Donuts and Diplomacy

By Sienna Sachs Beck / New York City

The author outside of the United Nations on April 24. She was there with her MUN delegation to attend a special meeting of the General Assembly commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster.

In late October, 2024, I got a one-sided, large-font permission slip telling me to go to Room 324 during my lunch period. I knew what it was. I’d known even before I’d been at the school.

My junior high school, Booker T. Washington (MS 54), is quite well known for its MUN program. That’s Model United Nations, an educational program with hundreds of thousands of participants worldwide. [Editor: UN sources have cited more than 200,000 annually, while some educational estimates put participation above 400,000.] Here, we call ourselves MUNchkins, because our conference day breakfast is six dozen Dunkin donuts. We function way differently than your average MUN, though.

MUN is not a club. It’s not a team. The word to describe it is a commitment. All 60 of us get to school at 7:45 a.m. every single day, whereas normal school starts at 8:40 a.m. Each week, we give up three of our five lunch periods to talk, debate, and work. We give up many of our weekends for writing and conferences. It’s the best (and most time-consuming thing!)  that’s ever happened to me.

We begin the year by focusing on current events and seeing where the flow of conversation takes us. It is the most genuinely open space in which I’ve ever been privileged enough to participate. It’s the kind of place where, stimulated by the moment, you can slip up and say something so morally wrong, and people will yell at you while giving you hugs and tissues. True story! It’s the one place I can share all of my opinions and not be censored in any way.

Around this time, our MUN newsletter also opens up. It’s called The Gazette, and it’s shared via Google Docs to all of us daily.

Towards the middle of MUN, the eighth grade is divided into several groups. Each group is presented with a current or historical dilemma. These include situations like the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the current state of India, the situation in Nepal or the fall of the U.S.S.R. Once a slideshow is created and research has been done in extraordinary depth, the topics are presented, pondered, ranked and voted on by the entire delegation. The highest-ranked topic becomes the one that the delegation pours its heart and soul into for at least two to three months.

My 7th grade year in MUN, it was El Salvador, and the two sides of the debate were pro-Salvadoran President Bukele and anti-Bukele. The position papers were over 25 pages long. This year, it’s been the Democratic Republic of the Congo–with a focus on the cobalt mining methods, sales, and child labor rates, and foreign-owned mines there. We spend a few months doing intense research and debating with each other, which often leads into screaming matches that end in hugs.

At the end of that period of time, two days in the end of March or early April, we stay two hours after school and present the position papers, usually extremely professional and long! Oreos are provided–a necessity.

Once this part of MUN is over, we begin preparations for our conferences. Here is where traditional MUN starts–we are assigned a country, a committee, and a topic. In the four conferences I have been to, my countries have been Nigeria, Ukraine, Colombia, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines Islands.

Before writing the papers, we spend hours and hours on end reading from websites, collecting information on our topics. Once we have a deep enough understanding, we begin to write the position papers. These range anywhere from one to ten-plus pages, but this is just the first draft. Then, we get comments on our papers from our MUN advisor. Usually, we require anywhere from four to twelve drafts until it has everything it could need in it. These are anywhere from 2-12 pages. Then, we create our bibliographies, which have a minimum of 35 sources.

At this point, we are super close to our conference, the climax and ending of MUN. By two weeks before conference weekend, we are reading opening speeches in front of everybody on the delegation. We also read update papers from our dais, preparing conference note templates, as well as any other background information one might need.

Then it’s conference weekend. You know how they say time flies? I say that time teleports. One moment it’s there, the next moment it’s gone. The conference weekend this year was from April 24-26, taking place in the Millenium Hilton, right across the street from the United Nations. We all gather from 7:15-8 a.m., at the Time Warner Center in Colombus Circle. Dunkin’ Donuts are served, hence, MUNchkins. We all assemble and talk and argue and have final checks to make sure we have everything for the conference. Once everyone is accounted for, we take the subway to Grand Central Station, then walk to the U.N., where we hand out IDs and change into our conference shoes. Then, we go to the Millenium Hilton nearby for the conference.

The conference itself lasts anywhere from two to eight hours per day for three days. It consists of moderated caucuses (specific amounts of time with a specific speaker’s time on a specific topic), unmoderated caucuses (kind of like free time), bloc forming (forming alliances to start working on working papers), voting (which draft resolution should be the one of the committee session), and amending (kind of like compromising the resolution for a final draft). At the end, awards are presented, but the reason our delegation goes is for the experience, not for the certificates.

The weekend after the conference, the delegation goes to the Gemini Diner for a last lunch. Afterwards, we all go back to the Peace Form One statue across from the U.N and say our heartfelt goodbyes to the delegation. Usually there are a lot of tears. This year was no exception. It’s the delegation’s last formal goodbye.

M.U.N. has a lot of special events. This year, Columbia Prof. Mahmood Mamdani (the Mayor’s father) paid a visit to our school and talked to us about his Ugandan background and the history of Africa in terms of the effects of imperialism and the misconduct of local elites. Last year, Columbia Prof.  Jeffrey Sachs (my grandfather) came in and talked about…everything, really.

Model U.N. is one of the best things that’s happened to me. It’s an open space that won’t target me for saying the weirdest, most not-true things in the world. I am eternally grateful to it.

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Sienna Sachs Beck, 13, will be entering 9th grade this fall at the High School for American Studies at Lehman College. Although she enjoys all kinds of writing (except for research papers), her favorite form of all time is poetry. An active environmentalist, Sienna especially loves writing poetry that raises awareness about global changes. And best–or worst–of all, Sienna enjoys doing Eka Pada Sirsasana (her favorite yoga pose) to excess, even while writing her next piece.