By Ron Allen, NBC News Correspondent

FREETOWN, Sierra Leone – I've been to Africa dozens of times. However, my reporting trip to Sierra Leone earlier this summer was unique.

Why? We went to cover "good news," make that "wonderful" news stories.

We did a story about a professional athlete who lives in the United States – but was born and raised in Sierra Leone – and returns there every year trying to help more kid get an education.

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Another story is about the U.S. Peace Corps, President Kennedy’s nearly 50-year-old idea, which just sent the first group of volunteers back to Sierra Leone in 16 years. The Peace Corps, like just about every other Western organization, had fled Sierra Leone's decade long civil war and its lingering aftermath.

And finally, we did a story about an old slave fortress, Bunce Island, and an American professor trying to get it the recognition and attention it deserves for its inhumane and brutal contribution to history.

This was my first trip to West Africa. I've been all over the continent covering wars, famines, floods and various other disasters, natural and man-made. But this was a trip about Americans in a far flung corner of the world doing incredibly selfless things.

From the football field to Freetown
First up was Madieu Williams. He's number 20 on the Minnesota Vikings of the NFL, a free safety entering his seventh season, who plays the game in a solid and unspectacular way. He's a guy who doesn't crave the limelight. He's not a self promoter. He's humble. He's so many things the stereotypical brash, multi-millionaire, egomaniacal professional athlete is not.

Williams was in Sierra Leone during the off-season doing his life's work. He was born and raised there until he was 9 years old. He then came to the U.S. with his family and has been living the American dream. But he returns to Sierra Leone each year.

He's built a school on a hillside overlooking the Atlantic coast on the outskirts of Freetown, the capital. It's a school in a community where none had existed before. The staff had to turn students away when it opened, so many wanted to attend. The teachers either volunteer or earn very little money. That's the way things are done over there.

Williams was visiting with a group of volunteers from a foundation called Healing Hands, based in Baltimore. The volunteers – teachers, doctors, dentists, even a business man and a civil engineer – had all come to help the local community. They brought school supplies like books, pencils and rulers and they brought expertise to help train the staff. But mostly they brought big open hearts, and tried to show the people in this desperately poor nation that somebody cares.

TIMELINE: The history of Sierra Leone

Giving back
That's the kind of thing that Williams makes happen, when he's not banging heads with the best of them in the NFL. He also recently gave his alma mater, the University of Maryland, $2 million of his own money. It's the largest gift ever from someone so young – he's 28.

The money is to help start a global health center at the university. Williams hopes the school’s research will discover ways to improve health care and education in places like Sierra Leone. All that is pretty telling about what kind of person Williams is – a guy who gives millions from his own pocket, because he's concerned about poverty in the developing world.

Williams says his family instilled in him early the importance, make that the necessity, of giving back, and often putting others first.

He took us to his old neighborhood in Sierra Leone. I was expecting more. The family home is a rundown two story structure that looks like it might get washed away by one of Sierra Leone's monsoon afternoon rain storms. But the family had more than most, Williams explained. They had TV, a phone, even running water, which they shared with neighbors.

Williams’ mother lived the lesson of helping others. She was a nurse, who often took her son with her through the hospital wards. Williams named the school he built to honor her. Sadly, she passed away a few years ago – Abigail D. Butscher was just 45.

During this visit, Williams returned to some of those same hospital wards his mother used to take him to. The other foundation he was teaming up with on this trip, Healing Hands, does most of its work in pediatric centers around the world.

The story of how this partnership came together takes us briefly back to football, and the University of Maryland. Dr. Jamie Flores, a plastic surgeon who volunteers for Healing Hands, was once a defensive tackle for Maryland's college team. A few years ago, the school honored him for his humanitarian work. Williams was another honoree.

They met, hit it off, and this summer they were standing together in a dingy children's ward in the hospital where Williams was born, trying to figure out what's needed most and how to get it here.

This is a long-term commitment. And in fact, that's how Williams answers the inevitable question: “How can you be optimistic and hopeful in a place full of so much misery and despair?”

His answer: “Small victories, patience and time."

It's a pretty remarkable story of a man who never forgot where he came from. A talented, successful professional athlete who could be almost anywhere else he wanted to be, but chooses to spend so much of his time, money and effort in a place few Americans ever will go.

