Mon, May 04, 2009 page2

• FEATURE : Substitute service opens unexpected doors

  EVALUATION PERIOD: Two young men who joined the substitute military service to serve on Liouciou island were offered positions after their tours of duty were up

  • By Shelley Shan / STAFF REPORTER
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  To 26-year-old Chris Lee (李銘龍), guiding tours and arranging hospitality for visitors to Liouciou (小琉球) is the best job in the world.

  “Here, you can soak up all this beautiful scenery every day, plus you have quite a bit of time for yourself,” Lee said in an interview with the Taipei Times.

  Now a contract worker at the Dapeng Bay National Scenic Area Administration on Liouciou, a small island off the coast of Pingtung, Lee studied tourism in college. When it was time to report for military duty, he used the tour guide license he obtained in his junior year to apply for substitute military service, which allowed him to fulfill the obligation somewhere outside a military base. He was assigned to work at Dapeng Bay (大鵬灣) and later volunteered to be stationed in Liouciou.

  “I believe in myself, and I believed what I learned in college could help make a difference on this small island,” he said. “So I was determined to come here.”

  Lee later returned to Kaohsiung and worked as a sales clerk at an electronics store. Three months later, he got a phone call from his former supervisor asking if he would be interested in a job opening in Liouciou. He accepted the position, even though the sales clerk position paid more.

  Like Lee, 26-year-old Huang Sin-kai (黃信凱) was dispatched to work at Dapeng Bay under the substitute military service program. But unlike Lee, Huang was an information management major. He became a contract employee with the ­Dapeng Bay National Scenic Area Administration immediately after he was discharged and he is now doing regular office work.

  Huang took some tourism-­related courses and acquired his tour guide license while he was in college.

  “I came back here because they happened to have a job available,” Huang said, adding that many of his classmates were still looking for jobs and wondered how he managed to get his foot in the door of the government sector so quickly.

  As a tourism major, Lee said he did not need to work in travel agency to be a tour guide.

  “You don’t get much hands-on experience as a junior tour guide in a travel agency,” Lee said. “Many senior tour guides do not have licenses, but they get to be in charge of plenty of tour groups. Those of us with licenses might be left with nothing.”

  Lee said he was not content to know only Liouciou. He has traveled to Green Island four times and visited both Kinmen and Penghu as well, which helps him explain to his guests the differences among the nation’s outlying islands. This experience also helps him appreciate what makes a place special and gives him ideas for things that can be done to enhance the quality of a visit to Liouciou.

  “Most of the visitors to Kinmen today don’t have any war experience, but the county lets them get a taste of it by recreating a scene where tourists can feel and hear the bombing,” Lee said as an example to demonstrate that Liouciou still has room to improve.

  Lee said he learned a great deal from some of the hostel owners in Liouciou who posted articles online to introduce the island and help preserve its environment, which has inspired him to manage a hostel some day. Huang said that traveling to different places has made him more sensitive to some of the problems facing the nation’s tourism industry.

  “Nowadays, a lot of the stores in scenic spots only open on weekends because they know that is when a huge number of tourists will come,” he said. “And if you visit Chichi (集集) in Nantou on any given holiday, you’ll see the main street is clogged with vendors.”

  Maria Pan (潘翠萍), Lee and Huang’s supervisor, said more than 200 men in the substitute military service had been assigned to work at Dapeng Bay, and they don’t just offer job opportunities to anybody.

  “Only those who have proven to us that they are capable and have a good work attitude will be asked to return,” Pan said.

  Lee and Huang could be the last batch of substitute military men in the area, as the Ministry of the National Defense announced in March that the nation would soon replace conscripts with career soldiers by 2014.

  “I don’t think I would be doing this if it weren’t for the ­substitute military service, which I think gives people the chance to continue practicing their expertise and explore different career options,” Lee said. “Canceling the substitute military service may affect some people, particularly those who still have no idea what they really want to do by the time they graduate, because it means now they won’t even have time to think about what their next step is going to be.”

  Huang said working in the government department as a substitute military serviceman was a good work experience that one normally only gets after passing the civil servant exams. He said the service also gives the government a year to evaluate potentially qualified personnel who probably would have never considered a government job otherwise.

  Statistics from the conscription agency under the Ministry of the Interior showed there were a total of 18,139 substitute military servicemen in different government departments as of March this year. Aside from office work, they also serve in different capacities, such as playing for second-tier baseball teams in the Chinese Professional Baseball League or offering medical services to the nation’s diplomatic allies.
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