Living and Breathing Politics

The first thing I noticed when walking into the small corner room in Hillcrest
High School was the smell. A combination between pizza, coffee and the strangely
familiar smell of high school (Axe body spray and a dash of bath body & works lotion).
The room was small and did not have the best lighting, with about 30 desks and chairs
and a large desk for the teacher. The door is UN blue, which has always been a fit for the
Model UN class that takes place in there.
The level of noise in the room hit me right away, about 6 students were standing
by a gray metal cart that held a large set of chrome books, and the ones who were still in
their seats yelled out to their friends to get them one. Because the class is very selftaught the teacher Mr. Jackson, a chubby blonde teacher who looked like he was on his
fourth or fifth cup of coffee, sat on his desk reading through paperwork without paying
much attention to what his students were doing. You could tell that the room was very
female heavy, considering that there were about 5 boys huddled in a corner laughing
about something on a screen while the 20 something girls got the class ready. The topic
of the day was an ongoing simulation of the Disarmament and International Security
Committee of the United Nations; they asked everyone to pull out their research and
placards, a rectangular piece of paper with the name of their country, and sit on a large
circle to continue their debate from the previous day.
Two people were clearly in charge, one of them was the Secretary General of their
conference, a small girl who looked a step away from strangling the loudest of the boys.
All I could think of was Same, because his obnoxious off-topic comments were starting
to give me a headache. The red headed girl next to her who was wearing a Colombia

National Soccer jersey is the Under-Secretary General, who sat behind a computer
screen listing the topic and duration of the class for the day on the smartboard.
DISEC Nuclear proliferation crisis. Day II
The shift in the room was immediate, and I nearly dropped my hot chocolate
from freight when the girl behind the screen banged a wooden gavel on the desk. Even
though I had been part of the Model United Nations class in the same school before I
graduated I was almost impressed with how professional they all turned. The off-handed
comments stopped and a couple of people raised their name placards to be allowed to
speak.
The boy who had been very loud was the first to speak, in the rhetoric that MUN
students use to address the room the delegation of Iraq motions for a Moderated
Caucus for 10 minutes, 1 minute speaking time on the topic of what we discussed
yesterday. The two girls sitting at the front, who are chairing the committee room,
wrote down the motion that was put up, and as a reflex I too jotted down the motion on
a piece of paper thinking that old habits die hard.
Without another motion being raised the chair allowed the boy to be the first
speaker. While he summarized the talk of the day before you could immediately notice
the difference between this classroom and any other classroom in high school. The
students in the circle began passing post it notes around. The desk of the girl who sat in
front of me with the placard that identified her as the United States flooded with
different color papers. In a normal class I would assume they were trying to talk to her
about trivial topics; in this class, all her notes had work with me, we should talk in the
Unmoderated Caucus and I liked your policy of.

Having summarized everything that had gone on the day before, the speaker who
followed talked about what they should spend their class time doing; when the girl who
represented France indicated that they needed to work out sanctions for countries with
Nuclear weapons, half of the room nodded their heads quietly and the other half
proceeded to increase my headache to a migraine when they loudly protested, so many
people talking at once I didnt manage to catch what they were saying. Placards were
raised from at least fifteen of the 25 people in the room, some I even thought might have
been close to dislocating their shoulders with how quickly their arms went up.
Ideas where thrown around back and forth from 8 different students who
represented countries with very different points of view. The highlight of every speaker
was the fact that these kids were very skilled at throwing backhanded diplomatic insults
to one another; A lot of their speeches either started with unlike some delegations
followed by an unpopular idea or punctuated with We do not want to follow the
illogical paths some countries are going down to. There were many times when the
entire room either laughed or went Ooooohhhh all at once. I even joined a couple of
times because one delegate calling another hypocritical without being outright insulting
was always something I admired. Every time it was cut off by the chair with a bang of
the gavel or a loud delegates, Decorum!
Most peoples arms raised with their placards again when the chair asked are
there any points or motions on the floor at this time?. Determined to not scribble every
motion put up, I began suggesting to the United States delegate that she should put up a
20 minutes Unmoderated Caucus to begin writing a resolution. She had been so

bombarded by papers about working with other people she and I agreed it was time to
be put out of her misery.
When the chair began counting delegates in favor and opposed I joined in. In a
room of 25 people she needed at least 14 to pass her motion; everyone except for the
obnoxious kid who represented Iraq raised their placards. Before letting them loose
the chair reminded everyone that there were only 15 minutes left in the class. Very
quickly I raised my phone to check the time, there had been so much talking I didnt
realized how the time flew by. While the chair indicated that they were in an
Unmoderated Caucus I stepped as far away from the United States delegate as I could, a
measure that I was proud of because most the room to whom the post it notes belonged
to ran to her desk. I hope shes not claustrophobic.
Fifteen minutes flew by, with kids running from their desks and to the desk of
whatever country they were working with, carrying binders of research and loose-leaf,
throwing ideas around as to what belonged on their resolution. People of the smaller
groups around the large American bloc that had dubbed themselves Murica and the
Boys (in my opinion it had been very clever) popped in occasionally, asking if they
would like to sign each others working papers. Around the room I heard groans of
disappointment when the mechanical ding. Ding. Ding blasted on the loudspeaker.
The room began filtering out very quickly, with people yelling stuff about finishing their
ops, or changing a preamb by tomorrow. Most of all I noticed that the mass of
students leaving the room took the almost painful level of sound and the smell of axe
and lotion with them, leaving only Mr. Jacksons coffee smell that oozed from his travel
mug, and my escalating migraine.

