MUN weekend from HELL

Yes, I think I'm fully recovered from the latest Model United Nations conference and ready to tell the story. This one was held in Mussoorie, at the "Woodstock" boarding school, no relation to the festival - but perhaps the name was a sign of an event that would deliver oh so much more than expected.

You know those dreams where you are paralyzed and cannot speak or run away? That was this trip. So much went wrong that I don't even know where to start.

The plan: to attend a "local" MUN conference only about 8 hours away. The dates: early Friday morning, April 9th until Sunday night, April 11th. We were scheduled to travel by train to Dehradun, a lovely town that serves as a gateway to the Himalayas (more like a gateway to Dante's Inferno, in this case).

The first sign of trouble was when a student emailed me asking why we were missing an extra day of school. It turned out that the train reservations had been made for Thursday, not Friday (notice my use of passive voice, here, just to emphasize that this is NOT about blame).

Missing school days is becoming less and less popular with administrators here, who claim to actually WANT to see students at school on school days. Students, I've noticed, almost universally do not share this sentiment.

In an attempt to support administrative policy (and avoid creating yet another substitute daily lesson plan) I immediately alerted our travel office to the reservation error and asked for reservations on Friday instead. Uh-oh. Nothing available on the train. Where are all of these people going? Kashmir? The Swat Valley? Or do people ride trains just for the pleasure of watching men pooping only yards from the tracks, mooning the passengers? Doubtful. So what would we do? Of course! Take a bus. That shouldn't take much longer than the train ride. And then we can stop and stretch our legs here and there.

Ha, ha, ha. On both counts. And that's only the beginning of What Went Wrong at Woodstock.

The bus arrived about 20 minutes late, 6:20 A.M. - situation normal for India - but we were on a tight schedule, since the conference started at 3:30 that afternoon. The email from the travel agent stated that the driver spoke "passive" English but was not fluent. What is "passive" English? All I know is that I had to ask a Hindi-speaking student to communicate anything of importance to the driver and his sidekick. Bus drivers here have a "spotter" who hangs out the passenger-side window and keeps the driver informed of how many farm animals and old ladies have been killed or at least knocked unconscious by the bus in the past hour. The "guy" also does all of those nice things that long-distance drivers wish for: pulling grapes off their stems so they're easier to eat, folding back plastic or paper wrappers to enable one-handed eating of sandwiches, taking the tops on and off of water bottles - everything but the neck massage (at least not in public). The driver himself did not trouble himself with the niceties of conversation, or even acknowledgement of our presence. I could've sworn that maybe he didn't even LIKE us.

If you think this is just about a couple of torture sessions in the form of claustrophobic enclosed spaces and diesel fumes, oh no, there's more. We're not even at the conference yet. And I haven't even complained about the driver turning off the air conditioning whenever we went uphill because it was "overheating the engine." Which led to a repeated chorus of "Make him turn the air conditioning on, Ms. Guerin." My Hindi lessons came in handy here, "AC, AC!" But the relief would only be temporary, until he decided again (without ever telling us) to turn it off. Outside, the temperature was about 110 degrees.

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Many moons before the trip, I had eagerly snapped up Woodstock's offer of free housing in their new, state-of-the-art guest house on campus. At least we could look forward to cooling off and changing when we arrived. But when I called ahead to ask if we could stop to change before the first session (that started right when we arrived), they told us that the housing was "too far from the school" for us to have time to go there first. Hmnn. . . on campus? Let's stop here to mention that the campus is on the side of a mountain, and we had gone from close to sea level to about 6500 feet on that lovely bus ride.
The bus driver dropped us off at what I thought was the gate, where some hapless Woodstock middle schooler, whom I thought was our official greeter, went along with my delusion and walked us up to the main entrance. Here, when I say "up," it's not figurative. Carrying backpacks and wheeled suitcases, we climbed steps and walked steep walkways, and by the time we got to the main entrance, I could hardly breathe - it was a good 1/2 mile.

And when we got there, I noted that the REAL main entrance appeared to be on a street wide enough for our bus to have stopped. Remember this; it's relevant for the return trip story.

