The unsungheroes of Athens were the thousands of volunteers who made it all possible
IN this day and age when supposedly there isn’t any such thing as a free-thing, nearly 160,000 people from around the world volunteered to be part of the Olympic dream. Eventually 50,000 made the final cut. I was one of them.
For 18 days in Athens this summer, I embarked on one of the greatest adventures I’ve ever had: being an Olympic volunteer at Athens 2004.
Blessed with a high metabolism (or cursed with it), I am not exactly the sportsperson one would dream of. Yet, being part of an Olympics had been desire for a long time. My parents, however, weren’t particularly happy of my desire, terrorism being the key word here. But then, they were just being parents and I being their adventurous journalist daughter. after assuring them as much as I could, that I would be fine, I packed and left for the adventure I always wanted.
I departed for Athens on August 4. The friend who I was staying with said Athenians were divided over the Games because of how much they had to suffer while the preparations went on. But my concern was that my little Greek guide wouldn’t be with me all the time; and all the Greek I knew was filakia (kisses) and sagapo (I love you), which she cheekily assured would get me far depending on the destination I had in mind. What was I about to get myself into? Would I like Athens, and more importantly, would Athens like me?
Apart from the seemingly revered stray dogs, the first thing I noticed on a trip to downtown Athens were other volunteers, and I couldn’t wait to get my uniform so that I too could start walking around Monastiraki looking cool and important. A few days later, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I was handed a collection of branded clothing to wear during my services. I knew the sweatshop workers would never forgive me. Still, I hadn’t paid any money for them so I still hadn’t broken my rule of not buying branded clothes. Anyway, I was pretty sure a naked protest wouldn’t go down too well with the centre where I was based.
While in Greece, you have to accept it when the gods start playing games with you; Athens, full of clueless international volunteers, was just too shiny a toy for them to resist. As a pacifist, I kept this in mind not only when I was placed in the venue for shooting, which I confess I was previously unaware was an Olympics sport, but also when on my first day as a volunteer, I discovered that I had to either drink bottled water or die of dehydration. My issues with multinational companies were temporarily suspended in the sponsorship heaven of the Games.
My first day didn’t start too well, I thought when I missed the bus and had to wait half an hour for the next one in the process making some of the closest friends I would have in the guise of fellow latecomers; a nervous bunch of five or six people, from all corners of the world, not knowing what to expect and wondering whether our experience was going to be as bad as the canteen food. As part of ‘Spectator Services’, our jobs were simple. We had to smile a lot, keep a watchful eye over crowds and put up with the tantrums of everyone from athletes to the press. It soon became clear, however, that it were the skills we weren’t trained for that would become the most valuable in the long run.
Perhaps it’s human nature to invent a currency in situations where you aren’t getting one, so national team pins became the status symbols that divided the wealthy from the poor. As volunteers jangled by with their pass straps heavy with pins, I quickly assessed that access control was the best place to harass athletes and coaches for them. No pin, no access, it didn’t matter how blue your pass was! Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t, but before long I joined the bourgeoisie of pin wearers.
Some relied on the snowball effect of being given pins on the basis of displaying the ones they already had, while others preferred to stash away their bounty and pretend they were poverty stricken and pin-less. I must have been a magpie in a past life because I developed an instant reaction to anything gilded, often accompanied by whispers of “But he told me he didn’t have any!” Then it became a case of not how many pins you have, but whether you own the most elusive ones. This, and dancing the occasional rumba in the stands during the pre-show music, transformed an otherwise mundane job into one which I looked forward to being at each day.
The at first unappealing venue turned out to be a blessing in disguise, set amongst beautiful olive groves and being small enough for everyone to get to know each other. Although we were all suffering from pin envy, no hierarchies emerged and every day brought the promise of something different. When the sun is shining, the sky is blue and you are becoming a small part of history, there isn’t much more you can wish for.
Getting on television is another major preoccupation with volunteers, more out of needing proof for your families than out of vanity. Sadly, there was no successful game plan for this apart from being at the right place at the right time, and my collection of pendulous earrings failed to get me noticed. Still, a lot of spectators liked to have pictures taken with volunteers, and it’s quite a poetic thought to know your face is in photo albums all over the world.
It’s a fact that only five per cent of communication is verbal, so getting around the language barrier wasn’t that hard and simply exaggerating accompanying gestures to what you are saying proved enough not only to understand what people wanted but to be understood as well. Nevertheless, I picked up some basic words, which were much appreciated, and developed a particular fondness for saying “excuse me” in Greek. I didn’t manage to progress to some more sociably useful Greek; it would have been kind of nice to be able to ask an Adonis or two to go for a coffee rather than launching straight into saying “I love you”!
As it was, my extremely limited language skills were being met with barrages of Greek to which all I could do was say that I spoke no Greek in Greek, and with a perfect accent according to my friend. But that didn’t make me feel any less of a stubborn imperialist who expected everyone to speak English.
The parallells between Greek culture and Asian culture gave me a lot of amusement and proved that the world is a very small place, with more things in common than we realize. Often when I came back from my day of volunteering and left something to warm on the stove I would return to find it had doubled in quantity as my friend’s mother insisted on feeding me up even when I had no more room.
Greek society is just as family orientated as Asian society; children are spoilt by parents and aunts and uncles get offended if you don’t visit them. Greek teenagers probably have just as much trouble keeping secrets from their parents in their closely knit communities. From toddlers to the elderly, everyone loves to visit their friends and if tea is the staple drink of Asians, frappe is the Greek equivalent, a cold coffee drink which all of Athens seemed to run on.
The Greek are second to none in their hospitality, and were astonished that a British Pakistani would come alone all that way just to help at the Games.
On my first day a woman in a souvenir shop knocked off 50 per cent from everything because she said I looked like her daughter and on another occasion, the person we stopped to ask for directions piled us into her car and took us there herself.
The day I had to leave was fast approaching. Volunteering was giving me a truly grass roots experience of Athens, and I’d fallen in love with the city. When I arrived in Athens, I hadn’t expected to feel so at home. I was dreading the separation, but they say that absence makes the heart grow fonder and one of my new friends assured me that he has great connections with the gods and would work something out.
I soaked up the sunshine and felt very stupid for losing the one piece of my uniform which would have been of most use to me in Britain; my sports jacket, left on a bus somewhere between the airport and city centre. Like it or not, the day of my departure arrived and I had to say the goodbyes which I wanted to avoid so much. On a sunny Sunday morning, as the good people of Athens went to church and the not so good people were recovering from their hangovers, I kissed this beloved city goodbye, determined not to end such a wonderful time in tears.
A three-hour flight and another world away, as I try to cope with my souvlakia withdrawal symptoms, it seems too good to be true that I was part of the Olympics returning to their homeland. An athlete I spoke to while volunteering asked me my motivation for giving so much time for free. I told him that no one could put a price on the experience I was having.
The unsungheroes of Athens were the thousands of volunteers who made it all possible
