Dr. Groesbeck Parham remembers walking the streets of Atlanta with the late Dikembe Mutombo. “I was there visiting, and he had to get his passport renewed, so we parked the car and we were walking here and then we went and had lunch and whatnot. And you know, people recognized him and they would honk their horns.”
Parham remembers people shouting, “Hey, Dikembe!” Mutombo was beloved in Atlanta, where he played from 1996 to 2001. “But to walk with him in Kinshasa, man,” Parham said.
At the Biamba Marie Mutombo Hospital, which the Hall of Fame center opened in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s capital in 2007, Parham trained doctors to screen and treat breast cancer and cervical cancer. One night, he and his team, along with Mutombo, went to meet the new U.S. ambassador to the DRC.
“When we came out of the ambassador’s house, it must have been 9 o’clock at night, there must have been 500 people outside waiting,” Parham said. “I don’t know how they knew. They were [shouting], ‘Dikembe, Dikembe, Dikembe!’ We had to run in the car and they were beating on the car. Oh, it was just totally different.”
At the first day of hospital’s screen-and-treat camp in July 2016, thousands of women lined up….
