A team of five young Bahrain-based debaters left for the annual World Schools Debating Championships (WSDC) in Singapore yesterday (July 27).

The St Christopher’s School students are believed to be the first team from Bahrain to ever compete at the tournament, which this year features teams from 53 countries and will last for 10 days, said a report in the Gulf Daily News (GDN), our sister publication.

“I’m very excited about this trip as it’s the culmination of a lot of work,” said delegation head and schoolteacher David Milnes. “I’m satisfied that we’re going in as prepared as we can be.”

He told the GDN that the team, which consists of Harsh Ainapure, Hesham Albaharna, Anish Vishwakoti, Abdulla Janahi and Adam Wilson, were hopeful of reaching the last 16 and performing well against their GCC rivals from Qatar, Kuwait and the UAE.

“We practised debates after school ended,” said Ainapure.

“We would prepare speeches and then send them to Milnes and keep going over things to improve.”

Janahi said they have been preparing for the tournament since May.

“We started preparing at the end of May, but intensely over the last two weeks,” he said.

“We need to make sure we stack up against the other countries.

“We won the British Schools of Middle East debate, so we know we can measure up in the region, but we want to see what it’s like around the world.

“We’ve been watching videos of debates from other countries and past years to have a better idea of what’s in store.”

Vishwakoti added that the team spent ‘most of their days’ preparing for the competition.

“Stylistically, we’re strong and confident, we’ve done well in the past,” he said.

“We need to make sure that our content is strong and can stand up to other teams.

“This is huge and it’s not like anything we’ve done before.

“We want to find out what the world stage has to offer.”

Albaharna said they had a potentially volatile debate scheduled for round six of the tournament.

“Our round six debate will be interesting, I’m looking forward to it. It’s against Israel,” he added.

The WSDC runs until August 6 and has been held for 27 years, hosted by different countries.

To follow the team’s progress, check the hashtag #fightba7fight on Instagram and Twitter. - TradeArabia News Service