ACID Braden

A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity of taking eight students from ninth and tenth grade to Amman, Jordan. The trip was for the model united nations club. First off I have to say I had a great group of kids, from the management standpoint I could not have asked for a better group.

We arrived with little incident, which when leaving Saudi with a mixed gender group and not being the parent of any of them is an amazing feat in and of itself, and got to the hotel. The organizers had a very long, loud and pointless get together the first night. By way of pointless we supposedly tried to break the world record for most number of people patting their heads while rubbing their tummies…yeah. The next day we had to be up at 4:30am to get on a bus bound for Petra. If you are not familiar with petra this photo should help you identify it, if from nothing else than Indiana Jones:

The place was amazing. The buildings all carved out of rock, endless caverns and canyons snakng through the desert. As I understand it we actually saw very little of Petra. It is a vast complex and had we not had a guide that must have been paid by the numer of tourists he could get through in a day we might have seen a bit more. Reaqlly though, to do it justice you would ave to stay at the nice hotel at the entrance and spend a couple days exploring. Should you be planning a trip take the hotel, it is four hours one way by bus from Amman…needless to say when we got back, late, it was all we could do to get dinner and prepare for the opening ceremonies the next day.

The conference itself lasted three days. It was opened with a very interesting presentation by one of the Jordanian princes on the topic of land mines. This was not one of the conference topics, so I am not sure how it related other than the fact that his foundation helped fund the conference. As for the three days of conferencing, well it was interesting and a learning experience for all of us. I had never been to one of these before and took a lot of notes for when we have ours here in February. My strongest impressions were: Do it in two days, not three and keep the conference in English. The “local” delegates kept speaking in Arabic. Not only was this against policy but there were several schools (ours included) that did not have Arabic speakers and so were left out quite a bit.

Most of my students did not propose any resolutions or amendments, but did take semi-active roles behind the scenes. A couple though really got into it and were significant contributors. It was really neat to see them in action. Perhaps the best time of the whole trip for me was when, after the first conference day, we ordered room service and all worked together on proposals, terminology and procedure. It was really neat to see them working so closely and all getting something from the experience.

The last day I got to visit a former student who, owing to a terrible car accident last summer, is in hospital. At the time she was in Amman so her mom came to pick me up for a visit. She looked great and was excited about a move to a hospital in Germany where she hopes to get better care. Good Luck, Aya!

After a very long trip away from my family we all returned to the Magic Kingdom and I was able to reunite with my family. It was hard being gone that long and I hope that the next time it is a shorter trip.

Here are a few photos of various locations and sights…including what happens to a teacher who has been chaperoning a group of teenagers…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 at 1:04 pm and is filed under Alex and Charmagne. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.