Helen Koliais, a friend from the past!

by: Achilleas Vrantzas

     Ladies and gentlemen: she is back! A genuinely happy person who brings happiness with her smile is back at ACMUN. Ms. Koliais was a teacher at Anatolia College and an MUN advisor for more than 10 years. I met her and asked her some questions about her overall experience at Anatolia.

     First of all, she thinks it is very pleasant to come back to school and meet all her past students. What makes her more excited is that she is not stressed, now that she does not have any responsibilities with the conference or her lessons. Ms. Koliais’ MUN journey started back in 1998 when she, along with Ms. Kastritsis, went to the DSAMUN in Athens. The very next year she took a group of students to the Harvard MUN in Boston, where a student of hers told her that “if we want to have MUN, we need to have a club in order to do it every year.” This was the time when the MUN started as a club at Anatolia. After that she was taking students to one or two MUNs per year and eventually in 2006 they started the Anatolia College Model United Nations.

     What she has learned after all these MUN experiences is geography! She represented countries that she had never heard of before so she had to find out more about each and she also learned a lot of new things from the various topics that they had to discuss for the MUNs. The exciting part is that when she started the MUN club there were only 4 students in the club when now there are more than 150. MUN has been an enjoyable journey for her, which has given her a lot of new knowledge and pleasure.