My Favorite Day of the Week

My weeks and weekends are backwards.  Friday through Monday tend to be the busiest days of my week.  Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday tend to be considerably more relaxed.

Each day has its own flavor.  Sundays naturally fill up with church and worship gatherings.  Most pastors take Mondays as their day off, so pastors gatherings and seminary classes tend to be held then.

But, the day of the week that consistently brings me unbridled joy has to be Friday.  Friday is the day that I host a small chess club here at Casa Adobe.

At around 5:30 PM, I start arranging the tables in the front room and mixing a couple of pitchers of Tang.  At around 6:15, I lock up our guard dogs behind the house.  Sometimes, if I have some extra time on my hands, I’ll make a snack: homemade bread, cookies, popcorn.

Then, at 6:30, I open the front gate and the kids start arriving.

We started out slowly.  Most of the kids had never played chess before.  We had to start with the basics: what the pieces are called, how they move, etc.  With time, I introduced them to increasingly difficult concepts.  Checkmate is one thing, but how do you explain stalemate?

Before each club meeting, I have to do quite a bit of preparation.  Chess has an entire set of vocabulary that goes along with it.  Doubled Pawns are different from (and considerably less desirable than) a Pawn Duo.  Yet, if I had to try to come up with the terms in Spanish on my own, I would probably end up using the same word for both.

I make errors every day, but the kids are forgiving.

They have been improving quite rapidly.  I have started to give them chess problems to solve.  They have to sit and stare at a particular scenario until they see the correct move to make.  You can get a sense of what that is like here:  https://www.chess.com/tactics

The big news floating around right now is that one of the kids who has been attending the chess club finally beat me.  It was a short match.  I made one big error and WHAM, it was all over.  He beat me fair and square.  He was ecstatic, and rightly so.  He had set up a simple attack and had executed it perfectly.

I’m really proud of my students even though I was a bit red-faced as I stared at my check-mated king.

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One of the best parts of the club is that it has momentum.  Sure, after the first meeting, we had a sharp drop-off in the number of attendees, but we still reliably get a group of 6-7 kids together to play chess every Friday.  Some have even started inviting their friends.

This momentum, however, can’t stand up to December.  December in Costa Rica is weird.  Everything comes to a halt.  Everything.

The Philosophy class that I was co-teaching at the local seminary had one final class scheduled for today.  It got canceled.  It is just too close to Christmas.

Basically, the only things that keep going during mid to late December are family, church and shopping.

In that light, the kids and I decided to pause the club until early January when we will re-start.  I’m hopeful that the momentum we have had over the past months will carry though until then.

Given the fact that the chess club is on hold, classes are done and the entire country is on holiday, I figured now would be a good time to fly back to the US to visit friends and family for two weeks.  It helped that my parents found a good deal on a ticket and got it for me as a present.  So, I WILL be home for Christmas, and not only in my dreams!