The Middle Eastern Civil Wars -Dante Tomaino 

I was initially introduced to an in-depth understanding of the Middle East when I joined my school's Model United Nations (MUN) Team.  In my freshman year, I went to my first MUN conference, where the topic was the refugee crisis stemming from the civil wars in the Middle East.  In preparation for the conference, I spent hours trying to understand the root causes of the conflict without much success.  To this day I have continued to follow the conflicts in Syria and Yemen with a special focus on the international consequences of those conflicts.  When I was asked to choose an internationally relevant topic to write about, the Middle Eastern conflicts seemed like the logical choice.

 

A few days after submitting my topic choice, I was at another Model UN Conference at Appalachian State.  During a break between committee sessions, I was incidentally introduced to a university student who had a personal connection to my topic.  I never even learned the young man's name, unfortunately, but I was able to hear about his personal experiences working in a refugee camp inside of Syria.  The young man had spent the summer of 2017 in a camp where the refugees lacked access to basic sanitation and medical services.   The student's story of helplessness in the face of so many displaced, scared, and hurt people was a wake-up call for me.  He spoke so fluently about the struggles faced every day by the refugees that I could not help but feel compassion for those affected by the civil war in Syria.