First day of internship, I rushed to the office right after my front desk duty. I was lucky and I arrived at the office at 5 to 10. Today happened to be the day of staff meeting too; hence, I am asked to join the staff meeting and I could meet everyone in the Institute for Multi-Track Diplomacy.
I have to admit that I learned many things during the meeting. First of all, after introducing myself to the others, a guy from Liberia challenged me with Taiwanese diplomacy. He asserted that Taiwan does not support the democratic government. Taiwan supported the strong man government and the dictatorship. Taiwan did not take care of people; Taiwan only pays attention to the president or the minister of foreign affairs, which I strongly doubt. On the contrary, China reaches to people here and monitors the projects that it promised to Liberia. China goes to the field. I argued that Taiwan does have its medical team and agriculture team out there, but I cannot help but wonder whether Taiwan is really a loser and a bad diplomat. How can Taiwan lose its friends to China? There must be reasons but Taiwan does not admit. How does Taiwan view the diplomacy? I think it is the core question.
Secondly, I learned about news and conferences in other regions. I am in charge of North East Asia. Other people take Caucasian area and Africa in charge. Some of the interns are focusing on Africa; I am not familiar with Africa. Hence, I learned a lot. An intern from Chad talked about his project on Equatorial Guinea. It is a Spanish speaking country. We talked about the language and the infrastructure of that country. Another intern from Haiti talked about a conference that she attended; the conference was about North-East Congo. The phenomenon that she mentioned was really interesting.
Thirdly, I got a lot of information about the peer mediation and also the real way to deal with problems. One needs to have a cultural understanding before talking about development. Ambassador McDonald was telling us about the development of these projects all take time. This would stay this way in the future. We need to work hard and be patient. IMTD, where I am interning, tries to build partnership because its belief is that the world can resolve conflict by bringing the people together. I like this mission of IMTD, and I hope I will enjoy this internship.
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