Ahem...

MUN credentialing was today, and it was a bit of a fiasco. Kvitka has been in Russia for the past two and a half weeks making some documentary of Gorbachev, so Ian and I have been running MUN alone during this normally very hectic time. It was, in fact, a miracle that all of the country notebooks got done and made it to the Lincoln credentialing session this morning. For people on a particular country to be able to be credentialed, the country notebook for that country must be approved. Thankfully we noticed a contradiction on the requirements for the notebook on the OHSIRL site, and were able to adapt our notebooks to fit either standard. So, Ian and I were rather pleased when everything was coming together smoothly at about 8:15 this morning. Then we took all of our notebooks to the room where they were to be approved, handed them to the judges and waited for their approval. Only it didn't go like that. They failed us because they had made a change in the requirements for the country timeline about a week and a half previous and had sent out an email to all of the teacher advisors. Ahhh, but as you know, Kvitka is in Russia, and has been for a while now, so she couldn't get the news to us. So we found ourselves a computer, and Kadish and I feverishly added the necessary facts. To be perfectly honest, it wasn't that bad. We just had to find and write down about 7 more major events in Saudi Arabia during the 1990s. When we were done, Ian took the notebook to the people to be approved. Only it didn't happen that way. They failed it again. This time it was because I had typed the 10 page data sheet. That's right, it was failed because it was typed. This change in requirements and strange departure from past years' policy was apparently included in the same email that Kvitka couldn't tell us about. Apparently they were trying to crack down on people who just copied and pasted the entire CIA World Factbook country profile for their data sheet. This would be a legitimate concern, except for the fact that the CIA World Factbook is in a totally different format, and only has about half the information one needs to fill out the country data sheet. Thankfully, we had six members of the Saudi Arabia delegation present, so we all sat down in the middle of the hall and transcribed all 10 typed pages onto 10 handwritten pages in a mere 10 minutes. We were racing the clock so we could get an early spot to credential. And finally, it did pass. All of the notebooks from our five countries had these same problems, and two countries threw in the towel and just decided to go to a later credentialing session.

Then it came time for credentialing. I got to go last in our country because I'm special--I mean, because I'm on General Assembly B. It was great. They asked me about the first topic for GAB: about Israel-Palestine and the peace roadmap. I talked for about 3 minutes and had really just gotten my feet wet in the subject, when the lady interrupted me and asked me in what year the roadmap was aiming to solve the Israel-Palestine conflict. To be quite honest, that is a rather obscure fact that is somewhat innapropriate for the level of detail that is dealt with at credentialing, but somehow I managed to summon it off the top of my head. It was 2005. So then I started talking again about Israel-Palestine, and they quickly interrupted me once more. They were moving on to the topics from another committee with which I was supposed to have familiarized myself: Disarmament. They chose the topic of WMDs from Disarmament. I spoke no more than one sentence that stated the three major types of WMDs, before they cut me off again and said that they were done. Apparently I passed rather easily.

Needless to say, I was a bit tired after the morning's events, so Kadish, Dan, and I walked over to India House on 11th and Morrison (you really should go), and enjoyed their excellent lunch buffet. It is quite possibly one of the best $7 I have spent in a long time. Kadish was serious about this too. He neglected to eat breakfast so he could consume as much Indian food and mango chutney as possible. And eat we did! We spent 2 hours there. Ian never did show up to lunch because of issues with his ride, but it was still good. And then I went home. The End. Tah dah!