Sunday, October 18, 2009
Story last updated at 10/18/2009 - 1:10 am
Two male prostitutes were looking for Patrice Majondo-Mwamba, and everyone on the football team knew it.
The teenagers heard a Congolese man was playing in NFL Europe in 2007, so they positioned themselves everywhere the Amsterdam Admirals went, trying to pick out their fellowCountryman among the hoards of big, burly linemen. One night, Mwamba stepped outside a Dutch restaurant after a long dinner with teammates and decided to walk off all the food and wine. The former Texas Tech defensive tackle noticed the two boys, no more than 16 years old, on his way back to the hotel where he was living for the 10-week season.
Frustrated by their persistence, Mwamba identified himself to his stalkers.
"I have no idea how they were in Amsterdam, but they were there with no papers, no food, no parents, displaced there because of the war," Mwamba said. "I was touched by their story."
The boys escaped to Amsterdam from a five-decade war that had ravaged the Democratic Republic of Congo.
They could not work without government documents, so they prostituted themselves to get money. Learning the Admirals included an NFL star from their homeland, they sought Mwamba's help.
"Sometimes in life you have to recognize when God puts you in a position to create change," Mwamba said. "These guys made me realize, 'Hey, you're at a crossroads.' "
Mwamba could only give the boys new shoes, some clothes, and directions to the proper government office that night.
Now, two years later, he hopes to use his new Fight for Five Foundation to protect other children from a similar fate.
A royal upbringing
Mwamba is Congolese royalty. His maternal great-grandfather was a king in the southern part of the country, part of a system of tribal government reaching back before the country's 1908 colonization by Belgium.
Mwamba's father was among a select group of youth educated after the Republic of Congo gained independence in 1960. A government installed by a military coup renamed the country Zaire five years later, but the country's political climate never stabilized.
Mwamba's parents, fearful of the building violence in 1991, sent their seven children to foreign boarding schools for good educations and protection from the growing civil war.
"I'm very lucky and I'm very conscious of that," he said. "I don't take that for granted."
He attended boarding school in Belgium, then moved to the United States to enroll at Georgia Tech.
One day he was eating at a McDonald's when a group of football players entered the restaurant. Friends explained they were athletes. A few days later he tried to sign up for the Yellow Jacket team, only to have a coach tell him to go to junior college to learn the game.
In 2000 he followed his cousin, Belgian-born Loliki Bongo-Wanga, to Hartnell Community College in California, where Mwamba learned to play football. In 2002 they reunited at Texas Tech. Mwamba redshirted, then spent two seasons primarily as a backup for teams that went to the 2003 Houston Bowl and 2004 Holiday Bowl. After graduating he signed with the now-defunct NFL Europe, which led to stints with the Denver Broncos and Kansas City Chiefs.
Mwamba said he lived all of it in a bubble.
Violence worsened in Zaire while Mwamba lived abroad. Rwanda and Uganda backed a 1997 rebellion that led to a new government and name: the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Another civil war erupted a year later. Foreign troops from seven countries marched through trying to influence politics, a cease-fire agreement failed and an assassin killed the president.
The CIA estimates more than five million people have died in the turmoil that began in 1998, according to the agency's World Factbook. Fighting displaced more than 1.4 million Congolese.
Mwamba said he heard about the violence, but was too removed to care.
"You're busy; by the time you're in the NFL you go to work at 7:30, you finish at 5:30 and in your off time you have to do rehab," he said. "You see those things, but there's only 24 hours in a day."
A firsthand experience
It took a recent trip to the Congo to show Mwamba how impoverished and dangerous his homeland had become.
He remembers a 5-year-old boy approaching him and chatting with the maturity of a teenager. Mwamba was impressed until the child asked for some money, or maybe a piece of meat.
Mwamba realized he was being hustled by a 5-year-old.
"I have a nephew who is 5 years old; all he thinks about is playing G.I. Joes or video games," he said. "They don't even know. That's automatic. But for these kids in the Congo, they're just so poor."
The Congo's natural resources include diamonds, gold, copper and cobalt, but corporate control means money rarely trickles into the hands of its citizens. A 2009 report by the International Red Cross said much of the violence today is a struggle to control that mineral wealth. Sexual assault, kidnapping and looting are all effects, the Red Cross reported.
"Everything that is horrific that you can think of," Mwamba's wife, Deborah, said, "is happening in the Congo as we speak."
Mwamba wanted to help the teenagers he met in 2007, but didn't know where to start. He called his attorney and asked for help creating a foundation.
He established the Fight for Five Foundation to raise awareness of and support for aid to the Congo.
Mwamba spent more than three months there this spring and summer, meeting with government officials and securing 20 acres of land on which he plans to build a school and eventually a medical center.
"That is his origin; those are his people," Deborah, said. "We believe strongly in leaving a legacy, something that is of value. He feels that opportunities, if they are given, can make a difference. It's not about changing the world, but changing things life by life, child by child."
Athletics and education
The school comes first. More than 32 percent of the population can't read, making it difficult for Congolese to land lucrative manufacturing jobs in their own country.
Mwamba wants to give students at the Mwamba Sports and Education Academy the same opportunities he received, using athletics to further their education. Tennis, basketball and football will be part of the program.
Amadou Gallo Fall, the director of scouting for the Dallas Mavericks, established the model for the program with his SEED Foundation.
Fall runs a school in his native Senegal where students learn basketball along with a traditional academic curriculum. Organizers hope the basketball skills might give graduates an edge for scholarships to continue their educations.
"In Senegal, the caliber of education is really good, but you're not able to have as much opportunity after that," said Brian Benjamin, SEED Foundation director of U.S. operations.
"To use their natural abilities and gifts to take them to the next level, that's what we're facilitating. We can connect the dots."
The SEED Academy has a maximum enrollment of 30 students. A new bilingual French-English program should help students overcome what Benjamin called their biggest challenge in American colleges: the language barrier.
Benjamin warned operating the school can be costly, particularly in a weak economy. SEED Academy sponsors include Nike and the NBA.
"Fundraising, especially in this economic environment, it's very important to have that backing," Benjamin said.
Publicizing the cause
Mwamba plans to unleash his full fundraising campaign soon. Fight for Five will host a cocktail hour in Dallas on Nov. 12 as part of a publicity blitz stretching from California to the Congo.
The foundation hopes to sell 250 tickets at $100 each to help pay for a fact-finding mission by a team of Stanford University doctors who hope to establish a hospital after the school opens in 2011.
Mwamba really wants enough publicity to pressure international companies doing business in the Congo to help.
"If a change is to be made, it's going to be made by heavy hitters," Mwamba said. "We're talking about petroleum companies, mining companies. All these corporations have offices there, but they don't have the stress on them to give back to the people there."
Mwamba enlisted friends in professional and college football, including Tech football coach Mike Leach, to help highlight the Congo's problems. Five NFL players have committed to traveling to the Congo for the school's groundbreaking next March, along with an ESPN crew.
Mwamba wants the school to lead its students to college and careers in the U.S. and Europe. But he also believes education can curtail the decades-old conflict at home.
"I want to give people a chance to let them know what they are capable of, to understand why they are poor," he said. "Then they can at least fight."
To comment on this story:
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PEOPLE/Former Texas Tech, NFL player leads foundation to protect children from abuses in war-torn homeland of Congo
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