The Suze asks: If Dikembe Mutombo is from Africa, how did he end up in the NBA?

For those that don't know, Dikembe Mutombo Mpolondo Mukamba Jean-Jacques Wamutombo is a 7 foot 2 inch tall NBA center who actually has the name I just wrote, I didn't make it up as a joke about how Africans have funny names. In addition to being one of the most dominant defensive players of all time and having a voice that sounds exactly like the Cookie Monster, Dikembe has one of the greatest track records for humanitarian work in all of professional sports. His crowning achievement is the Biamba Marie Mutombo Hospital, a $29 million, 300-bed hospital near his hometown of Kinshasa. Of the $29 million, $15 million was donated by Dikembe personally; the hospital is named in honor of his mother, who died of a stroke in 1997. What does this have to do with Dikembe, a native of the Congo, showing up in the NBA? Well, he originally showed up on the basketball radar at Georgetown, where he was attending school with hopes of becoming a doctor on a USAID scholarship. As fate would have it, John Thompson, the basketball coach at the time, just assumed that a 7 foot tall black man would be a good basketball player. What a racist.

And what is the origin of the word eavesdropping?

Well, I don't exactly see what the two questions have to do with each other, but whatever.  The original definition of eavesdrop is "place around a house where the rainwater drops off the roof" (from "eave", or roof overhang, and "drop", which is a, uh, drop). An eavesdropper would be someone who would stand at the walls or windows of a house to hear what's going on inside. This definition has since drifted away from someone standing at the walls to anyone who stands near a conversation to overhear what is being said.