Xu Zhou, 19, has one of the "boring" jobs that is totally irrelevant to what she is trained to be -- a communication engineer.
She travels at least 20 times a day on a media bus commuting between the Main Press Center and the North Star Media Village, a 20-minute ride, to provide language assistance for foreign reporters aboard and answer their questions.
Most of the days, Xu, as well as 2,000 other volunteers who work for the media bus fleet, can only catch a glimpse of the ongoing competitions on TV during their breaks. But Monday was a red-letter day for the bespectacled sophomore from Beijing Communications University: she had a day off and she got a ticket to the Olympic Green Tennis Center through a lucky draw on campus.
To fully exploit the hard-won chance, she arrived at 5 a.m. and didn't leave until midnight, watching as many games as possible as the ticket was valid for all 65 matches played in the day.
"It was exciting to see Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal play," said Xu, adding that she was happy to be among a home crowd that cheered Lu Yen-hsun from Chinese Taipei on to a hard victory against British Andy Murray.
Starting her service on July 25, Xu said she would stick to her position until the assignment is over by Aug. 25. "My job here might be a trivial detail in the running of the whole Games, but details matter in the Games' final success," she said.
Besides the 100,000 volunteers directly serving the Olympians and journalists, the other 1.6-million-strong volunteers in the Chinese capital have seldom come under the spotlight.
Among them are pensioners -- the oldest one already 103 years old -- that patrol streets and communities, students that answer tourists' questions at roadside information kiosks, skilled taxi drivers who have been handpicked to access the locked Olympic area in northern Beijing, and chefs selected from renowned Beijing hotels to help cook the Olympic dishes.
But a set of snapshots, showing a young female volunteer holding a foreigner, who fainted shortly in the street probably for a slight sunstroke, in her arms and feeding him water, spread quickly in China's vast Internet community, and stirred up a great sensation.
"You look so beautiful when you extend your helping hands. You are the embodiment of the traditional virtues of the Chinese -- hospitable and caring," read an online comment seen on qq.com.
At 103, Beijing resident Fu Yiquan still patrols the street near the Temple of Heaven in downtown Beijing as a "security volunteer," a job he has been doing for 30 years.
The perseverance of Fu and tens of thousands of other pensioners in Beijing impressed David Tool, a former colonel of the U.S. Army who now teaches at a Beijing university and hunts awkward translations in his spare time.
"These pensioners are doing a great job. The Beijing Games are a grand occasion. I, too, want to share the excitement," said Tool.
During the Games, he is serving as a volunteer at an information kiosk close to the Sanlitun bar street, one of the areas most frequented by foreigners in eastern Beijing.
"No matter who wins the most medals at the Games, one thing is clear -- these volunteers will win the hearts and minds of visitors to Beijing," Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, said on the eve of the Beijing Games.
(Xinhua News Agency August 14, 2008)