‘Just tell me I can’t’
Bungee jump inspires Rosicky to face fears

By KRISTA J. KARCH
Observer-Dispatch

Tell Julie Gilbert Rosicky that she can’t do something, and watch her go.

It wasn’t always like this, she said. Her newfound confidence has a lot to do with a 180-meter drop, which she toured up close and personal this spring while attached to a bungee cord. In South Africa.

“After the bungee jump, just tell me I can’t,” Rosicky, 35, said.

Rosicky, director of multicultural services at the Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees, read about the
jump in a guidebook while preparing for a month-long exchange program through Rotary International, and thought, no way.

That’s just crazy, she thought. And the purpose of the trip was a cultural exchange, to visit her South African non-profit counterparts in action. It wasn’t an extreme sports tour.

But plans change. And if Rosicky’s life so far is any indication, she should have anticipated the unexpected.

“Oh, that’s a funny story,” Rosicky, often says when asked about how she made her way from Oregon to Central New York.

She grew up in Massachusetts, but headed out West for
college. She was living in Colorado when a last-minute change in plans sent John Rosicky to a conference she attended in San Diego. They exchanged e-mail addresses — a cutting-edge technology at the time.

“Why not?” John Rosicky told her then. “It’s not like we’re going to get married.”

Six months later, they were engaged, and off to “the good life” in Eugene, Ore., she said.

Three years later, John Rosicky accepted a professorship at Mohawk Valley Community College.

“It was supposed to be temporary — five years at the most,” Rosicky said.

But Uticans were thrilled to have a young couple from the West Coast in their midst, and it showed.

“We got such an amazingly warm welcome,” she said. “We were invited to people’s houses all the time. I’ve never been welcome to a place like that.”

Under Rosicky’s direction, the Peacemaker Program grew from a faltering non-profit on the verge of going under to a
respected advocacy program designed to provide alternatives to the court system and teach skills and create opportunities for youth.

Since she began at the Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees last spring, she has overseen unprecedented changes in the center’s offerings for non-refugee immigrants and interpreting services for speakers of other languages throughout the community.

Even after all that, it took a bungee cord to convince Rosicky of her own potential.

“That trip has given me more inspiration than anything I’ve ever done in my life,” she said. “You can go anywhere and
do anything you want, even if it’s scary or you’ll have to leave your home for a period of time, and even if it’s dangerous.”

For Rosicky, it wasn’t the bungee cord that was the obstacle, it was herself.

“One of my greatest accomplishments was overcoming the fear to do something this amazing,” she said.