Model UN

I'm in a mentoring program and yesterday my Mentee and I went to the United Nations with about 60 other people in the program. It was really interesting listening to the history behind the building and getting to see the places were different world wide policies and recommendations are made. My mentee is Chinese and she's only been in the country for a year and a half, so she had a lot of questions about what our tour guide was saying. It's interesting how explaining information to her can make me remember what the guide said better. It's also funny how she misheard one piece of information in the section about UN peacekeepers and she was confused for most of the lecture. At the end of the tour, she asked me why our guide kept talking about "blueberries" and I had to explain to her what a beret was, and that fact that UN peacekeepers wear blue ones, so "Blue Beret" not "blueberry". She said the tour made much more sense after that.

It's interesting too, what kind of a place the UN is. It's a place of such power, but at the same time no real power. It doesn't make rules, it makes policies. It uses peer pressure to try to get countries to do good things, but has very little ability to enforce anything. It still feeds 1/3 of the world's population using it's Food Programs. It tries to make the world a better place for the 50% of the world's population lives on their country's equivalent of $2 a day. This doesn't mean they live on the equivalent of 2 American Dollars, which would not be a bad thing in some countries. This means that they live on the equivalent of what 2 American dollars would buy an American in the United States. For those of you who live in NYC, they live on the monetary equivalent of buying 1 subway ride a day. It sort of made me sick to stand there and listen to what the guide was saying. But, it's not like I actively do anything to make this situation better, and that just made me sicker.

I hadn't meant this post to be political, my trip to the UN yesterday just made me feel pretty lousy. Hopefully, I'll find a way to take how I feel and make something better. I was an International Relations major in college with a focus on Africa for crying out loud, it's not like this is information I didn't already know. But I guess when I had to stand there and explain to a child all the sad things that happen that our guide speaks about so nonchalantly, it sort of makes everything come more sharply into focus.