NFL Player Raising Money for Sierra Leone

I’m a proud NFL Miami Dolphin fan. While perusing a Dolphin news website the other day, I actually came across another one of those uplifting make-a-difference stories that keep cropping up here on Tonic.

The Dolphins new free safety, Gibril Wilson, who formerly played for the Oakland Raiders and the New York Giants, was born in Freetown, the capital city of the West African country Sierra Leone. He left with his mother when he was 6, first to live in New York, and then the San Francisco Bay Area.

Sierra Leone is officially the second-poorest country on the planet, according to the United Nations. Life expectancy is 42 years old. One out of six women die while giving birth. More than 57 percent of the people there live on less than a dollar a day. The movie Blood Diamond, a film with Leonardo DiCaprio about the issue of conflict diamonds whose sales aided in the purchase of weapons for a civil war, was set in Sierra Leone (the war ended in 2002).

Since becoming an NFL player in 2003, Gibril Wilson has been going back to his home country, but not just to visit its beautiful beaches. Through his “Sierra Leone Project” sponsored by the Gibril Wilson Foundation, he is helping to raise money to build schools, medical clinics, electric generators, water storage facilities, bridges, housing, farms and more for several villages and urban communities.

“I do clothing drives, soccer games,” Wilson told the Palm Beach Post recently. “I’ve got a foundation that gives young people scholarships (and) lifts their spirits. If I can do it, they can do it. It’s just a matter of opportunity.”

Consider making a donation to such a worthy cause through Wilson's foundation.