Choose Peace, Not War.
For those of you who have been at SIS, as well as those of you who might have just arrived, you might have heard about the United Nations Day celebrations. This is the perfect day for our community to show and take pride in our school diversity. With students and faculty from over 60 countries, it’s great to have a day to celebrate and embrace our nationalities.
This year, instead of the UN Day parade, the grade 10 to 12 students were lucky enough to attend a presentation from Erik Melander. Erik Melander is a professor at Uppsala University, who gave us an enlightening presentation about the past and present situations of war and peace. He discussed how the situation of war and conflicts in our globalised world has, despite what many may believe, decreased drastically. The figures that Mr. Melander used showed how, compared to the past, there has been a significantly large decrease in war and conflict in the present world.
Mr. Melander also discussed with us the peace in our world, and the measures taken to be able to keep that peace. One example Mr. Melander gave from his own life was that when he was younger he had been a peacekeeper. Seeing that Mr. Melander is Swedish, when he was younger and had to do his part for the Swedish Army, he decided that he wanted to work as a peacekeeper. He had worked with a team of different men on opposing sides of a conflict to locate and remove landmines. The two parties would tell Mr. Melander and his team where they had hid their mines so that they could be evacuated. Understanding how one person’s actions and decisions can help make a community a little bit safer, such as in the case of Mr. Melander being a peacekeeper, was truly inspiring in how we all can help make our world more peaceful.
At the conclusion of the presentation there was time for questions where many students got involved and participated in the discussion of War and Peace in a Globalised World. Seeing students getting involved and understanding the different perspectives of this topic showed the success of this presentation. The SIS students are glad to have been a part of this presentation and are looking forward to hearing more of these interesting presentations in the future.
