To cope with the expected 450,000 tourist coming to the Beijing Olympics starting August 8^th, BOCOG (Beijing Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games) started setting up kiosks in early July across the city and filled them with volunteers. Their goal is simply to inform tourists and offer free services in the most commonly spoken languages.

In a city as big as Beijing, it is easy to get lost. At the same time, it is hard to ask for directions or information to anyone on the street as the level of English is fairly low. To counter this problem, the municipality has decided in early July to set up kiosks across the capital and to fill them with Olympic volunteers whose role is to respond to questions from visitors and provide various services.

The numbers are on a level that is typically Chinese: 100,000 volunteers in total, with 70,000 on the event sites and the remaining 30,000 spread across the city. Easily recognizable by their blue and white clothes and their caps, the volunteers are in teams of five to eight and share 1 m3 kiosks placed at strategic points throughout Beijing.

For the most part, they are students on vacation. These young Chinese were recruited across the country and have received special training to deal with crisis situations. They also have a first aid kit, just in case.

Wei Linlin, one of the volunteers and a translation student at the American University of Beijing greets tourists with a smile. She is posted at a booth in the Chongwenmen District, south-east of the city. She shouts out a "Welcome to Beijing!" It's not very original, but nice to hear nonetheless.

All the gold in the world

But when we asked about a specific location, things got a little complicated. "You want to go to Chaoyang Park? (note: one of the largest parks in Beijing) I am not very familiar with this place," she says. And without being dismantled, she adds: "What if you took a cab?" We insist that we want to use the public transport. She takes out a map and, with her four accomplices, looks into the problem for a few minutes. At the end of the little team exercise, she comes back with a solution.

In terms of language, the volunteers still have a couple of issues. Although they can speak English more or less, they tend to forget that the French remains one of the three official languages of the Beijing Olympic Games. At another kiosk, a volunteer asks of a 12 year old French girl: "And why don't you speak English? ". The mother has to answer "She's only in middle school."

The volunteers will have almost three months to learn from these little cultural mix-ups. These will happen more frequently in the following weeks until its peak during the Olympics. The number of available foreign languages should also increase. The kiosks will then all be open until the Paralympic Games to be held in September.

If the inexperience of young volunteers is quite excusable, the absence of maps, brochures or other information is not. This is easily forgotten by the contagious good mood of the young Olympics ambassadors. One great smile is worth all the gold medals in the world!

Text: Edouard Beauchemin
Photos: Wang Zhuo
July 2008