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View Full Version : Really cool article about Kellen Sampson



Collier11
6/15/2006, 01:27 PM
For all the jokes I hear about the guy, myself included...this is a really cool story and tells alot about his character...
http://www.soonersports.com/ViewArticle.dbml?DB_OEM_ID=300&ATCLID=294478

King Crimson
6/15/2006, 02:26 PM
wow. thanks for posting that. i'm also further convinced Dewey Selmon is about the coolest cat going.

http://users.ev1.net/~hlsports/a100179.JPG

Grimey
6/15/2006, 03:08 PM
I really like Kellen, and he should not be held accountable for the sins of his father. I LOVE the fact that he is finishing out his career as a Sooner, and I hope he is cheered big time for sticking around.

BudsBoy
6/16/2006, 04:17 PM
Kellen and the Selmon family are great representatives for the University of Oklahoma. Proud they chose our school.

GDC
6/20/2006, 04:12 PM
Smiles out of War
By GUERIN EMIG World Sports Writer
6/20/2006

NORMAN -- Oklahoma basketball player Kellen Sampson came upon the boy, maybe in his teens, and couldn't believe his eyes.

"He had razor marks in a design all over his body," Sampson said. "They went down his chest and wrapped around his waist to his back. He told me, 'My tribe, this is what we did for war.' "

It was late May. Sampson had traveled to Liberia, the West African nation that had torn itself to bits during two civil wars, wars fought by children as much as young adults.

He was part of a mission undertaken by a group of 14, a sort of Sooner caravan including Sampson, Chicago Bears All-Pro and former OU All-American Tommie Harris, OU gridiron legend Dewey Selmon, and Selmon's four children, including Wake Forest defensive end Zac Selmon and former OU women's basketball player Shannon Selmon.

They'd come to build the 85 children of Rainbow Town orphanage a school. They'd come so that the strong could comfort the weak.

Only, it never worked that way.

"I'm sitting here complaining about a test? I've got two papers due tomorrow?" Sampson said. "Here's a kid with razor marks all over his body. Here's another

who saw his parents murdered. And yet these kids are never not smiling. Are never not eager to learn something. Are never not excited about seeing you.

"We were there 16 days. Every day, there were smiles."

From May 21 to June 5, the weak would comfort the strong.


Kids involved in war
"The first thing you encounter is this chaos. You see the results of war immediately," Dewey Selmon said.

Dewey knows well what it's like to disembark from a plane in the Liberian capital of Monrovia. His family has poured itself into the cause of Liberian children since 2004, when the Selmons adopted 6-year-old Christiana and brought her home to Norman.

"It's in the buildings, the mass destruction all around," Dewey said, "and in their approach to life."

It is a meager existence.

Liberia has been in a state of general upheaval since 1980. Civil war broke out in 1989, stopped in 1996, then began again in '97.

At the time the latest cease-fire went into effect in 2003, the United Nations estimated more than 250,000 people had been killed and another 1.2 million had been displaced. Life expectancy in a country with no reliable electricity, and with an estimated 80 percent of its citizens impoverished, is 42 years of age.

Most appalling, war raged so long that a nation of 3 million citizens began running out of soldiers and turned its claws on its children. According to UNICEF, as much as 60 percent of the Liberian civil war forces were under 18, with an estimated 15,000 children fighting at some point.

One day in the midst of such despair, a soldier happened upon a middle-aged Liberian woman named Feeta Naimen.

He asked Naimen to take her children inside. Naimen responded honestly, that she had no kids. He asked her a second time. She still said she had none.

This time, the soldier pleaded in a whisper that if she did not do as he said, his superiors would force him to turn his machine gun on the children, then on her.

Naimen took the children in -- 75 in all -- and spent the next several years moving them out of war's way. Eventually, the group settled in the village of Gbamga, about 150 miles from Monrovia. After the last cease-fire, and under the Selmons' watchful eye, Naimen's children formed the core of Rainbow Town orphanage.


Learning from kids
Rainbow Town is what drew the Sooners to Liberia on May 21. Zac and Shannon Selmon formed the nonprofit Shine Foundation to benefit the orphanage, raised funds for the trip, then recruited strong-bodied, able-minded friends to come build the school.

"As it is, the kids who want to go to school have to walk two hours each way," Shannon said. "Very few of them even get to go. The ones who do walk, even if they're not sure school's going to be in session that day."

The missionaries arrived and the work began.

"Then it became more personalized," Dewey said.

Perhaps it had to do with what happened the first morning of construction.

