Wednesday 5th June

Another lecture day today but a very interesting one :) We had a guest speaker called David from the World Service Authority, this is an organisation set up by Garry Davis which helps people whose best interest does not lie within their nation but in becoming a World Citizen. Davis was a fighter pilot in WW2 who had to drop bombs on any city he was told to, but he felt that it went against his nature to kill and did not want to be a art of a nation that demanded he do so. Therefore, he renounced his American citizenship and become a citizen of the world. Davis is 92 now, he seems to me to be an incredibly brave individual, we were lucky enough to have him on the phone for 10 minutes but I could probably have listened to his stories and ideas all day. I had never heard of world citizenship as a legitimate option (a world passport is an official document recognised by over 160 countries) and I am really happy that I got the chance to learn about something on this trip that I would never have done otherwise.

The second half of the day was preparing us for our United Nations trip tomorrow in the form of a history and overview of the structure of the organisation. At the end of the day we discovered that we are going to be taking part (over the course of the 3 weeks) in a mock UN Security Council set-up. We have been given a brief with the story of a fictional African country at civil war and we students each represent one of the 15 member states of the security council who must decide how to act, if at all! The countries were issued randomly, I was assigned Pakistan which I was disappointed with at first because I'm power mad and was hoping for somewhere like Russia, China etc. But looking at my secret Pakistan brief there may be some interesting politics yet! Obviously I can't disclose them here as they are far beyond your security clearance ;)

 

I need to take a minute in dedication to Fred. Fred is our bus driver, or our God as most of us are referring to him. He's just cool. He's driving us around outside of term time, picking us up whenever we need, even waiting for us to shop for three hours! Fred's one of those guys who, no matter what you need, he knows a guy! To top it off, when we got back on the bus yesterday he emerged with three big boxes from Neri's bakery, full of assorted cookies and biscuits for each of our three students houses. I think we would all agree that our trip has been made more enjoyable thanks to Fred :)