OK, I have to admit that the conference itself was great, especially after the students recovered from the shock of realizing that most of the attendees were actually serious about Model UN, not there for the "hot" girls or illicit drinking (the campus is isolated and was founded to educate missionaries' children, so it's pretty tame). Our students were also bowled over by the audacity that the other school from Delhi showed by actually coming PREPARED to debate, with background information on their topics and practiced speeches delivered at frightening volume. After some scrambling, our American-educated students showed those stereotypical all-American characteristics: the ability to BS until they figured out what the heck was going on. They made a lot of speeches that sounded like this:

"Now you've heard a lot of facts and figures. But what's REALLY important is . . . ."

When all else fails, punt. Reject that "fuzzy math."

And here's where the complacent seniors lost out to the eager and naiive sophomores, who buried themselves in committee dialogues and stayed up late writing new resolutions and speeches, while the seniors fought over who would get the towels. Oh, yes, that's where we were - the housing.

At 9 the first night, after the meetings ended, one of the MUN advisors there offered to walk us to our housing, as the path was dark and we "might get lost." Double hmnn . . . . This was an uphill climb that made the earlier climb seem like child's play. There was no point in trying to wheel luggage along the gravelly, uneven path. And one hand had to cling to the railing, that thin thread holding us back from a tumble into the dark void. After several stops where the only sound was ragged breathing (remember that the girls were in heels, too), finally, whew! We were there! There? This didn't look exactly as I 'd expected. Instead of a modern, cozy-looking house with cheerful yellow lighting to greet us, it looked like a girl scout camp that had been deserted suddenly during a landslide. It smelled like dust. The rooms each had two or three narrow bunks that looked like they had been made up years before, so that when you moved the covers dust flew. Visions of Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, surrounded by cobwebs. The pillows, we discovered soon after, were cinderblock-like and the mattresses? Why bother. At least we we could get a good drink of water and take showers after the long day and the climb. But . . .

two pitchers of drinkable water sat on a table. Two pitchers for 13 tired and thirsty teenagers? One student actually picked up a pitcher in a characteristically unselfish teenager move and drank straight out of it, spilling precious water on his shirt as he did so. And . . .

Did I say showers? A man mysteriously appeared out of the darkness outside and informed us that there would not be hot water until the next night, at the earliest. AND that there were only four towels, which I claimed on behalf of the female contingency. I was ready to do battle with a wet towel, if necessary, but the boys accepted their bad fortune, resigned and fatigued.

Do you know the feeling of having to be the cheerleader in situations like this? Probably all of you parents have gone through this. "Come on, kids. A little cold water never killed anyone (whom I know, anyway). It's invigorating. Look, I'm going to go and take a nice long relaxing freezing cold shower, just to show you. Hey, who needs towels? It's more fun drying yourself off with toilet paper. Let's play mummy!" All this in that familiar desperate high-pitched tone that is met with stone-faced silence by the troops.


The Man from Outside handed us a large bunch of keys that looked old enough to belong to Bluebeard. He gruffly told us to lock up all of the doors, especially the double locks on the doors to the outside, before we went to bed. Maybe some of his dead ex-wives were behind the doors in true Bluebeard fashion, I thought.





I locked the outside doors, wondering what exotic and dangerous species was waiting out there bears? tigers? A few minutes later I heard loud knocking.




In fact, the mysterious lurking wild animals were several of our boys playing a rousing game of basketball with a deflated ball - at least there was a hoop. They returned inside and gulped down the remaining fresh water before retiring, sweaty and showerless, to their bunks.

Just to top off the events of the day, I dropped one of the two rolls of toilet paper into the toilet while fumbling my way through the darkness in the middle of the night.

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The second night we arrived back at our cozy lodging to hear that no, the hot water wasn't working yet (sigh). It was at about that time that I learned that the house we were in was NOT the lovely new housing built for school guests. No, that housing had mistakenly been given to our conference rivals from Delhi. How did I find this out, since no one actually told us? Just those casual conversations with other advisors . . .how was your night? Did you have hot water? You did? How were the beds? Comfortable? . . . What? You had TVs and hot water? What's the name of the place you're staying? And your BUS took you to the door via an upper road?





Do I have "gullible" stamped on my forehead? Don't answer that, Mike.








