Ogunsiku Babatunde

The beauty of setting one’s heart on. Today marks exactly eight years since we officially kickstarted the Chess in Slums project. Oh, how beautifully time flies. It still feels like yesterday when, with trembling hands, I committed my heart to this seemingly impossible miracle of doing great things from small places. I feel immense gratitude today, above all things. But I also want to share a recent contemplation from one of my many mundane musings about life. Sometime in July, while I was in New York, I decided to take a really long walk through the city. New York is a deeply fascinating place, with so much to see and admire that one can easily get lost in its allure and chaos. So I gave myself a simple task to find and photograph everything in color blue. Suddenly, it felt like the city changed, at least in my own eyes. A blue bicycle chained to a railing. A stranger in a blue coat. A young boy in a blue shirt held closely by his mother, one of his hands carefully wrapped in a blue cast. Blue tents. A small patch of sky reflected in the glass of a building. By the end of my walk, I had taken so many wonderful pictures of all the beautiful blue things my curiosity could capture. Of course, the city hadn’t changed. The blue had always been there. What changed was that I had decided to look for it. I haven’t stopped thinking about that experience ever since, about the strange and beautiful power of setting one’s heart on something, and how what we choose to look for in the world eventually teaches us how to see. It feels even more meaningful today because eight years ago, I set my heart on the Chess in Slums project, and it became my own trail of blue through the world. It taught me to see possibility in the lives of children in places where poverty had robbed them of the basic dignity of being human beings with dreams and aspirations. We went into those places with chessboards and a simple belief: there is remarkable brilliance here, if only someone is willing to look for it. It has been the greatest privilege of my life to witness what happens when a child who has been invisible for most of their life finally encounters someone who sees them. And perhaps that is another thing I have learned: we do not only find what we are looking for. Sometimes, by looking long enough and loving deeply enough, we help it become visible to others too. These eight years have carried the full spectrum of being alive: beautiful moments, difficult years, mistakes, exhaustion, hurt, disappointment, uncertainty, and days when the size of the problem made our efforts feel painfully small. But chess has taught me something about small things. The pawn is the smallest, most ordinary piece on the chessboard. Yet hidden within its humble beginning is the possibility of becoming something far greater than anyone imagined. Perhaps children are like that too. There are still millions of children across Africa whose brilliance remains hidden behind circumstances they did not choose. So we will keep looking. We will keep going to the small places. To help them burn brighter and hold them up long enough for the world to see. And perhaps this is the beauty of setting one’s heart on something: That you begin by searching the world for a particular kind of light…. Then one day, you look around and realize you have spent your life helping to create it. Happy anniversary, @chessinslums. To our incredible team, volunteers, partners, friends and supporters over the years, thank you for believing, for staying, and for teaching me in the most profound way that no amount of darkness can conquer a flicker of light. Eight years later, my heart is still set on the same thing. This is Day One, all over again.