We hope you'll enjoy our story on the NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams, and the extended interview, video clips and pictures linked here, as much as we enjoyed the actual time spent in Sierra Leone.

For more information see: Madieu Williams Foundation and Healing Hands

Stay tuned for more of Ron Allen's reports from Sierra Leone on NBC's Nightly News with Brian Williams.

By Ron Allen, NBC News Correspondent

BO, Sierra Leone – Ahmed Smart is a well-dressed man who stood out in the midday market crowd in downtown Bo, Sierra Leone’s second-largest city.

He walked up to me with a friendly, inquisitive face, dark glasses shielding his eyes from the intense sun, and asked that inevitable question I hear in places like this: "What are you doing here? What is your purpose?"

Obviously, I stand out. I probably looked pretty uncomfortable sweating profusely standing there looking like a foreigner.

We were in Bo taking pictures of the market scene for a story about the U.S. Peace Corps returning to Sierra Leone after a 16-year absence during the country's long, bloody civil war.

Thirty-nine volunteers were in training just down the road, learning how to teach secondary-school subjects like math and science. They were also grappling with learning the local language and with their new living arrangements with host families – a huge adjustment. Most have no electricity. They get water from a well. They walk up to 45 minutes each day back and forth to their training, from houses in the bush.

It’s a two-year commitment. "The toughest job you'll ever love," is the Peace Corps motto. The tough part is putting it mildly. However, the tremendous feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment from teaching or helping people in these poor distant communities in other ways, so many former volunteers say, is life-altering and almost impossible to put into words.

Trying to make a living in Freetown, Sierra Leone.

Memory of an old teacher
All of that brings me back to Smart. When I told him about the story we were working on, a broad smile instantly spread across his face. He let out a long sigh, as his mind’s eye raced back to when he was a young boy. He paused to gather his thoughts. The moment was very emotional for reasons I would soon understand.

"They taught me," he said. "Miss Watson. I remember her even now," he said. "I wish to see her."

Watson, a Peace Corps volunteer, was Smart's sixth-grade teacher. "I wonder whatever happened to her," he thought out loud. (Since we are still reporting from Sierra Leone, we haven’t had a chance to try to find out what did come of Watson back in the States.)

It was some 40 years ago, in the early 1960s, he said. Two American teachers, he couldn't remember the other person’s name, spent a couple of years at his school in the eastern province of Kenema. Smart is now an accountant, a civil servant who works for the local government in Bo.

While we visited the Peace Corps training center, we ran into several former students of volunteers who years later are teaching the newest generation of volunteers. But running into Smart in the craziness that is downtown Bo in the middle of the day was a complete coincidence.

Coming back after 16-year hiatus
We are going to have more stories in the coming weeks about the American volunteers now finding their way here. We spent a couple days with them during what's been an extraordinary adventure in this nation trying to pull itself up from the ashes of a devastating war. The government from President Ernest Bai Koroma on down pushed hard to encourage the Peace Corps to return, as a signal to the rest of the world that the country is peaceful and safe.

There's a rich tradition of service here dating back to 1962 shortly after President John F. Kennedy launched the Peace Corps with a challenge to a group of students at the University of Michigan. Nearly 4,000 volunteers have served here since. Even though no volunteers have been here for the last 16 years, that figure still makes Sierra Leone’s one of the largest Peace Corps programs in the world.

Back in downtown Bo, Smart was telling us how he hopes more young people here will go to school, learn trades and find jobs that will help this country develop.

The road where we were standing was loud and somewhat dangerous because of the sea of motorbikes whizzing by, usually with two or even three people perched on the seat. Young people, especially young men, love to use the bikes to dash through the terrible traffic here.

Smart said they’re the people who concern him most. "They're the same men who were fighting in the war," he explained. Now they're idle and he feared that could lead to a return to violence.

As we were about to part, he remembered something else about his years in grade school and his American teacher Watson.

"I'm singing Lord, Lord, Lord truly been good to me…I'm singing Lord, Lord Lord… because you did what the world couldn't do." There were several verses.

"I would like to say a very big ‘thank you’ to her," he said of Watson. The song, like so much else he learned from an American volunteer some 40 years ago, has never been forgotten.