Locals will be able to apply to become volunteers for World Expo
2010 Shanghai next month, organizers said yesterday.
The Shanghai Expo will need at least 20,000 volunteers within
the World Expo site, said Zhang Renqing, the supervisor of the
Volunteer Department of the Bureau of Shanghai World Expo
Coordination.
As well as recruiting local volunteers, the organizers will also
sign up volunteers from throughout China and overseas in December
next year, Zhang said.
There are 38 different roles that volunteers can fulfill ranging
from interpreters and media assistants to traffic guides.
"We expect most of the volunteers to be college students who
will be relatively free. This is very different from the Beijing
Olympics which lasts a fortnight - the Shanghai Expo will last for
184 days," Zhang said.
"We will have to have volunteers working for more than seven
consecutive days. They will also have to take part in two or three
days' training. For most employees this will not be possible," he
said.
As a practice for 2010, the Expo exhibition, now being staged in
Shanghai's Urban Planning Exhibition Center, recruited 50
volunteers from city universities to help guide tourists around the
site.
They all have to speak fluent English.
Some 1,200 elementary students yesterday visited the exhibition
as an educational day out.
More than 80,000 people have visited the exhibition since it
opened on August 5. It will close on Sunday and move to Nanjing,
the capital of Jiangsu Province, next week.
(Shanghai Daily September 6, 2007)
