About
Opening Address – ShawMUN
It gives me great pleasure to welcome you all to ShawMUN and to extend a Shawnigan welcome – virtually – to this year’s delegates, drawn from Costa Rica, California and BC.
I would also like to thank, at the outset, the Secretary-General (Ainsley F.), the Director-General (Justin L.), the Committee Directors, and the Committee Chairs, drawn from different schools (who will be moderating debate throughout the day).
We have been living through an extraordinary moment in history.
The pandemic has created a period of polarization, uncertainty, insecurity.
It has been a period of de-socialization: physical distancing, quarantine, disconnection, an artificial world of online interaction, border closures, strict protocols, loneliness, school closures and much more.
However, it has also been a time when nations across the world have worked together to control the spread of COVID-19, to develop and produce vaccines and to strive to defeat the pandemic.
In a world where handshakes have been forbidden, invisible handshakes and partnerships across borders have unexpectedly been forged.
I have found myself again and again coming back to the wisdom of the Indian novelist Arundhati Roy as I have sought to help guide Shawnigan through this time – she perceptively describes the pandemic as “a portal, a gateway between one world and the next” and encourages us to choose to walk though it, “ready to imagine another world. And to fight for it.”
In the microcosm that is Shawnigan, COVID-19 has, again and again, forced us to reimagine our Shawnigan traditions and routines and it has proven to be a gateway to new ideas, initiatives, opportunities and silver linings.
Together, as a community, we have adapted, re-imagined and accelerated. The pandemic has proven to be a gateway between one world and the next and I am convinced that Shawnigan is emerging more creative and stronger than before.
ShawMUN provides the opportunity to engage in conversation on that gateway to the future of our world.
As delegates, you are encouraged and expected to see through the lens of others and to enter into respectful dialogue towards developing understanding, exploring solutions to the complex issues facing the world today, learning the strength of compromise and discussing a more sustainable future for our shared world.
We need to address the global challenges of our time – and this conference challenges you to consider the interconnectedness of humanity, to debate solutions, to build partnerships and to leave no one behind.
Here at Shawnigan, we talk about the 4Cs: Curiosity, Compassion, Community – and Courage.
I invite you, today, to engage with the 4Cs during this conference, to practise and develop skills essential for community building – both at local and global levels, and to consider how best to drive action and change.
The news continues to be dominated with the global response to the pandemic. In parallel, old and new fault lines appear: escalating tensions between China and Taiwan, between Russia and Ukraine, internal protests and worldwide condemnation of the military coup in Myanmar; and racial tensions across the world. This week Iran has announced its development of an atomic weapon and the US has decided to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan.
We need to strive for a better and shared world and today I challenge you, in this Model United Nations simulation, to look for new partnerships and for those ‘tiny glow-worms of tenderness encapsulated in [the] icy caverns of a cruel [world]’.
[Chinua Achebe – ‘Vultures’]
Food for thought.
And good luck.
Richard D A Lamont
Headmaster
Shawnigan Lake School
16th April 2021
We acknowledge with respect the Coast Salish Peoples on whose traditional lands and waterways we live, learn and play. We are grateful for the opportunity to share in this beautiful region, and we aspire to healthy and respectful relationships with those who have lived on and cared for these lands for millennia.
Shawnigan Lake School is an independent co-educational boarding school for ages 13 –18 on Canada’s beautiful West Coast. Our diverse, interdisciplinary and innovative programming helps shape the next generation of global leaders.
