of the discussions were very intense and passionate. Bronte Cloete-Wakefield was part of the UN-Habitat committee, which discussed safer slum development in Africa, methods of financing water and sanitation programs and slum upgrading in Latin America. In UNESCO, Maka Ngwenya helped make a difference in finding resolutions to the problems of copyright protection, world heritage protection in developing countries and bridging the digital divide. Cessen Kidane, Juliet Caragianis and Lucy Zheng all members of the small crisis committee of 12 people had the opportunity to participate in the exciting and eventful Chiapas Rebellion of 1994. At the end of the crisis committee, the committee re-elected Cessen, the President of the Republic of Mexico, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, as President of Mexico showing her excellent politician skills. Joanna Znotins was the Gerard Cournoyer, the Ministre du Tourisme, de la Chasse et de la Peche in the bilingual crisis committee of the 1960 Quebec Cabinet which tried to find resolutions to the place of French language in Quebec society, Expo 67 and the secularization of Quebec.

Sam Peters was a member of the Press Corps writing for the Russian Newspaper, Pravda. Sam was always there listening in on the committee sessions keeping an eye on delegates and politicians making sure they stayed in line and writing stories for The International Citizen, the daily newspaper in the conference. She wrote three articles a day and every single one was published in the paper.

After three days at the conference, on the Sunday we attended our last committee session, packed all our bags, went to the closing ceremonies and boarded the train back to Ottawa. Everyone was sad to leave especially after making so many new friends and great memories. The conference provided an amazing chance to develop leadership skills and confidence, speaking in large or small groups and working together creating resolutions for different global issues. I can’t wait for next year’s conference and I definitely encourage any Senior students to join because it is an experience of a lifetime!