Kings Center Doubles as Voice for Native Haiti

By HOWARD BECK
Published: January 13, 2011



After the earthquake had leveled Port-au-Prince, toppling buildings, taking lives and unleashing a horrific humanitarian crisis, Samuel Dalembert reached out to his father and made a sensible plea: Leave Haiti. Come to the United States. I can take care of you here.



Samuel Dalembert, the N.B.A.'s only Haitian player, giving a basketball lesson in his homeland.
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Emmanuel Dalembert kindly declined.

“ ‘Son, there’s one thing you need to understand,’ ” Samuel Dalembert, a center for the Sacramento Kings, recalled his father saying. “ ‘A part of me will always be here. A piece of me is always in this country.’ ”

This was last January, not long after an earthquake struck the impoverished Caribbean nation of Haiti, killing more than 300,000 people and leaving 1.5 million without homes. Dalembert, then playing for the Philadelphia 76ers, absorbed the devastation from afar as his heart broke.

A second cousin and the children of several friends had been killed. Some family members had been seriously injured. Homes had turned to rubble. Electricity and phone service were wiped out and water supplies imperiled.

But Emmanuel Dalembert, an educator and an official in the Haitian government, would not budge.

“ ‘You’ve seen people rebuild cities, people rebuild different places, rebuild a town,’ ” Samuel recalled his father saying, “ ‘but you’ve never seen in your lifetime a country being rebuilt. And I think this is an opportunity for me to be a part of it.’ ”

The response was not surprising. A strong sense of civic duty runs in family — from the grandmother who ran a public school, to the father who dedicated his life to public service, to Samuel Dalembert, a nine-year N.B.A. veteran who has become one of the league’s great humanitarians.

“I was born with it,” Dalembert said proudly, his 6-foot-11 frame stretched out on a hotel lobby chair in Midtown.

The Kings, who are in town to play the Knicks, were in Boston for the one-year anniversary of the earthquake on Wednesday. Dalembert commemorated the event by writing another check, this one for $50,000, to Unicef, to help deal with a cholera outbreak. In 12 months, he has donated $650,000 toward the recovery effort, much of it directed toward medical assistance and water purification.

For the last year, Dalembert — the N.B.A.’s only Haitian player — has been the face and the primary voice of the league’s aid efforts. The league and its players union donated $1 million to Unicef last year. More recently, Dalembert and Pau Gasol of the Los Angeles Lakers lent their support to Unicef’s Haiti 365 campaign.

On Wednesday night, players for the Miami Heat and the Los Angeles Clippers wore shirts during warm-ups and ribbons to raise awareness and promote the aid work of Project Medishare, which Dalembert also supports. Last year, his efforts were recognized with the J. Walter Kennedy Citizenship Award.

Dalembert has visited his home country at least a half-dozen times in the last year, finding a mix of hope and anguish. Progress has been excruciatingly slow, impeded by political instability and corruption.

“You go back over there and see 90 percent of the place is still the same,” Dalembert said. “Nothing has been done. It’s frustrating to see that your own country, your own people, the government, is not really moving forward or really putting things together, strategizing things to make a difference or trying to maximize the help coming to us.”

Dalembert left Haiti at age 13 to live with his family in Montreal, then moved to New Jersey to attend high school (St. Patrick) and college (Seton Hall). He played eight seasons in Philadelphia before the 76ers traded him to Sacramento last June. But, as with his father, a piece of Haiti is always with him.

Dalembert is only the third N.B.A. player to come from Haiti, and the first since Olden Polynice, who retired in 2004 after 15 seasons. Dalembert assumed an ambassador role long before the 2010 earthquake struck.

In 2007, he created the Samuel Dalembert Foundation, which has supported previous relief efforts through Unicef, the Red Cross and Feed the Children. But its greatest mission is to build the Samuel Dalembert Academy, to provide a stable educational environment for Haiti’s youth, from grammar school through college.

Dalembert envisions a sprawling campus with dormitories for older children and a diverse curriculum that includes music, the arts and sports. He envisions a safe haven, where classes can operate year-round and not be threatened by riots, which often close schools.

“Instead of being raised by the street most of the time, they can have something to do, where we can organize activities and keep them out of the street and keep them focused,” Dalembert said.

He has secured 10,000 books — some donated by Barnes and Noble in Sacramento — for the school library and wants a computer lab that will connect Haitian children to the outside world.

The academy will cost about $20 million, much of which has been raised, Dalembert said. He has acquired the necessary land, in Haiti’s Central Plateau (about three hours from Port-au-Prince) and hopes to break ground this summer.

Haiti has a long way to go to recover from last year’s devastation. Dalembert is dedicated to the recovery for now, but dreams of a more promising future. He wants to help raise a new generation of educated, progressive Haitians who might follow his path and become a model for the next generation.

“I will use all my skills that I have, and I will bring in people who have different skills, to help the youth to see hope,” he said. “When you do that and you see that person grow and leave, you got a story to tell. So that story is going to inspire the rest.”