One of the most incredible and uplifting stories you'll ever hear.

   Phiona Mutesi's story is an amazing story of, "life, chess, and one extrordinary girl's dream of becoming a grandmaster." (Tim Crother's The Queen of Katwe)

   Phiona is currently Ugandan's women champion and a WCM, making her the only titled player in Uganda. This, however does not seem inpresive until you hear how she became what she is.

   Phiona was born in Katwe, a sprawling slum in Uganda's capital city of Kampala, which is also one of the poorest if not the poorest slum in Africa. If this was not humble enough, let me now tell you that her name was more of a sound than a name. Her mother, who was illiterate because her parents could not afford to pay her school fees, had a relative who had named one of her kids Phiona, and she liked the way it sounded. So that's how her name was chosen. Her mother doesn't even know her exact date of birth. Because in Katwe, a place full of illiterate people, noone cares when you are born, and because she was not born in a hospital, she  has no birth certificate. (Her mother believes she was born in 1996 but has no idea as to the month.)

   Phiona lived the first nine years of her life (assuming 1996 is correct) wandering the slums fighting boys who tried to abuse her and selling maize to help her mother pay the rent on their tiny, one room shack with a blanket for a door. Then one day she followed her older brother Brian, who had been sneaking off lately, and found something which woud change her life.

  The place Brian had been sneaking off to was level piece of ground where a ministry called the Sports Outreach Institute had one of their men Robert Katende, a former soccer champion who was good enough that he could probably have made the national team, playing soccer and giving out free food to the kids and at the same time preaching the message of Christ. However in somewhat recent months Robert had noticed that their were some kids sitting out the soccer games and just coming over when it was time for the food and his testmony. When he asked them why they told him that they would be hurt and unable to play the medical bills. Robert tried to think of something to do besides soccer and setteled on chess, a game he had played with his friends in secondary school and college. Once they understood how to play, it was a huge success.

    But getting back to Phiona. She watched the kids play soccer for an hour and then go even deeper into the slums to a small biulding where they set up chess boards and began to play. At this point Robert noticed her and invited her down. Knowing that none of the boys would deign to teach her, he set her up with the only other girl there, a four-year-old named Gloria.Within a period of months Phiona was one of the better players there. Then one day Katende decided his players weren't being challenged enough, and after a lot of argument got them admitted to a week long tournament for Ugandan schools called the Father Grimes tournament. Skipping ahead, Katende's kids results in a number of tournaments quallified three of them, Ivan Mutesasira, Benjamin Mukumbya, and Phiona, for the 2009 International Chess Children's Tournament in Sudan, (A tournament hosted by FIDE to get Africans more interested in chess) where they placed first. Next Phiona alone entered a quallifying tournament for Uganda's women's team at the 2010 Olympiad where she would have placed first, but because she had already qualified for the #2 board and didn't realize  that the winner would be the national champion, she offered a draw in the crucial game to save her opponent the humility of being beaten  by a fourteen year old. At the Olympiad she only scored 2.5, but it was against opponents rated hight enough to earn her the title of WCM. Coming back to Uganda, her game had improved drasticly, and in the Rwabushenyi Memorial Chess Championship became the National women's Champion and has remained so since. Here is a link to her FIDE profilehttp://ratings.fide.com/card.phtml?event=10000399

Very nice story, thank you very much for sharing...

NP. It really is a wonderful story.

Wow!! Unbelievable , It is just incredible how a girl who was getting Underestimated with the boys became the only chess player to earn a WCM tittle and the Ugandan Champion born from the Poorest of Poorest. Good Job!<!>!<!>!