Photo By Christopher Hurd | Master Sgt. Sylvester Lawrence official portrait. (Photo courtesy Sylvester Lawrence)... read more read more
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WASHINGTON -- Sometimes there aren’t enough minutes in the day to get everything done. Finding time to go to work, workout, cook, go to school and take care of kids doesn’t leave much time to help others. But if people make time and take an interest in the futures of others, it can turn a person’s whole world around for the better, says Air Force Master Sgt. Sylvester ‘Wes’ Lawrence, Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling’s career assistance advisor.
He knows because it’s exactly what happened to him.
Lawrence grew up in North Philadelphia in an area known as the ‘Badlands’, for its abundant drug-related violence. He said he lost several people he knew to the violence in the 1990s.
He grew up with two older brothers and an older sister. They weren’t well off, but they had both parents there to help take care of them. Lawrence’s father, a Vietnam veteran, was always busy working to keep food on the table and didn’t have time to help with other things in his life like basketball.
At 14, Lawrence would enter a work-school program that allowed him to work two days a week for an engineering company doing electrical and plumbing. There, he met Ernest Borlandoe who ran the company.
Borlandoe heard he played basketball and decided to challenge him to a game one day.
“He thought he could take me on,” Lawrence said laughing. “He couldn’t beat me. He was old. I was [killing] him.”
From that point on, they began to hangout, playing basketball and grabbing something to eat after work. They would talk about life and Borlandoe would offer him advice.
“He didn’t have to take time to help me, but he did,” he said. “He had a job, a wife and a son around my age, but he still took time to make sure I was doing alright.”
Through the advice and guidance he got, he started to see changes in his life.
“I saw how his influence on my life was benefiting me,” he added. “He made me see something outside of what my little box in North Philly was. He made me understand the significance of going to college and being productive in life.”
Borlandoe often took him on basketball recruiting trips and even dropped him off his freshmen year at Delaware Valley University, where he earned a basketball scholarship.
“My mentorship started [with Borlandoe] and throughout my life I’ve had other mentors who have played key roles.”
After a year and a half of college, it wasn’t working out for him. One morning, he woke up at his dad’s house and decided to make a change.
“I told my dad to take me to a recruiter,” he recalled. “I didn’t see a future [in Philadelphia].
He enlisted in the Air Force as part of security forces and after basic training was sent to McGuire Air Force Base. There, he met Senior Master Sgt. Ronald Mark Vickers, now retired, who mentored him and made sure he kept on the right path.
“He looked out for me,” Lawrence said of Vickers. “He saw an Airman that nobody was taking care of, and he took care of me.”
Vickers put him on his first deployment and helped him get his first service medal.
After coming back from Iraq, Lawrence struggled to re-acclimate himself. He was stuck doing the same thing all the time.
“I was stagnant,” he recalled. “I was having a hatred of my life, my marriage, my everything, and it was all based on what was going on with me coming back from war. My emotional state wasn’t the same.”
Senior Master Sgt. Tony Laudicina saw something wasn’t right with him. He asked what was going on and quickly got him pulled over to the Contingency Response Group.
“He told me ‘it’s time for a change’,” Lawrence said. “I had been at the same base and doing the same things for nine years. He was right, it was time for a change.”
After pulling him over to the CRG, Laudicina got him into schools and put him up for TDYs, trying to change things up and improve his mindset.
It worked and he won NCO of the year in 2006 for the CRG and Contingency Response Wing.
Lawrence took that advice of looking for a change and went to Hawaii, Korea and then to D.C., first to Joint Base Andrews and now JBAB.
Throughout his life and military career, Lawrence has never forgotten about that first mentor that took the time to make a difference in his life.
“I’m a mentor today based on what [Borlandoe] provided me,” he said.
Knowing that, he tries to take the most valuable thing he has and give it to others … time.
After the riots in Baltimore last year, he went up to schools in the city to speak with the kids.
He also went home to speak with kids in North Philadelphia. He showed up driving his luxury car with his wife by his side. He did that to send a message to the kids.
“I do it to say, I grew up down the street from y’all and I didn’t sell drugs, rob, kill or pillage people. I worked hard for 18 years, and that’s what it’s about. I go in and say ‘this is what you can get based on hard work.”
Even with his job, a wife and three kids of his own, he takes the time to talk to kids and Airmen looking for help.
“Never once has he ever turned me away,” said Air Force Staff Sgt. William Dameron, one of Lawrence’s mentees on JBAB. “He always makes himself available to me, to take time out to mentor me.”
Dameron said Lawrence inspires him to want to “pay it forward”. Something he’s been doing with the Joint Uniformed Mentoring Program (JUMP!).
“If you can take time to help someone be a better person, why wouldn’t you do it,” Dameron said.
Now, Lawrence is trying to help make an impact on the D.C. community by helping spread the word about JUMP! and encouraging people to make a difference in someone’s life.
“Give your time,” he said. “I think that is the most important thing someone can do.”
For more information or to get involved with JUMP!, email jbabjump@gmail.com.
| Date Taken: | 09.02.2016 |
| Date Posted: | 09.03.2016 09:16 |
| Story ID: | 208838 |
| Location: | DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, US |
| Hometown: | PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA, US |
| Web Views: | 151 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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