This did not start as a plan to build a conference.

In July 2025, I joined Model United Nations for a reason that had very little to do with wanting to run one. I had social anxiety, serious stage fear, and a habit of thinking too much about what everyone in the room might think of me.

The strange part was that I already liked many of the things MUN was built around. I was interested in law, debate and diplomacy, but also in web development, robotics, business, project management and event management. I liked building things and organising things. Speaking up was the part I could not get myself to do.

Someone encouraged me to try MUN anyway. So I did. The first few times did not magically remove every fear, but they gave me somewhere to practise being heard. I learned how to stand up before I felt completely ready, how to make a point without overthinking every word, and how to recover when a speech was not perfect.

Over roughly four months, I noticed that I was behaving differently. I was speaking more. I was meeting people instead of avoiding them. I was volunteering for things I would previously have found an excuse not to do. MUN did not turn me into a different person overnight; it gave me a reason to keep testing the limits I had put around myself.

I also started chairing, delegating and joining online conferences. Online MUN gave me something I could not get from one local circuit: people from completely different countries, schools, cultures and ways of thinking. A committee might have people sitting hundreds or thousands of kilometres apart, but by the end of the session we knew each other's speaking habits, jokes, arguments and ideas.

That is where MUHAMI started to make sense.

I knew I was not ready to promise a polished in-person conference yet. So instead of pretending otherwise, MUHAMI began online. We ran editions, experimented, collaborated, chaired, delegated, made mistakes, fixed things and learned how much work exists behind the screen that delegates never see.

Along the way, people I met started telling me they had joined MUN because they saw the change it had made in me. Some were nervous about speaking too. Some simply wanted to try something new. They joined, met somebody they would never otherwise have met, learned something, or discovered that a fear was not as permanent as it had looked from the outside.

That became more important to me than making MUHAMI look big.

The online editions proved that a screen can connect people. But after a while, that also became the reason to go further. I wanted to meet the people behind those screens. I wanted committees where delegates could argue over a clause at one table, laugh about it in the hallway later, and leave with an actual memory attached to the names they had been seeing online.

So MUHAMI is now going in person.

The aim is not to replace the online side. It is to add another layer to it: conferences in different countries, local teams with their own character, and a network where people who would normally stay inside separate MUN communities can actually meet each other.

If MUHAMI keeps growing, I want it to grow for that reason — not because we can say we held the most events, but because more people found a room where they felt able to speak, participate and meet someone outside their usual world.