Interview
Like everything in life, there are places for things; a bedroom for sleeping, a
kitchen for cooking, a road for driving. There are also places to not do things, in this
case a place to conduct an interview would have been a quiet coffee shop or an office, a
crowded train with overexcited high school students is one on the category of places not
to do it. Rashell Vazquez and Taishiry Salazar are, at a glimpse, two very different
students. Differing ages, high school levels (A Junior and Senior respectively) and focus
of studies, it would seem like the only thing they share is the title of Hillcrest High
School Students; one thing that unites them however, is their shared interest in the
world of international politics. As members of the Model United Nations class of
Hillcrest, they share a passion for debating about world politics as delegates of a country
in the UN, and this was most clear after having left the SciMUN 2016 conference in the
Bronx High School of Science.
The orange and beige of the chairs in the D line contrasted against their dark
blazers, gray slacks and black winter coats; with the overhead lights that seemed about
to give way complementing the dark circles under their eyes, they both told me they had
slept an hour because we had last minute dirt to dig up and you could really see it
taking a toll on them. Being awake for nearly 24 hours however, gave them a boost in
their anger, with their hand movements increasing as the ride passed. When I
approached, they had been yelling about biased chairing and supporting their
classmates comments that they could not understand why they kept attending SciMUN
when it was clear the Bronx Science MUN staff went out of their way to undercut their
award possibilities. Most of the nights interview was conducted through simple

listening, as the questions I was ready to ask were answered by themselves during their
different conversations.
Rashell, who had two years of Model UN experience and three awards under her
belt, told me that despite the stress of waking up early on a Saturday and sitting in a
room with pompous private school kids, every conference was an experience for her.
During her first year, she did not speak much and focused her energies on researching to
allow her partner a chance to kick their butts. That however changed during the
conference we were walking out of, where she was responsible for strong arming a
Security Council room into giving her country aid to care for Syrian refugees, and
proceeding to launch a full military operation against that a**hole Qatar, who refused
to comply with her.
Taishiry, a third year MUN student for her part supported the savage approach
Rashell took, and was very happy to share the experience of her Historical Joint Crisis
Committee, in which she represented the Capitalist nation of Rhodesia. Her experience
did not stand out much on her record of conferences, despite her appreciation for the
innovative topic, the issue of chairs being completely biased ruined the experience for
her, but did motivate her to make the Hillcrest conference, HillMUN, a much better
staffed one.
We moved our conversation from the conference to the importance of Model UN
in their high school careers. Both agreed that Model UN was a thing they would do again
without hesitation, because it provided them with skills for the real world and
knowledge of the world in a way their peers found strange and intimidating in many
occasions. It was interesting to see how eloquent their way of making their answers was,

it was a huge contrast with the normal high school students one could speak with. We
diverted the interview many times to talk about the current situation in Gaza, the
Russian annexation of Crimea, Syrian Refugees in the world and the US elections and
what it would mean for the country and the world; it was surprising how much more I
could speak with them than I could with their adviser, a man with two masters in history
and education.
One of my preconceived notions before starting this interview was that their love
for politics would influence their future careers; as someone who had switched from
Medicine to Political Science after partaking in Model UN for 3 years it seemed like an
organic transition. It was very surprising to me that their years of debating did not
influence either of their future careers or their choices for college (one of mine had been
the acclaimed CCNY MUN team). Taishirys aspirations were to study sociology and
later specialize in Criminal Justice at Farmingdale or Manhattanville, and Rashell while
undecided, was sure politics was something she did not want to do as a career, and
would not discard or add a college to her application list because of their MUN
opportunities.
The end of our conversation involved their love for MUN, and the tightknit
community it created for them. One thing we shared was our belief that every high
school student should have a small extracurricular group they are a part of, because
without MUN we would all be different people. The fact that before the United Nations
experience, knowing what was happening outside of the country was a stressful and
tedious activity was impressive. Now that breathing politics is something we shared, it

seemed almost second nature to read the New York Times and CNN first thing in the
morning to find out what was happening in the world.
The conversation was cut short with the train conductor announcing through the
very muffled loud speaker that Your next stop is 49-50th Rockefeller Avenue and Mr.
Jackson, the Hillcrest Advisor showing us his phone, where the attack on Istanbul drew
our attention and our sleepy conversation powers.