MAL Nationals

So the last week of March/first of April I was in DC for the National Model Arab League Competition. The short version of the story was that we won, the long...we won big time! 3 Outstanding delegation individual awards, 1 honorable mention delegation award, and overall Outstanding Delegation award for the school on a whole. If I hadn't been so caught up in the politics of what was going on I would have been crying for my babies.

The politics this year were horrible. The southeast regional was 2 weeks prior and apparently it was hell, so everyone who had gone to that one came to this one hostile, and it infected the whole model.

As Chief of Staff I got the bums rush so to speak. When they introduced the "senior secretariat" I was never mentioned, which meant that a lot of people didn't know that there was someone legitimately in charge of the copy room. The copy machine itself was incredibily slow, as it wasn't really a copy machine but one of those copy, print and scan things. It was very high quality, but not meant to handle the volume of copies that it needed to. I was also in charge of resolution packets, which under normal circumstances is alright, but the National council took away my Vice-Chairs, leaving me to format all of the resolutions and admendments. I managed to keep up until Friday till almost 4pm (please note that the model sessions ended that day at 5pm and that was when everyone was supposed to help me put packets together) and of course, every council decided that they needed to railroad as many resolutions as possible into that last hour. At 5pm it hit me that I wasn't going to be ready and I cracked, discretely excusing myself to cry in one of the vacant council rooms. Part of the problem was that I was exhausted, hadn't eaten enough, etc. The day prior I worked with no lunch/dinner breaks etc from 9:30 am to 2:00 am, and starting again on that Friday morning at 8:30 working still with no breaks until almost 8:30 that night.

One thing that I did enjoy was that Mr. 3 and I spared no expense for whatever we had time to do. There were several nights just hanging out in the Watergate Lobby drinking heavily. It was expensive (over $100 in alcohol alone) but worth it.

While I still feel sick at all of the politics that happened (and I am only mentioning a faction of the crap that happened) I am optimistic for next year. And I was named as Assistant Secretary General for Nationals. A lot of the things that I had issues with this year will be changed, I guarentee that.