The Lewis Chronicles Pt. 5: May Jamal's Way

Ron Bailey, Publisher

Jamal Lewis, soon-to-be senior guard had a very active May.

Hello and welcome to my diary. I hope everyone had a wonderful weekend and an even better Mother’s Day. It’s been a while since I last updated you all and in my last diary I mentioned that I would be taking a trip to New Orleans, where I would be completing my community service hours. As you all know, New Orleans was devastated by hurricane Katrina in 2005 and majority of Louisiana was destroyed. As of now, almost 6 years later, New Orleans has made significant progress and many areas that were completely destroyed by the hurricane have recovered nicely.

However, as shocking as it may seem, there are many places and houses in New Orleans that haven’t been touched since 2005. One reason for this is the fact that a lot of families either lost everything they had or most of what they had in the storm including their home.

Each of those families had a choice to rebuild their homes or seek a new place of refuge and start a new life. Some suffered tremendous emotional tragedy and decided they just couldn’t return to the place that had caused so much pain in their lives. Others reclaimed New Orleans as their home and took on the challenge of rebuilding the place that had housed their families for years, decades, or even centuries. These families had a tremendous task ahead of them and couldn’t have possibly completed the rebuilding in a reasonable amount of time so they all looked to volunteer programs for help. Which is the second reason why many houses remained untouched even six years later because there aren’t enough volunteers or people that are willing to sacrifice their time and effort to help people in need.

Jamal Lewis, at the line in DCA-Big Shots action.

I’m glad I was able to take some time to help a family in need, because I know if I were in that same situation I would want somebody to help me. Many of the volunteer groups that have been working down there since the devastation predict the full recovery of New Orleans to take about 10-15 more years. I don’t know what your schedules are like but if you can, try to set aside a week to go down and help. Even if it doesn’t seem like you can spare a lot of time, the least bit helps and trust me the people of New Orleans will be very appreciative of your efforts.

After being gone for a week, I was anxious to get back on the court and since then my DC Assault has competed in four tournaments. The first one was the Playaz tournament in New Jersey, where we went 3-1 and lost to Long Island Lightning in the semis. The next one was the DC Assault tournament here in MD, where we lost to Fairfax Stars in the first round. Then we went 4-1 at the Pitt Jam Fest in Pittsburgh, losing to All-Ohio Red in the quarter-finals. Our last tournament of the month was King James Classic in Ohio, which proved to be our best showing yet as we made it to the final game but, unfortunately, we lost to All-Ohio Red again.

Although we started the AAU season off slow, we got better each weekend and if we continue to get better, in the end we’ll have won multiple tournament championships. Our next tournament will be the Bob Gibbons tournament in North Carolina, which is one of the biggest spring AAU tournaments in the country. Hopefully this will be our first or many championships won.

April was also a tough time since I had to prepare for my AP exams in Environmental Science and Chemistry. This past week I took my exam in Chemistry and it might’ve been the hardest exam I’ve ever taken, but hopefully I’ve prepared well enough to get a five, which is the highest possible score. My Environmental exam isn’t until May 18th, so I’m trying to prepare for that now. After that exam, I’ll only have three classes to worry about which will be a lot easier than having five.

Then end of school for me is about a month away and I can’t wait because for me summer means nothing but basketball. The summer also means I’m getting closer to making my college decision, which I can already tell will be a hard one. Thanks for reading my diary and look for my next one in 3 weeks.