A digital anthology of youth empowerment and collective action

Adriel Barrios-Anderson

Houston, Texas USA

June 2020

My family is from Panama, so I've always had an awareness of life beyond America, but it was solidified in a scholarly way with MMUN early on when I was a delegate of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

For months, I worked on a proposal for a large hydro-electric dam project to provide sustainable energy in sub-Saharan Africa. After presenting that idea to the biggest gathering of people my own age that I had ever experienced up until that point in my life, a fellow delegate representing Canada pointed out the potentially harmful impacts of my idea on local biodiversity. In an instant, my confidence was shaken right out of the room.

Coincidentally, Dr. Ecka, who was my mentor in middle school and also introduced me to MMUN, was on the dais for that committee so I went to speak with him afterwards:

“How could I have overlooked that? And how am I supposed to represent a country I’ve never even visited!?”

“Adriel, you need to think more broadly. This is why you’re here — now the exciting work really starts.”

I recognized then and there that if you’re working in a vacuum, no matter how hard or how long you stay at it, there can still be holes or blind spots in your thinking — sometimes massive ones. The point of being at MMUN I realized throughout my years was to evolve an idea, to address its holes with the help of other perspectives and proceed with great empathy, even excitement, like "Oooh, I might be super wrong about this."

Perhaps a lot of people don't think of their professional career starting in middle school, but because of MMUN, I imagine that mine did as I'm now a research scientist working in clinical and basic neuroscience. Studying the brain is 99% failure – just trying to fail in the right ways to maybe get somewhere.

In many ways, we're all just blindly holding hands in the dark and I'm excited about that because I'm more interested in looking for the blind spots now – even interrogating them. I don't think of failure as a stopping point, but as essential to the process.

We're in the process of building a free neurology clinic in Providence, RI run by medical students on a model that I like to call “global local” — we treat underserved international patients in our local communities. Trans-national healthcare has to be approached with incredible humility and deep empathy, because otherwise we’ll build things with gaping holes. We still find holes, but we can plan for them and get excited by the resulting challenges.

What part of the planet is yours to save?

Calling all former MMUN delegates and teachers: How did MMUN inspire you take action in your community or create lasting change within yourself? Submit your story and we'll feature a select group in the next volume of "The Once and Future Ambassadors" anthology!

Adriel is from Houston, Texas USA and a former MMUN delegate of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Learn more about his free neurology clinic that treats underserved international patients in local communities.