I had long wanted to volunteer somewhere, preferably in a place where I could help children, maybe even through chess, my profession. At the beginning of February 2023, I was in Rio de Janeiro, waiting for the carnival to start. The first chess class for Romanian children took place on Ipanema beach, where I met an American teacher who inspired me with the work he was doing. He was volunteering online English classes secretly, with girls from Afghanistan. There, girls lose the right to education after a certain age.
Several ideas from the book I was reading at the time, Think Like a Monk, pushed me even further to act with the goal of volunteering and bringing something valuable to a community. But who, where, and who would organize it? I had been eagerly waiting for my little niece in Romania to reach the age to learn chess. These factors led me to look for other Romanian children her age, five years old, and form a class.
Chess Lessons, Diverse Children
I proposed the idea to all my parent friends on Facebook. At that time, I also thought to ask not only friends in Romania but also those in the diaspora. With great difficulty, I managed to convince a few friends—very skeptical and comfortable—to download Zoom and trust me with their children.
From every parent, I received the classic: “You know, mine won’t sit still, he’s too little, he won’t be able to do it, but I’ll give him to you.” That motivated me even more. I know very well what five-year-old children can and cannot do. Moreover, I was confident in my own “magic” with children. Eventually, I gathered six children besides my niece: one from Cluj, two from Slatina, one from Bucharest, one from France, and one from Germany, who, as I later found out, spoke very little Romanian. And me, from Brazil.
Virtual Class, Real Lesson
I prepared the class by translating and adjusting my entire arsenal of little jokes that I had been using for so many years with children in Canada. I conducted the class for one hour—a full hour in which I literally sweated. Not because of the children, but because of the parents, who had never seen an online class before…
From “press the camera button to turn on your camera” to one parent, to miming “your microphone isn’t working and you can’t hear me” to another, and even reading the children’s lips to guess that their microphones weren’t working, my first chess class for children in Romanian was a real ordeal.
In one hour, I barely had time to learn the children’s names. I managed to mention the names of the pieces and explain how the simplest piece, the rook, moves. Immediately after the class, messages from parents started arriving, expressing various surprises. One thing was common in all the messages: how the children had managed to stay seated for a whole hour!
Now, a year later, six of the seven children I started with are still taking chess classes. During my trip to Romania in the summer of 2023, I had the chance to meet most of the children from the online classes. It was a great joy, as I had never met them in person before.