Courtesy of dentolibrary.wordpress.com
As we accelerate into the new year, December recedes in our rearview mirrors.
Thankfully so. Last year ended in one of the most tragic and uncertain ways in recent history. With the shootings at the Clackamas Town Center and at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, holiday cheer was replaced with generous helpings of fear, doubt and wondering what our world was coming to.
At the same time, we balanced precariously on the edge of a fiscal cliff, with Washington politics once again taking us on a down-to-the-wire ride of anxiety.
Nonstop projections were complete with an email from the Portland State administration warning: “If an agreement isn’t reached, Oregon
universities face potential cuts.”
That was just what we needed to hear as we raised another glass of eggnog, hoping to rinse out the bad taste in our mouths. December left many of us feeling like there was more bad in the world than good. When each day was met with another little 6-year-old’s funeral, it was hard to imagine anything worse.
The common denominator across myriad news reports was a general sense of paralysis and inexplicable sadness.
So, if you were anything like me, you desperately needed some good news with your New Year’s. Some reason for hope.
I then discovered the story of Phiona Mutesi—and realized hope is in the countless everyday acts of kindness that, though small in comparison to huge, horrific catastrophes, can make a life-changing difference.
Phiona is a Ugandan teenager whose life has always been hard. Her father died when she was around 3 years old, and early on she was forced to scrounge on the streets for food for herself, her mother and her brother. She told CNN that it was on the streets that she first heard of a man named Robert Katende, who had started a chess club in her slum, Katwe, and offered children a bowl of porridge if they came to learn.
With the promise of a meal, Phiona soon became a regular. Katende told CNN that he chose to teach the children chess because it gave them skills, including “how to make decisions, obstructive thinking, forecasts, endurance…looking at challenges as an opportunity in all cases, and possibly, not giving up…anything to do with life, you can get in that game.”
He soon discovered that Phiona was a natural. Within a year, she was beating all the older girls and boys, and despite the fact that many thought a poor slum girl shouldn’t be playing a “white man’s game,” she continued to make the daily four-mile trek to practice.
What no one could have imagined came true—today, at the age of 16, possibly 15 (she’s not quite sure), she is Uganda’s top player and represents her country in international chess tournaments. In 2010, she flew for the first time in her life to a competition in Siberia, praying for “God to protect me, because who am I to fly to
the europlane?”
ESPN writer Tim Crothers heard about her and wrote a story on her journey. People everywhere were inspired by her story. He eventually wrote a book about her, The Queen of Katwe, and now Disney is in the process of turning it into a movie.
Crothers marvels at a girl who has faced “every hurdle that the world can place in front of her,” and who is now inspiring hope in people all over the world. A little girl who walks two hours every morning to fetch drinking water and who never learned to read or write now walks proudly on the world stage, carrying the honor of her country as she competes against the best of the best.
It’s the small acts, however, that make this huge story possible. It was Robert Katende who started a chess club, of all things, in the most unexpected of places, and thought highly enough of slum children to invest in coaching them.
It was Phiona’s courage and belief in herself that kept her coming back. It was
Crothers who took the time to tell a less-than-flashy story.
It is a program called Sports Outreach that is sponsoring Phiona to go to school and learn to read and write. It is people from vastly different lives each doing their part that culminates in a story of hope.
If we all choose to write our own daily stories of kindness in 2013, while we might never erase the tragedy around us or make a Disney movie, we may be the reason that someone who was once invisible can now feel like a queen.