Utahns may help in Torino

Out of all of Utah's international exports, the latest might be the most unusual: Olympic volunteers.

The 2006 Winter Games are slated to be held in Torino, Italy, a city located in a green, fertile valley about the size of Salt Lake Valley. Torino has more water, but Salt Lake and its environs have something Torino apparently doesn't: an abundance of willing volunteers who speak a foreign language.

"We have a lot of those here," said Brigham Young University Italian professor Cinzia Donatelli Noble. "They (Torino officials) are really interested."

The Salt Lake Games were widely lauded in large part because of their 20,000 volunteers, almost half of whom spoke a foreign language. "It is absolutely one of the things we are really proud about," said Steve Clark, director of staffing for the Salt Lake Organizing Committee.

Torino needs foreign language speakers generally, but it particularly needs speakers of less common languages such as Romanian or Korean who can shepherd those countries' Olympic delegations around Italy.

The Utah volunteers will obviously know English, which Torino officials plan to use as a common linguistic denominator, but clearly it would help if they spoke Italian as well. To that end, Noble and University of Utah Italian instructor Giuliana Marple, who are organizing the effort, plan to use the BYU study abroad program to their advantage: the two professors propose signing students up for a fall 2005 semester abroad course in Torino, giving them an intense Italian course and having them live with Italian families.

The students will extend their stay to help out during the Games.

"Volunteers who speak English, Italian and the language of the NOC (National Olympic Committee) of the delegation they are helping. No other place has that," Marple said.

Students from anywhere, not just BYU, who sign up will probably study Italian before they leave as well, the two professors said.

In the company of several local business people, Noble and Marple recently returned from a trip to Torino, whose officials embraced the idea. As for the business people, deals are developing between Torinesi and Utahns in the areas of power management, building wraps (those huge pictures on the sides of buildings downtown in 2002) and even catering.

"Can you believe that?" said David Winder, Gov. Olene Walker's assistant for special projects who coordinated a similar state- sponsored trip last spring. "Catering? Italians already have great food."

"The mentality is generally a little bit different than it was here," said Marple, who was born in Torino."Here we had a lot of professionals -- doctors, lawyers -- from all walks of life. In (Torino) this will not happen. The majority of volunteers will come from young people."

While they're not cold or aloof, Marple said, Torinesi are a conservative people, who take longer to open up than Utahns. They also have a depressed economy; many volunteers are signing up in hopes that their stint might lead to a paying job.

"It won't be as easy as it was here" to get volunteers, said Noble, herself a native Italian. "The culture in Utah is a culture of volunteering, more than anywhere in the world."

E-mail: aedwards@desnews.com

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