THE famous markets, cuisine and of course the Taj Mahal are on the list of things to do for a group of local students who left for India last week.
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The trip, however, will involve much more than mere sight-seeing with the delegation of eight students also preparing to attend a Model United Nations (MON) Assembly along with students from Bangladesh, Pakistan and the host nation India.
The trip is the result of Great Lakes College Senior Campus’ enduring relationship with Sanskriti School in New Delhi.
“We’ve formed a sister school relationship with Sanskriti School. I’ve been over there to visit and to teach, and their principal has been here,” senior campus principal Steve Nicholas explained.
“That relationship has developed further and last year a number of our senior leadership team carried out a series of Skype conferences with students from over there and we thought the next logical step was to formalise the sister school arrangement by sending a delegation of students over there. We decided that a model UN assembly as the best way to do that.”
The Great Lakes Helping Hands in India delegation to the Model United Nations Assembly is designed as hopefully the first of many future exchange opportunities for the students and staff of both schools. Apart from the MUN, students will also be helping with Sanskriti’s humanitarian Umang program.
“We’ll also be going to an orphanage in New Delhi to spend a day helping there and our students will also be holding lessons with year four students from Sanskriti about Australia before the MUN.
“Sanskriti, which is a predominantly middle class school, also runs program where children from the slums come in and are fed and undergo lessons, so we’ll also be helping with that.”
As the only non-Asian nation attending the MUN, the students have been focused on learning the cultural differences between countries.
“By nature we (Australians) aren’t very formal so we’ll need to be careful in what we say and do and make sure it’s done in a culturally sensitive way.
“We also have differing views in some cases on the issues we’ll be discussing in regards to immigration and boat people, uranium mining and Indian students coming to study in Australia. It’s sure to be an interesting discussion.
Mr Nicholas said the delegation of students, teachers and parents is a strong gesture of commitment to the evolving relationship to a school in one of our poorer, yet strongly growing, Asian neighbours.
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