Soccer and Chess

At the soccer school

We´ve been working at two places so far through AIESEC. (The ´we´ refers to Oscar, Mickael, and I. Oscar and Mickael are fellow AIESECers from Ukraine and France, respectively.) The first place was a soccer school (see right). This was fitting since our project is called "Driblando." There, we basically played soccer with about thirty 13-16 year old kids under the guidance of their coach, Fred, who used to play professionally. We went every day for a week and by the end of it we had gotten to know the kids pretty well (and got a deluge of friend requests) even though our Portuguese wasn´t the best. Then on Sunday (8 days ago) we helped out with a social project that came into the school and hosted an event. They brought in some professional players (Wagner, anyone?) and food and music. It was cool, I guess. Wasn´t sure if anyone could answer the question why?, but we were just there to assist.

By far the more rewarding experience so far has been at the place we are currently working at. It´s an institute in the middle of a favela where 8-13 yr old kids go before and after school. It´s function is basically to keep the kids doing something not un-productive when they´re not in school. There is a dirt soccer field, some grass, and some classrooms which, as far as I know, we are the only educators to take advantage of. The first day we arrived there were about 20 boys playing soccer and 5 girls at a table in the shade, doing homework. They weren´t expecting us, so we had to explain in our shabby Portuguese that, yes, we were the gringos a woman named Luciana had called about a few days ago and said were coming. Soon we had been placed into teams and were playing on the dirt field filled with puddles. The day passed like this with us going along with the different soccer drills and games. Much like at the soccer school before, we were unsure of our authority and therefore unwilling to take the initiative. But the next day nearly as soon as we arrived the head coach/teacher(?) handed off all 20ish boys to us, pointing to his head and saying something about how we were going to improve their "mente"´s. Oscar and I had previously discussed the idea of teaching chess, so we decided to go for it and pretty soon we had everybody sitting at a table as we drew out and explained all the different pieces and their movements (in Portuguese/Spanish). We didn´t have a chess board that day so we had to make do with explaining the game, which I imagine was pretty boring for the kids, but they sat through it, bless them, and the next day when we brought a board we were astounded at how much some of them had retained. Now we´ve been going for like a week and several are quite good. We´ve also basically taken full responsibility for the groups of boys (the girls are shy and work with another teacher who´s a woman. We tried to get the girls to learn chess to no avail.) We´re also expanding our subjects of instruction. "Listen up everyone, after chess, yes, it´s soccer, but after that it´s geography, okay? Yes, yes, after geography it´s soccer, and after lunch too, okay." they´re supposed to have memorized all 13 countries of sudamerica for next time. I do hope I remembered correctly and that there are 13...