Weekend Part 2

This update is terrible late. sorry!
But in my defense I have been quite ill for the past week and so I haven't had much access to the Internet.
Anyways, this is the second half of my weekend (which is now from two weeks ago) and is about the Peace and Conflict Conference that we had:

The second part of my weekend was even better than the first because on Monday and Tuesday we had no classes, but instead we had a Peace and Conflicts conference.
It was a great success.
I think it went so well because it was a good mix between student and staff organization. My peace and Conflicts teacher, along with some other teachers and my vise principal, was very involved, but students also had a large role in the organization and execution of the conference.
I think it was good for the students to have a say, but I think that the teacher involvement allowed it to be more professional, and we were able to have some amazing speakers come.

Monday focused on global issues and was a mixture of lectures and workshops.
In the morning we had a man names Ray McGrath (who won a Noble Peace Prize for his involvement in the banning of land mines) give a lecture. He talked about war laws and the ways in which governments and the public view war. I found one quote that he had very interesting: “So long as weapons are not prohibited, states can use the weapons that are available to them” (British government). It was a very interesting beginning to the conference and I think it really made people think about the absurdities of war.
For the rest of the morning and for the afternoon, there were a bunch of different workshops. Students ran some of them and the speakers (such as Ray McGrath) ran other ones.

I was running one of the workshops. I did my ee on child soldiers and so I was asked to run a workshop in the topic of child soldiers, which I was very pleased to do, with the help of a 1st year in my house: Vincent (Kenya). I was bit nervous about how it would go, but in the end I think it was very successful. The workshop was completely full, which was awesome and extra people came to a few of them. The workshop was a mixture of videos, discussions and me talking. I gave a fair amount of information on what child soldiers are, where they are why they are used, and what is being done etc. I then showed a clip from the film War Dance of a boy recounting his experience as a child soldier in Uganda. Then at the end, I raised some questions about the topic such as: when is a child a child and when are they a soldier? And what should be done when a conflict is over?
It was really interesting to see what people thought and some of the discussions were quite good.

I was lucky enough to also be able to go to two different workshops, just to listen.
1) I went to one of Ray McGrath’s workshops and we talked about disproportionate retaliation and how to change public opinion on the way that governments fight their wars.
2) I went to a talk that was done by an Israeli and a Palestinian student about the conflict. It was really interesting to listen to them talk about the conflict from the two different points of view.


The second day of the conference was more focused on conflicts within the college. In the morning, we ate breakfast in our houses and had discussions about some of the broader issues at our school (such as: cultural differences, and communication issues). The day was ended with a peace flame that we lit.

So, overall it was a very successful and enjoyable conference.

I feel like I left satisfied with what I had done and with what I had learned. I was given new ideas about how to overcome difficulties on both global and personal levels. Although I did sometimes wonder if some of the simplifications of conflicts was accurate, I loved it.