Sunday 30 November 2008

Chess in Greenland?


Well, Greenland is not completely new to me. I was also working as a teacher from 2003 to 2006 in the town Upernavik in the North-Western part of the country, situated at the 73. latitude. And I did try to teach the kids some chess.

We purchased some chess sets (some very poor and cheap ones) and they were very happy for the opportunity to play "skakki", as they say. And then they sat up the pieces for...draughts! - and played on with great entusiasm. As the good teacher I finally took the lead and was in fact able, step by step, to teach them the rules of the real "skakki", NOT "tammorneq" as draughts is called in greenlandic.

One proof is the picture above, taken on a lovely, sunny day in june 2004. The big chess set we found somewhere at the school. Another teachers seemed to have tried to introduce chess some years before me. To what use the set was in that connection, I have no idea. Well, as a trained eye may deduce from the photo, I never got to teach them some openning theory...

Greenland has a population a little less than 60.000 inhabitants, scattered in small towns all over this vast territory. There are very few chess clubs, I guess 3-4 in all. But there are some chess entusiast among the genuine greenlanders. And then there is me and a few other danes with chess interest living in the country. So - who knows? - maybe we can get something up and running, maybe even a national chess organisation. But it will for sure take some years before we can put up an olympic team.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

hi.I am interested to go Greenland.I am a FM Master and i would like to teach chess there.is this posible?.My e-mail is.
l.cristobal88@yahoo.es
thanks