Sarah George | Lariat Photographer
By Linda Nguyen
Staff Writer
Baylor’s Model Organization of American States teams Chile and Guatemala won several delegate-voted and judge-voted awards as part of the Ambassador Eugene Scassa Model Organization of American States competition.
The competition took place Friday and Saturday. The awards ceremony was held at a dinner Saturday night.
Baylor students met and discussed international politics with students from Texas and abroad this past weekend with the Model Organization of American States. Each delegation was required to write papers explaining the delegation’s positions on different topics. The Baylor delegations also won awards for the outstanding and distinguished position papers.
Baylor hosted the Ambassador Eugene Scassa MOAS competition, which was the first time it was not held in San Antonio.
Mableton, Ga., senior Drew Vincent, a member of Baylor’s Chile team, was one of several Baylor delegates to win an award. Vincent was voted the distinguished Secretariat of Political Affairs delegate.
This year’s competition was Vincent’s fifth model. Vincent has been to regional, national and international models as well. He is also the president of the Washington, D.C., model.
Vincent said he started participating in the Model Organization of American States when he studied abroad in Argentina his freshman year.
“We were honored to be able to host the model,” Vincent said. “We’ve taken it over for some schools in the past. It was nice to have other schools come here. Hopefully we treated them really well.”
Vincent said he really enjoyed watching the new delegates because while they were initially afraid to speak, they became more confident as the day progressed. The competition also included participants from international schools.
“The best part was we had two Mexican delegations who came up,” Vincent said. “In fact, one of the guys I met is a German citizen studying abroad in Mexico but he came with the Mexican delegation.”
Lars Geidel, the German student studying abroad at the Universidad Regiomontana, which represented the U.S., said the competition was fun.
“I like it very much,” Geidel said. “I was very scared. The level of the language was very hard.” Geidel said he had to pick up on the procedures and structure of the competition quickly, even if parts of the structure of the competition were different.
“When I came here, the situation clicked — now you’re a parliamentarian,” Geidel said.
Espi Camacho and Ian Clemens from Concordia University in Austin, who were voted the most outstanding Chair and Rapporteur, said they thought their team felt very welcomed by Baylor. Camacho said their team liked the flags from all the countries that surrounded 510 Cashion Academic Center, where the dinner and awards ceremony were held Saturday.
“It’s exciting to see the flags, but since we’re from Texas, this is home,” Camacho said. “This makes you more culturally sensitive, though.”
Clemens was also voted as Parliamentarian for the Eugene Scassa Model Organization of American States Secretariat Staff for 2013 along with two Baylor students, Brownsville junior Cristina Mendez, who was elected as Secretary-General, and Waco junior Ewan Hamilton-Short, who was elected as President of the Assembly.
