A total of 15,870 volunteers including an 84-year-old senior citizen, college freshmen, soon-to-be discharged soldiers and people from various countries are in training to work at the Expo 2012 Yeosu.

Some 45,000 people signed up to volunteer during the application period between April and June last year.

They went through the initial screening in August and interviews from September to November in a number of cities including Yeosu, Suncheon, Gwangyang, Seoul, Busan and Jeju.

To give a chance to high school seniors who were then preparing for the college entrance exam, additional interviews were conducted after the exam.

Telephone interviews were held for students studying abroad, foreigners not in Korea and active-duty soldiers.

Among the interviewees were 291 foreign nationals who reside in Korea.

Watanabe Shiroyuki, a 50-year-old Japanese citizen who lives in Yeosu, applied for the volunteer work and, at the same time, became an interviewer for applicants with Japanese language proficiency.

“Help from the Korean people gave courage to many Japanese people when we were all in despair after the earthquake in March. I would like to pay back at least a part of the generosity offered to us,” Watanabe said.

The expo organizing committee will offer selected volunteers online classes as well as offline group training sessions in each region of the country. The volunteers will learn a global code of conduct for international events as they go through courses in basic manners and first aid as well as team-building exercises.

Volunteers who complete the entire training program will finally be appointed as official volunteers in April and assigned to 19 different types of positions including access control, visitor guide, exhibition guide, traffic control and interpreting.

Volunteers from Shanghai and Zaragoza, host cities of the previous expos, will also join them.

The organizing committee signed preliminary deals with two international organizations to send volunteers from China and Spain, and cooperate for the success of the Yeosu expo.

The Shanghai Youth Volunteer Association will dispatch 36 volunteers, and the International Events Know-how Association, a non-profit organization in charge of post-expo projects of Expo Zaragoza 2008, will send 32 volunteers, according to the memoranda of understanding.

The volunteers from Shanghai and Zaragoza will work mainly at the International Pavilion, the general information center, the China Pavilion and the Spain Pavilion.

The associations plan to select qualified volunteers with a high-level of language proficiency in English and Korean.

By Kim So-hyun (sophie@heraldcorp.com)