But we did have three new towels - Yay! - for the eight boys. This led to a demonstration of primal male competitive behavior (rock, paper, scissors?) for the alpha, beta, and gamma positions in the group. And some less primal but equally entertaining poor sportsmanship that nearly came to blows. Hey, guys, come on. I've discovered myself towel-less at the Y before - just use a t-shirt. These softies lead privileged lives, I harumphed to myself silently. After deciding who would get the towels, they continued their chest-beating in a merciless game of soccer (in typical AES fashion, it was Koreans vs. Indians and Marshall, the only white boy) on the concrete basketball court outside, cheered on by the females, until blood was spilled and the females nursed the wounded soldiers back to health with whatever toilet paper and drinkable water remained.

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The return trip: Short version of the argument with the bus driver about picking us up at the entrance. We're at the entrance; pick us up here. No. Yes. No. (He won). We tramped down the hill, chased by our suitcases rolling bumpily behind us. Yes, I called the travel company and complained bitterly about my aging knees and his rudeness, and they said "Yes, we'll talk to him. Yes, yes." But this is India. I'm sure that he was sent out the next day to transport some other unsuspecting school group somewhere, without skipping a beat. In fact, he probably won some award from his fellow drivers.

It was 3 PM when we left. We arranged our first stop, at the McDonalds in the town at the bottom of the winding road leading down the mountain. (I was thanked more by the students for this stop than for anything else on the trip.) Then we would make one more stop for dinner halfway home. I took a Dramamine pill and closed my eyes as the trip home began.
If the ride there seemed long, dusty, barely air-conditioned in over-100 degree temperatures, and, well, long - the ride back dwarfed it in the "Gateway to Hell" record book. 13 1/2 hours, through the night, with my attempts to sleep interrupted frequently by "Ms. Guerin, how much longer? Ms. Guerin, how many hours until we get there? Ms. Guerin, we haven't moved for an hour! Ms. Guerin, Ms. Guerin . . . ." Finally I changed my name, so that I didn't have to listen. Yet it was disheartening, the times I opened my eyes, to notice that not only was traffic stopped, but also that the driver was AWOL and people were picnicking around cooking fires in the middle of the highway.


It wasn't much better when we were moving - it was like a video game where the traffic is coming at you and you know that you're going to crash - not if, but when, is the question. But even the video games don't add the excitement, in addition to cars and trucks and buses coming AT you, of cars and trucks and buses and pedestrians and motorbikes on both sides of you. Now I understood why we needed the wiry "spotter" keeping a lookout on the passenger side.

Our dinner stop didn't happen until midnight and the students either had extremely well-trained bladders or were in the back peeing out the windows. I was realizing that it IS possible to get a chafed rear end, as I shifted position frequently and tried to sleep.

Another "fun fact." AES has a "12-hour" policy, recently referred to as the "11-hour" policy in a memo perhaps reflecting the increasing frenzy of our modern world, states that students are excused from any classes that occur within 12 hours of their arrival back in New Delhi after a school trip. Students who normally have no interest in math (or as it's called here, "maths") are fascinated with the numbers when it comes to this policy. Staying up until 2 or 3 is normally no big deal here; in fact, all-nighters are almost an initiation rite at AES, but put said student on a train, bus, or plane coming back from a school trip, and time (for sleeping) is suddenly of the essence! (Apologies for those who do not love the law and all of its terminology). They will repeat, in their sing-songy voices, over and over (hence: repeat), "Ms. Gue-rin, it's 11 PM so we don't have to be in your class tomorrow morning . . . . Ms. Gue-rin, it's 2 AM so we only have to be at school for one class (automatically deemed an unwise use of time - why bother).


At 4:30 AM, arriving home about 5 hours after the time parents had expected us, we were greeted silently by parents, who probably were trying to restrain themselves from knocking me unconscious and spitting on the bus driver.
To be honest, these are parents protesting some school lunch program in England, but don't they look angry?

Oh well, at least I had three hours to sleep before Monday started.

Lest I forget: three of our students were recognized as "distinguished delegates." Two sophomores and one junior. The Woodstock MUN chairs thanked us graciously for coming and said that we had improved the conference's quality. And we did get to know each other a lot better. All of which made the trip . . . almost . . . worthwhile.