Volunteer stories from the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympic Games

The 2008 Beijing Summer Olympic Games was a big event in every respect, including the number of volunteers who assisted spectators visiting the capital. According to a figure I shagged from the 2008 Summer Olympic Games website, the number of volunteers for the regular and Para-Olympic games totaled 100,000—70,000 volunteers for the former, and 30,000 for the latter. This figure is over double the 47,000 volunteers who participated in the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games (both figures are from the official websites of the 2000 and 2008 Summer Games).

From August through mid-September, you could spot these volunteers, sporting their distinctive blue and white shirts, all over the city, including places not in the immediate vicinity of the Olympic events. For example, I took the photo above of an Olympic volunteer waiting at a bus stop while visiting the Wudaokou area in north Beijing. I'll have more to say about this really cool area in a later blog post, but for now will note that it's not very close to the Bird's Nest Stadium and Water Cube Swimming and diving arena (Wukesong and other venues are located even farther away from Wudaokou).

Most of my former Erwai students were naturally very keen to volunteer. And since they speak relatively good English, they had little difficulty getting chosen as volunteers. I've stayed in touch with some of them since leaving the university to work in a Chinese company as an English teacher, writer/editor, and corporate trainer. I post of a few of their photos and pass on their volunteer stories in this blog post.

The young lady wearing glasses in the photo above is from Northern Beijing and was one of my very best freshman spoken English students (her friend was also a very good student and is from Shandong Province; she went back home for summer). This former student worked as a volunteer in the five star Prime Hotel, which is on Wangfujing Avenue, north of the famous Wangfujing pedestrian mall.

She informed me that her volunteer work consisted of answering basically the same tourist questions over and over again. However, she did become friends with one of these foreign visitors and spent a few days guiding that individual around the city and getting lots of good practice time in with her oral English.

My former upper-class Erwai students had better volunteer jobs. Two of them worked in the Wukesong Basketball Arena. They're in the photo above. One is the young lady on the right, who was mentioned in and whose photo appeared in an earlier post. The other student is the young lady on the left (looking at the picture, not from the perspective of those in the photo). She is from Shanghai and was among one of my very best former students. They weren't on duty the night I saw Germany, China, the US, Spain play basketball.

However, my friend, Flora Lu (路红艳) was there that night. She was doing some tasks for that Australian events management company she works for as a translator. Unfortunately, since Diarmuid and I barely got to the game on time, I didn’t have a chance to say hi to while visiting the facility that evening.

Two other former students worked in the Olympic water park, where the rowing events were held. One of them is a really sweet and pretty farm girl from Sichuan (my mother really liked this former student when she visited Beijing in May of 2007 and was ready to take this gal home with her).

The other student hails from Xi'an and had hands down the best writing skills of any my former students. In particular, she had the good sense to keep her sentences simple and ignore the terrible advice many Chinese English teachers, particularly the older ones, pass on to their students.

These nitwits urge students to write long and grammatically complicated sentences on all those English assessment tests they constantly seem be taking (more on that in a latter post). Their rationale is that if that writer such sentences, the students will be showcasing their writing skills. Of course, the more complicated the grammar, the greater the scope for making mistakes and demonstrating that one doesn’t have very good written English skills.

My former Xi'an student told me in an email that she met Princess Anne, the chairman of the International Olympic Committee, and some European heads of state. She added that many of the latter made a point of watching this event, as the Europeans excel at this sport (and the Chinese are just beginning to get the hang of it). I believe the Brits won the gold medal for rowing in the Beijing Olympic Games.

Another former student also had a good volunteer assignment. This young lady is a very beautiful former student from Wuxi, a medium-sized city near Shanghai. She worked in the judo [柔 (rising tone “rou”) 道(falling tone “dao”) and tai kwan do [跆 (rising tone “tai”拳 (rising tone “quan”) and 道) arena. This particular volunteer’s supervisor was really cool and frequently took her and the other volunteers working for him out to dinner and then to karaoke-TV.

However, probably the best volunteer assignment went not one of my former students, but to an Erwai student friend. This young lady’s name is 刘洁 (rising tone “liu” and rising tone “jie”) and she hails from Xiamen in Fujian Province. She served as president of Erwai's “Baby English” club and we met and became friends because I judged one of their speaking events. Liu Jie’s assisted the Sports Minister of Luxembourg during the Olympic Games.

Two photos of her are below. The other gal in the second picture is Liu Jie's friend from Yunnan Province who is studying traditional Chinese medicine. I shot this photo shortly before we all had dinner at a Yunnan restaurant in Dongzhimen that is located opposite the German Embassy.

Since I gave the Mandarin words for a couple of sporting events above, I’ll pass on the term for “volunteer” while I’m at it as well. For those readers who are interested, it’s
志愿者 (falling tone “zhi” and “yuan” and a falling rising tone “zhe”).