When Timothy Evans started the Andean Children's Foundation in 1982 to do development projects in Bolivia and Peru, he never expected his project director in Bolivia to one day call and plead: "Don't send any more volunteers."

Evans, a Salt Lake dentist-turned-development-specialist, could understand the complaint. The director had ended up spending more time chauffeuring and baby-sitting college student volunteers than doing his work.And this director was not the first to decide volunteers were more trouble than help in international-development work. Mother Teresa's organization accepts no volunteers, Evans said. And Dominique Lapierre, author of "The City of Joy," a book about Calcutta's poor, wrote that people's offers to help were generous but not usually realistic.

"Unless you are a doctor or an experienced paramedic in the fields of leprosy, tropical diseases, malnutrition, bone tuberculosis, polio, rehabilitation of physically handicapped, I think your generous will to help could be more of a burden for the locals in charge than anything else," he wrote.

But Evans wasn't willing to give up yet on volunteers. He had seen the dramatic changes in Americans' lives as they were exposed to the poverty, hunger and disease of the Third World, not as abstractions in books or pictures on television but as everyday factors in the lives of real people with whom they ate, slept and worked.

Even if the volunteer efforts were not the most efficient way to help the people of the Andes, they were crucial to changing the First World's attitudes about the Third, he thought.

And Evans was not convinced inexperienced volunteer help could not be made useful to recipients as well.

So he, along with Dan Judd, president of the Children's Foundation, and James Mayfield, who runs the international development administration program at the University of Utah, started a new group - the Center for Humanitarian Outreach and Inter-Cultural Exchange.

CHOICE, they decided, would provide grants not just of money but also of manpower to organizations needing help. The requesting organization would help to identify a specific short-term project where unskilled - and even some skilled - volunteers could be of assistance. It would be like a mini-Peace Corps.

They would make sure the short-term projects addressed real needs by sending specially trained development workers - called rural development facilitators - to live in the target villages for several months before the arrival of any volunteers.