Beijing Volunteers are Useless

OK so I'm finally getting around to writing a new blog after a bit of a hiatus. The truth is I've just begun teaching "kindergarteners," which in China means any child between the age of 2 and 4. This of course makes little sense, since at age two these kids can barely speak any Chinese. I'll save my rants on children for later though, since today I'm dedicating my time to how absolutely worthless the Beijing Volunteers have been, and continue to be.

For the Olympic games, the Beijing Olympic Committee (BOCOG) set up a massive campaign to get volunteers for the games. The official website lists that 100,000 volunteers were present for the Olympic games and will be present for the Paralympic games- that means that there have been 100,000 useless idiots roaming the streets for the past month plus. So where is all this hate coming from? Well for one thing, several of my friends and I applied months in advance of the deadline for the volunteer position, since the website had stated its need for foreign volunteers. Now I would think that after requesting foreign volunteers, receiving several applications from a group of American students who had all either majored or minored in Chinese would be just what the recruiters were looking for, especially because this was not a paid job. But no, in typical Chinese fashion, after receiving confirmation that our applications were received, we never received any further notice. I called up friends in China to see if they could reach anybody about the matter, but they were all told by the agency that there were too many applications and it would be impossible to look any individual up in the system.

OK fine, that doesn't make any sense but whatever. For all I know, the entire system crashed and they lost all our applications (this is China after all), but you would expect that there would at least be some foreign volunteers, right? Not that I saw. Beijing is a huge city, so its very possible these people were just in other locations, but I've been here since August 5th, been to an Olympic event, walked around the Birds Nest, the Beijing train station and airport, and been to various other major tourist attractions, but not once did I see any non-Chinese volunteers. OK fine, so what if they're Chinese, at least they can speak English and help anyone with their questions, right? Wrong again! Every time I needed help finding someplace, the volunteers I spoke to spoke absolutely zero English- how convenient! I can at least speak enough Chinese to get my point across, but what about all those foreigners who had traveled to China and desperately needed help getting around?

What bothered me even more is that half the volunteers I spoke to didn't even bother trying to understand the Chinese I was speaking. Something that makes Chinese really hard to learn is that several words are pronounced the same way, but the tone or inflection they are spoken with gives the words a different meaning. For instance, "mǎ" means horse while "mā" means mother. So I could be saying a sentence correctly, but if the tones are off the meaning of the sentence is lost. This is a problem I tend to have, but people can still take the context of the sentence and figure out what word I'm trying to say. If you're fluent in Chinese and are willing to take the time to figure it out, its not that hard. But on the few occasions when I needed help finding things, the volunteers I spoke to couldn't be bothered trying to figure out what words I had mispronounced. If you can't speak English, the least you could do is try to figure out what the hell I'm trying to say. For instance, I went with Estee to try and find a temple- its the only temple in the area, and I kept saying the word for temple properly but because I was mispronouncing the temples actual name they had no idea what I was saying and couldn't help me. How did these people even get hired for this!! What do you actually do? Just because Beijing is hosting the Paralympics doesn't mean you need to hire people with mental handicaps to volunteer! Aren't the volunteers there to help foreigners more than fellow Chinese? If so, learn to communicate with people who can't speak the language!

These clowns are still scattered throughout the streets, sitting around pretending to be helpful volunteers when in fact they are just blocking the sidewalks and replacing all the homeless people the government kicked out. For all intensive purposes, these people are jobless bums, since they spend all day sitting on the street and not attending their real jobs (if they actually have one). You know what would have been a welcoming sight? Some one who could speak English and could actually do their job of helping foreign visitors to Beijing. On the plus side, they do have very snazzy uniforms.