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Childhood accident led to passion to serve

By Nancy Barthel
Compass Correspondent

As a religious education teacher at St. Bernard School in Green Bay, Jamie Delikowski said he wants to teach the sixth, seventh and eighth graders lessons that will take them through life in meaningful, faith-filled ways.

Delikowski, 34, who is just a dissertation away from a doctorate, said he "always" wanted to be a teacher. And by "fourth grade, maybe younger" had developed his love for the church and "the sense of being more spiritually awake than others around me."

Perhaps the challenges he faced early in life had something to do with that. One November day when Delikowski was seven, while harvesting corn with his father and siblings on the family's dairy farm in Galloway, just south of Wittenberg, his coat got caught in the power take-off shaft.

Ultimately, his arm was caught all the way to the shoulder and his leg was crushed. Fortunately, he said, "Your body goes into shock and you forget everything."

So began the odyssey that eventually brought Jamie Delikowski to teaching at St. Bernard School and Silver Lake College in Manitowoc in conjunction with the Green Bay Diocese's adult religious education programming.

The move to this area three years ago also led him to get a new hi-tech prosthetic through a partnership with Green Bay's Monroe Prosthetics and Orthotics.

Previously, Delikowski had used a prosthetic device only briefly because he had found them to be heavy and useless. Besides, he said, he had adapted well to living with one arm. He remembers asking his mother to open a ketchup bottle shortly after he returned home from Shriners Hospital. Figure it out for yourself, she said.

Besides learning to open bottles, he coaxed his parents into sending him to a boarding school; he played sports, including going to the state championship as a butterfly swimmer; and he attended some of the best colleges in the country.

Delikowski has degrees in philosophy from Reed College in Portland, Ore., and religious studies from George Fox College in Newberg, Ore. He looked into religious life at Our Lady of Guadalupe Trappist Abbey in Lafayette, Ore., before earning a master in religion from Yale University, and later a master's in philosophy from the University of Nebraska, where he has completed course work for a doctorate.

While living in Oregon, a friend suggested he meet this school teacher from Wisconsin, who was working in the area. It took three years for them to catch up for that first cup of coffee, but "within a few months, we were engaged," Delikowski said.

He and Dorey have been married five years and have two children, Joelle, 2½, and Seth, six months. It was that change from bachelor to husband and father that led to his desire to do some things more easily as a parent and husband which prompted him to discover how prosthetic technology had developed.

"The classic thing he wanted to do was to hang a picture," said David Jolly, chief executive officer of Monroe Prosthetics.

Delikowski, who has a shoulder blade, but no shoulder joint, provided a great opportunity to use innovative new technology. "We don't see this very often," said Jolly, a certified prosthetist and a fellow of the American Academy of Orthotists and Prosthetists.

Delikowski and Monroe Prosthetics teamed up for six months in 2006 to develop a personalized electronic prosthetic arm costing $80,000. "No two are alike," Jolly said.

"They were so careful to build it precisely for me, and that was really cool," said Delikowski, who described it as a tool that he uses when it's appropriate - perhaps four times a week, though most of the time it's not a necessity.

Jolly said Delikowski was very capable before the new prosthetic, "but this provides him with the tool to augment things that he wouldn't be able to do without it."

The loss of his arm offers many teaching moments for students at St. Bernard School.

On the first day of class Delikowski tells students: "I'm missing an arm, let's talk about it," His sixth through eighth grade students get a lesson in overcoming challenges. Quickly the students forget he doesn't have an arm, he said, and that means, he continued, "You're getting to know me."

Delikowski said he also uses it as a lesson that we're all different and it's OK to celebrate our diversity.

Recently he was asked to talk to a preschool class where one student didn't want to play with another one because of the way that student was dressed. He said he asked one of his African-American eighth grade students to come to the classroom with him.

Delikowski said he asked the pre-school students, "Do you like ice cream?" After they said "yes," he asked if they would want vanilla ice cream every day or would they want different ice creams. After they said "different ice creams," he asked them: "Do you want all your friends to be completely different?"

"Different is better," he said he told the students. "Sometimes we can use (diversity) to help people and that's not a bad thing."

Delikowski said the job at St. Bernard has "been a good doorway into what I think is a really strong and healthy diocese and a chance to serve God."

He said a desire to get closer to home is what led them to Wisconsin. His mother-in-law saw the ad for a religious education teacher at St. Bernard. When he was offered the job, Delikowski said he remembers thinking, "This has a good feel. I'll try it."

"I'm excited about serving the Diocese of Green Bay ... I just love teaching," he said.

As for that accident he had as a seven-year-old, Delikowski said he can't imagine what his life would have been like if it hadn't happened. "It certainly has afforded me a lot of opportunities." While his life would have been "great" without the accident, Delikowski said, it instilled in him "a passion to serve God."