“At the sunrise of faith”

Last Sunday at this time a remarkable event was wrapping up here at KA. I had just been witness, and part-time chaperone, as an international conference hosted by KA seniors came to a close.

I come from a long-line of event planners. My mother and her mother both conceived and managed numerous conferences, meetings, and events in their time, and I grew up in a household where it seemed a festival or gala was always underway. I had first-hand knowledge of the vision, organization, stamina, diplomacy and grit needed to execute a conference-like event.

For almost a year a group of students worked with my colleague Fatina to create a Model United Nations conference hosted by KA. Since I was not a part of the organization, I got to simply watch as they “hatched” their plans, or rather, a more apt metaphor, planted the seeds and nurtured their seedling project.

For the first two years of our school we sent delegates to other international MUN conferences, and it seemed that our young scholars thought they were ready to helm their own conference. Where would they do it? How would they get the word out? Who would be in charge of what? How would it be supported? Funded? Would students from outside the region come to the Middle East for a conference? Could juniors/seniors actually run such a complicated machine as a conference?

Fatina would give me reports from time to time as the planning continued. These students really wanted to pursue this, and usually over a plateful of warm cookies, they met at her house to figure out the logistics of creating a conference from scratch. As Fatina described it to me, it seemed like the work and planning of doing a musical (I suppose if I were remotely sporty it might remind me of trying to engineer an international tournament, but you know, you start from what you know!). In my time I have directed a dozen or so musicals, and it always felt like you were building a house on the ground with a tremendous crew, some committed, others less so, and then finally, you hoist that house off the ground and see what you have right at the opening.

Her crew imagined the tasks, and divided up the labor, doing everything from creating a logo and website, to securing the splashy Kempinksy hotel resort at the Dead Sea as the site for the conference, to thinking of both the style and substance of such a conference. They laughed about how the delegates (from hopefully around the world!) would convene at the lowest point on earth, for a conference with the highest potential.

Over the next six months the finance committee secured an impressive list of sponsors and schools began to show interest. Then as 2010 dawned Fatina faced the countdown as that seedling idea began to grow. It was almost time to actually host the conference. Do you have coffee breaks? Do you provide time on the beach for the delegates? Who will open the conference? Will His Majesty be able to visit the conference? Will we have enough busses for the transportation? Should we take the delegates to world-famous Petra or not-yet-world-famous Jerash? I enjoyed watching these students grapple with the decisions. You know, I love the process of watching something come together. Heck, I also love the coming-together. As a director of 60 drama productions and 30 school trips I am usually the one in the driver’s seat. Now I had the pleasure of watching from the sidelines the work and tremendous effort of my colleague and my students.

So finally, that day arrived. There were delegates from Australia, Canada, Saudi Arabia, India, Israel, the United States, and Jordan participating! They really came. About 200 students descended on KA for the opening ceremonies. It really was an international event. I sat with a group from the Doon School in India, a venerable boarding school in the English boarding school tradition, over lunch on the first day, and enjoyed getting to know them over the next few days.

The keynote address at the opening was delivered by an exceptionally charismatic older gentleman who has spoken a handful of times at KA. He is a former minister with the government, former teacher, former really everything interesting in life, and a charmer. He spoke about how important it was for the delegates to be steeped in history (Yipee!! Smart Man!) and that History is geography in motion. He spoke eloquently about the last hundred years in the Middle East imploring the students to consider different perspectives as they approached their Model United Nations work.

As our guest spoke about the placement of this conference at the Dead Sea (another reference to the irony of being at the lowest point on earth, a sea called Dead,) right in the “cradle of monotheism” where “young minds will nurture the impulse toward peace and understanding.” In his inimitable way, he spoke again of where we all were—he bid us to look outside and think of this region, as he called it, right “at the sunrise of faith,” and urged the students to act in that manner of faith and dignity. To quote the hymn writer, “My Lord, what a morning!”

Of course not everything went smoothly. It rained. It rains maybe 8 times a year in Jordan. During this weekend conference, the heavens opened and it rained day after day. The trip to Petra had to be cancelled. The civil defense actually closed Petra! Petra is in a place like New Orleans, and is like a giant bowl, and when it rains, the water floods in. My friend Elizabeth actually was in Petra during this and spoke of the water coming up knee-high. So the poor guy in the Entertainment division of the conference had to keep vamping and rolling with the punches.

So after almost four days of committee work the whole conference moved back from the Dead Sea to our campus. The sun shone as the King arrived. (Can he control the weather?) His Majesty King Abdullah spoke to the students who had arranged the conference, traveled thousands of miles and worked through the position papers and hearings: “You are the new generation. You must seize the opportunities, chances and challenges to make the world better. We will create an environment in which you can surpass us.”

The eight student leaders in charge of the conference offered closing speeches, and they acquitted themselves magnificently. The poise, diction and commitment to this conference made it a pleasure to hear their words. Dana, the Madame President of the enterprise, and a natural orator and leader said “Our lives have been changed” from the work on the conference. She said that for her one of the most memorable moments in the conference came when a group wrangled over the semantics of what to call the place just across the Dead Sea.

Before I came to Jordan I would have not understood this dilemma. It is simply called Israel on every map I knew. But for the Jordanians, for my Arab friends, they want to call the area Palestine, and it is rooted in the problems and struggles of this region as to how to acknowledge it. I am sure for many of the delegates, the ones from outside the region, they perhaps had never wondered what to call this area. For them, for us, it may be simple.

“What do we call the country over there?” asked one of the delegates, as Dana recounted. Another delegate offered a humble answer, “Why don’t we call them neighbor?”

The fancy hotel was fun, the students dressed up in power suits wielding a gavel, all of that was fun, but it was exceptionally interesting to see the fruits of this seedling planted last year. It wasn’t my project at all, but I enjoyed watching the process of the process, admiring my students and all of the energy and effort Fatina expended at teaching our students how to organize an event.

An impressive feat, and an impressive seedling maturing into a mighty tree. An olive tree, perhaps, with the proverbial olive branch?