Honorable chairs, fellow delegates, respected advisors, coaches, and most esteemed guests: 

 

Welcome to the 17th annual session of Taipei American School Model United Nations! We are thrilled to be able to host over 400 delegates from 30 schools across Asia and to have you join us in our conference this year, and as Secretaries-General, we will work our best to make sure this experience will be a memorable one for years to come.

 

Our theme this year is One Small Act: Expanding the Pathways to Global Opportunity and Prosperity, reflecting the life and journey of our keynote speaker, Chris Mburu. As a child in Kenya, he was a good student and had excellent grades, but could not enter secondary school due to the fees. Following a scholarship from Hilde Back, a woman from Sweden who had fled Nazi Germany because of the Holocaust, Mburu could now enter secondary school, eventually going to the University of Nairobi, then Harvard Law, finally working as a Senior Human Rights adviser in the United Nations. We are pleased, and extremely fortunate, to have him here at TASMUN this year. 

 

Mburu’s life almost perfectly shows the ripple effect: no action is too small to make a positive difference in the world. One does not need to be a CEO or world leader to help change the world; Hilde Back was not, but in our eyes she is. But by doing those seemingly simple acts of kindness, we expand the pathways to global opportunities and prosperity, making the world just a slightly better place.

 

We hope you can learn something at TASMUN this year and keep it with you. Sustainable development goals 4 and 8— education and economic growth, respectively— are behind our topics in committees this year, and we hope that issues such as protecting cultural heritage sites in warzones or promoting food security become issues that stick with you so you can contribute to fixing them, one small act at a time. 

 

Thank you so much for attending TASMUN, and we look forward to seeing you all! 

 

Julianne L., Max C., and Karl C. 

Secretaries-General of TASMUN XVII