"Me, my dad, Kellen, Tommie and my friend who's a defensive end at Wake, we went strong for maybe 15 or 20 minutes," Zac Selmon said. "After a half-hour, were were dog tired. It was 100 degrees and we were struggling.

"About then, the kids from Rainbow Town started walking up the hill to where we were. We were carrying cement blocks . . . So they started taking off their shirts and tying them to their heads. Then they put these huge cement blocks on top of their heads and started carrying them with us. There was this little girl named Marie. She couldn't have been more than 6 years old. She jumped right in line.

"Talk about an awakening. I think that touched all of us. We came over there with the intention of helping those kids. That day, they saved us."

Over the following two weeks, as Rainbow Town's school went up, the orphans taught the bulk of the lessons.


Dealing with having nothing
"Every day, you asked the kids, 'How was your day?' " Sampson said. " 'Praise the Lord. It's a good day.' What? These kids have every reason to be mad at the world. Yet they don't complain that they didn't get a hot shower. Or they didn't sleep last night because it was so damn hot and there were bugs flying around their face and they were 12 to a room. Or there's no electricity or no light.

"An 11-year-old points out a man with a machete and tells you that's what they used to kill his mother and father.

"And they're all like, 'Praise the Lord. I'm here.' "

There was the time Zac prayed with a 10-year-old named Taylor who finished by crying, "Lord, we have nothing to give you but our heart."

There was the time Shannon held 2-year-old Josephine on her lap, and the little girl who'd lost her mother the day after she was born sang, "I will shine!" over and over again.

There was the time the entire orphanage gleefully chased Harris until the football star was running as fast as a 300-pound man possibly could.

And there was the time the missionaries took an 11-year-old named Abraham back to their compound for lunch.

"We gave him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich," Zac said. "He ate a little, and said he wanted to save some for his little sister, Hannah. When lunch was over, we went back to the orphanage. He jumped off the truck and all the kids came around him wanting to know what it was like to ride in the truck.

"As he told them, he started tearing off little bitty pieces of his peanut butter and jelly sandwich and passing them out to all the kids."

"You feel their pain, but you also see their joy," Dewey said. "It's there in the children. It's so easy to pick up on."


Somber return home
It was like that for two weeks.

"That's what I miss most. It's hard to have a bad day there," Sampson said. "The kids don't let you."

Actually, the last day was a little rough. When it came time for the Sooners to return to Oklahoma.

"The whole trip back, everybody just sat there somber," Sampson said, "almost depressed."

The work went well. The Benjamin Britt Academy should open in July.

Gifts were exchanged. Harris emptied his suitcases until all he had to bring home were the clothes on his back.

Games were played. Soccer. Basketball. Marbles. "Duck, Duck, Goose."

One day, the group returned from work to find Dewey telling the children about Abraham Lincoln, how he emerged from his own nation's civil war to rebuild something much more promising.

It's just that the missionaries were going here while the kids were back there. The best they could do was remember, and honor what they had learned.

"My dad always told me you can control your attitude. You can control whether you have a bad day," Sampson said. "I know that now more than ever."

"The first workout I did when I came back, every (weight-lifting) rep I did I named another kid," Zac Selmon did. "Times you are at practice and feel like, 'Why am I out here?' You can't complain. Not after you see what they've been through."

"You go with the idea that you're going to help and to serve and to minister to and to meet the needs of people less fortunate than you," Shannon Selmon said. "And time and time again, on a daily basis, you feel you are receiving more than you are giving."



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Guerin Emig 581-8355
[email protected]



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INFORMATION
For more information on Shannon and Zac Selmon’s Shine Foundation benefiting Rainbow Town orphanage, call (405) 321-SHIN, write to The Shine Foundation, 2725 S. Berry Road, Norman, OK, 73072, or consult www.shinefoundation.org..

soonerndn
6/21/2006, 03:42 PM
awesome..

SoonerStormchaser
6/21/2006, 04:31 PM
I was in a video production class with Dewey's daughter, Lauren back in '04...their newly adopted Liberian daughter was the best extra we had that semester. She truly relished every moment in front of the camera.

It's truly sad to see what's going on in Liberia. With all the stories my mom told me about when she lived there with her family as missionaries back in the 60's, it amazes me how fast things can go downhill over there.

badger
6/25/2006, 09:07 PM
Being the nice short blond girl that I am, I called Dewey over to the sideline at the Red/White game this year and begged him for an autograph. While he had just signed about two hundred for the young fans and old thankless fans alike, he obliged. I thanked him profusely.

...and then, I went back and got the other Selmon's autograph later that game, whom I also thanked profusely...

...and then, gave them to my boyfriend, NormanPride.