More volunteers will participate in the 11-day Summer Deaflympics than in any previous single event held in Taiwan, another sign of the country’s growing altruism that has also been reflected in responses to recent natural disasters.
Lee Yu-fan, who is in charge of recruiting volunteers for the Taipei Deaflympics Organizing Committee, said the 9,763 volunteers who have signed up to help with the Games, ranging from 15 to 72 years of age, come from all walks of life.
The volunteers will mainly be responsible for hosting visitors, providing information, accompanying teams, translating and offering traffic guidance.
The volunteers are divided into three categories: sign-language, general and foreign language service volunteers.
Most of them are college students, but many hearing-impaired people have also agreed to serve.
The volunteers first took part in basic training and sign-language courses and were then immersed in a three-month intensive training program course to become familiarized with the services they will have to provide and the needs of the event’s organizers.
Among them, there are 1,100 foreign-language volunteers who can speak other languages including English, German, Italian, French, Spanish, Russian, Czech, Polish, Arabic, Japanese and Korean.
The enthusiastic response to the call for volunteers reflects a growing trend of altruism in the public.
Mothers of schoolchildren serving as volunteers outside schools to protect the safety of students has become a familiar scene, and volunteers ready to give a helping hand can often be found in hospitals.
According to Ministry of the Interior statistics, there are nearly 480,000 people in Taiwan who have registered as volunteers and engaged in a total of nearly 50 million hours of volunteer service.
The Environmental Protection Administration also estimates that 150,000 people have volunteered to regularly clean communities, beaches and patrol rivers.
Aside from giving their time, local residents have been generous to people in need. The social welfare sector estimates that Taiwanese donate around NT$20 billion (US$608.7 million) a year to social causes.
Public contributions to help victims of Typhoon Morakot totaled NT$13.8 billion, and Taiwanese also donated NT$5 billion when a magnitude 8.0 earthquake struck Sichuan Province on May 12 last year.
Local residents have also generously donated blood. Lin Kuo-sin, chairman of the Taiwan Blood Services Foundation, said that Taiwan’s blood donation rate was 7.86 percent of the population, the second highest in the world behind only the Netherlands. It was 1.5 times that of the US and two times that of Japan.
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