By Vanshika Rohera, ISC Dive Club President
The International School in Curacao, on a small Caribbean Island that used to be a part of the Netherlands Antilleans, is the only school on the island with an MUN club. In the past decade ISC students have participated in two international conferences in Panama (PANAMUN), and in the Hague (THIMUN). Besides attending these international conferences with small delegations of 10 people, the school has been organizing annual conferences for local students who are eager to learn and grow through MUN.
Being an International School, there is a UN celebration day every October. On this day families come together to celebrate the various cultures that comprise the students of the International School of Curacao. There are groups of students on campus that participate in different clubs and have used the information acquired in MUN to make an impact throughout the school. In 2017 a group of students who were in the MUN club as well as the National Honor Society decided to spend an entire month informing fellow students around campus of the Sustainable Development Goals.
The talk of the SDGs started to influence certain students to join the school’s new Dive Club. The ISC Dive Club is dedicated to helping life underwater (SDG14). Every month students gather to go down to work in the local coral nursery
developed with support from the Coral Restoration Foundation (https://coralrestoration.org/.) At the nursery, small fragments of coral are kept clean and free of algae until they are big enough to be placed in different locations around the island to flourish into coral reefs.
The impact of this Dive Club has attracted the interests of many students around campus because they have started to value the ocean and the marine life that surrounds them. Through the Coral Restoration Foundation students have learned to give back to their environment.
“As a student I am proud to be a part of the Dive Club because we are working together to save the coral reefs that we find so beautiful when we go for dives. These coral reefs are the reason our island has its white sandy beaches, and we should be helping save them, rather than contributing to factors that destroy them. Together as one school, we work towards one mission, to help save coral reefs.”
