http://www.icmica-miic.org/
So we were all to report to our organizations Monday morning at 9 am. Alison and I arrived at 9 am found the building went up to the 4th floor found a door with several organizations on it including Pax Romana and thus proceeded to open it. There was a long dark hallway, I felt around for a light switch eventually finding it and illuminated an all white-fairly ghetto looking hallway, at the end of which was another door with Pax Romana written on it. We tried the door only to find it locked (no this is not the beginning to my new mystery novel but actually how our first day began.) After about 20 minutes somebody came and unlocked the door for us.
We went inside and saw a small office with bookshelves on every possible wall, there were two private offices to the left and a slightly larger conference room on the right-this is where we went with the woman who let us in. She explained that she was from Kenya and here for her countries review-we didn't really know what this meant so we nodded and continued to awkwardly sit at the table until our boss got there. When she finally arrived, she welcomed us and more or less began quizzing us on our knowledge of UN acronyms (as you can imagine the UN has many acronyms very few of which we knew), she also seemed to be under the impression that we had previously worked internships with various organizations in Geneva, when we explained these were actually visits with a short tour, lecture and question and answer period she seemed slightly annoyed and began lecturing us on what the UN was and the UPR (Universal Periodic Review) After a little bit of lecturing she explained to us that without a more comprehensive knowledge of these topic we wouldn't be able to report on the UN very well. So, we were to attend a training being held there everyday from 9-12. Today it started at 10, a man named Adrian was leading it-she explained that attendance would fluctuate, but today it was me Alison, the Kenyan woman and Adrian. Adrian is a short, sort of disproportionate man who looks kind of like he could easily be drawn as a caricature of what one would expect a european professor to look like. Adrian basically spent 2 hours explaining the very basics of the UN and the UPR, none of which could have helped us to answer our bosses earlier questions and all of which had been covered in our academic course on international institutions. After the course ended we were brought to the United Nations to receive our badges so we could attend the Universal Periodic Review. After receiving our badges we actually got to sit in on the UPR. Basically a country brought a board of "experts" who reported on the countries state of human rights and then the rest of the countries could sign up for 2 minute speeches where they congratulated, recommended and asked questions on the report (all of these speeches were of course done before hand so didn't really address the recently delivered report), then the country was able to respond to the speeches. The entire proceedings are 3 hours per country. After this first session ended, we went down to the UN cafeteria for lunch. Our boss had told us to eat there and then return to the office, which we did only to find nobody there. The third (and from what we can tell final) person who works in the office finally came in and told us that our boss was at a meeting with Japan and would be back around 4:30 and that we should read our manuals (which should really be titled: The Idiots Guide to the UN). So we skimmed it and then did some homework, internet stuff, napping etc. Until our boss came back to do our briefing. She gave us several topics which we could choose for our individual projects but that we should wait and think about them before we told her what they would be. Then we were able to leave for the day to head over to our class with Professor Krause.
We were all much better dressed than we normally were for his class however our snappy outfits didn't quite match our already tested attention spans from spending 9 hours at work. So while we were all more wound up and chatty than usual-very little of our focus was on the narrow versus broad definitions of security we were supposed to be discussing. After class, we caught the tram and boarded bus three to finally end our day around 10 pm (We had all more or less left for work around 8 am). This left little energy for tackling any homework so we went to bed.
This post is already too long to continue for the week so I'll try to do the next couple days in a different one.
Highlight of Day 1: Walking down the dark hall being very nervous about what to expect
Lowlight of Day 1: realizing the actual length of our days...
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