Interviews || By: || April 4, 2010 08:00 AM EST

Celebrity Apprentice's Summer Sanders on her Bizarre Cast and the Contents of Nickelodeon Slime

Talk about your charity Right to Play more. It brings sports, games, equipment, and organized fun to children who are affected by war in third-world countries. How did you get involved?

Well, I missed the Olympic team in 1996 -- missed making the team. I tried to make a comeback in my sport, and soon after the Olympic trials, Johann Olav Koss, who is a Norwegian speed-skater, called me up and asked me to be a part of Olympic Aid. Now Olympic Aid is Right to Play. It's a wonderful, narrow focus. It doesn't mess around with a lot of different things, it knows exactly what it is.

In 1996, I took my first trip with Olympic Aid. I went to Rwanda, two years after the genocide. It's just life-changing. There's no simple way to describe being around those kids, who were around such unimaginable atrocities, could feel uplifted when you brought them a game, a ball, just an organized day of play and sports. That's what it was in Rwanda, and I will never, ever forget this one girl. She was a double amputee. She had stepped on a landmine, and her prosthetic legs were two really skinny pieces of wood. She was literally walking around on two pegs. And the look in her eyes was so excited, focused, and serious about running this relay race. And when she got the baton and she jammed out and around -- they had to go around this cone -- and back, I will absolutely never ever forget how she didn't feel disabled, or different, and that's all through the power of sports.

In 2001, I went to Sierra Leone with Right to Play. I got to hang out with the child soldiers, and I got to see it the way it is now, which is that through sport and play we teach kids, for instance child soldiers, who are now expected to be a part of a community and society when for the last ten years of their life all this effort... has been in killing. Through sport we teach them about conflict-resolution, inclusion, nutrition, leadership, health, every imaginable thing you can learn through sports -- failure, success, working together as a team. It's a sustainable organization. They teach the older kids to be leaders, and they run these programs for these kids. Everyone there, it's a common language: They know how to play soccer, football there. It's wonderful to give these kids a chance to be kids, to play, and to see the smiles on their faces.

So winning last week was super-emotional for me. I gave up time with my own children to put myself out there on a reality show to raise money and awareness for millions of kids in Africa and Asia and other areas of the world. And that's how important it was to me.

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