Middle School MUN Conference

My wonderful wife volunteered last spring for us to organize the middle school MUN conference this year. While we have had all year to plan this event, we had zero, zilch, nada idea about how to actually organize a MUN conference. Slowly, we began finding some information and organizing the conference. In short 5 schools from Guangzhou, Xiamen, Hong Kong, and Shenzhen represented 9 model nations and came to the conference hosted by QSI Shekou. Jamie and I were responsible for arranging everything but we had some help from the visiting teachers, our own students, the QSI staff, and the QSI students. We made the registration packets, found hosts for 8 students and 2 adults, ordered all of the food, made sure the building was set up, designed the t-shirts, certificates, and made a 25 page full color program. We also set up and orchestrated the opening and closing ceremonies which included flags from all participating nations and their national anthems.

It was a ton of work and overall a huge success and opportunity for the students involved. It makes me look back to my middle and high schools days and wish that I had those opportunities. There are always some pros and cons of living in a small town and going to a small school.

We have some final touches to do for the post conference; but it is downhill from here for Jamie and I. We have a trip scheduled to Chongqing to begin the Yangtze River Cruise and ending in Shanghai, but that trip is at the end of the month. We'll go to Macau one more time and perhaps a trip to Guangzhou. Of course, we'll hit up Hong Kong a couple more times prior to leaving China for good on June 20.

My dissertation research is just around the corner, and I'll be putting in some major hours interviewing Chinese teachers and writing Chapters 4 and 5 of my dissertation. Ultimate goals is to finish by the end of the summer, but that might be too optimistic.

Griffey is doing great and we'll be shipping him home within a month. More information to come about that, and I'll keep you posted. People who move to Shekou like to read our blog and it might be helpful for them if they want to move a pet. I'll be posting more over the next several months as we begin our preparation to move out of China, back to the U.S. for a month, then to Saudi Arabia in August.

Hope everyone has a wonderful week!