Agency Spotlight:

 Change is inevitable. Sometimes we don’t embrace or want to see change happen. In this case I think we can all agree that change was for the good. Our friends at United Way have been blessed and that’s good news for our community.  Please take a moment to read the encouraging and thankful words on what’s been happening within our White County’s United Way from our Executive Director, Nickie Jenkinson.

United way – new home, new neighbors – same giving spirit by Nikie Jenkinson

We at White County United Way (WCUW) are so honored and humbled to be stewards of the beautiful facility once known as Lakeview Commons on Tioga Road, which was once a great comfort to our elders in their golden years and will soon primarily house community members on the other end of the spectrum of age. The Boys and Girls Club of White County (BGCWC) will bring youthful vibrancy to the majority of the space, with the easternmost wing acting as a new community center for the public to treasure. The sky is the limit with the ways the community center can benefit our neighbors, like providing areas for meetings, studying, conferences, and celebrations. The facility is a testament to the strong partnerships among nonprofits, government, and private entities in our close-knit community. On our Day of Caring to prepare the building for BGCWC occupancy, over 50 people, representing more than a dozen local and regional organizations, pitched in to clean windows, move furniture, and pull weeds in anticipation of the first student day on September 7, 2021. In addition to helping coordinate and register volunteers, WCUW was working in the background to handle the business and paperwork of moving buildings, as well as finding partners to share more of the space.

One such partner, already serving White County, is Bauer Family Resources. After renovations are complete, their Head Start program will join us at the new community center, serving pre-school aged children in all-day learning. They also serve families with their Community Partners program, which meets the needs of families with children who may not have access to the resources they need. As more agencies join our cooperative space, our organizational needs will grow. We are delighted that LightStream of Buffalo has offered to showcase their fiber-optic internet and digital services in the new community center. What their donations truly showcase, however, is the power of community and the joy of being involved in an ever-changing, ever-growing network of neighbors. Working together to serve one another and meet individual needs is a cornerstone of the philosophy of the community center. Together, our neighbors have helped us secure a new building, and together, we will make this building a home. Serving White County with the community center is an opportunity to wrap our neighbors in gratitude and appreciation, and it’s how we at WCUW LIVE UNITED.

Thank you,                           

Nikie Jenkinson                                            

https://www.whitecountyunitedway.org/about.html

The post Agency Spotlight: White County United Way of Monticello appeared first on Harmon Insurance.

MISS BETH AND SMALL TOWN LIVING

Chris and Beth at Monticello Family Express

Our small town Family Express – just proved to me why small-town living is the only way for me…

A few weeks ago, I was having “one of those” days. I over scheduled myself and was hopping from one meeting or appointment to the next all day. I had also agreed to fill in and help with a kid’s Jiu-Jitsu class right after work. Having skipped my normal lunch hour, and knowing I wouldn’t be home for dinner until around 9pm, I knew I had to go get a bite to eat and save the kids from seeing me in my hangry state of mind. I rushed from my office at about three in the afternoon for a grab-n-go type lunch from Family Express. As I approached the counter with all my goodies in hand, I realized my wallet was left on my desk back at the office. The clerk, who I came to find out is named Beth, from behind the counter, saw my disappointed expression and asked me what was the matter. I told her I had forgotten my wallet and had no cash on me, none whatsoever. She smiled and beckoned me to be rung up anyway. She said I could come back later to pay. Reluctantly, and humbly I accepted; it was, of course, the kids I was thinking of and trying to shield them from the effects of my hangriness they would encounter in just a matter of hours. When I returned the store later that evening to pay, I asked Beth why she made that offer to me. I’m not in there all that often and I know she did not know me personally. She simply replied, “Because this is Family Express, and we love our community”. Yes, Monticello is small town, I’m proud of our small town with local businesses filled with great people. I know there is no other way for me.

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Rain is better than Snow, Right Doug?

To these groups I want to say “thank you”. Your leadership and stewardship in Monticello is appreciated many times over by people, who at times, don’t even know how good things seem to just keep happening. To everyone who played golf, bought tickets, sponsored holes, donated and promoted, your contributions make events like this not only possible but successful. It’s likely that I cannot name all the volunteers who gave the many hours it took to put on this event. There are a few I’m aware of their involvement and there are several who tirelessly gave of themselves quietly and behind the scenes. To all the volunteers, please know you are appreciated.

This winter when the crews go out and decorate the city streets for the Christmas Season they will have better working lights and even more lights to hang because our community came together and raised over $10,000 during the Christmas in July Golf Outing. I can’t wait to see the display and know how great the community spirit is in and around Monticello. What a great place to call home.

The post Agency Spotlight: Monticello, The Community That Cares appeared first on Harmon Insurance.

May God Bless and keep all our fallen heroes, their families, and those still serving.

The post AGENCY SPOTLIGHT: OUR HEROES appeared first on Harmon Insurance.

She was born Ludmila Dubovsky on May 5, 1944, in a Nazi labor camp in Poland.

Her conception, birth, and early childhood, against all odds, took place amidst the atrocities of the deadliest theater of war in history, during the height of the Holocaust.

By her 16th birthday party, in 1960, she was a typical American teenager in Lincoln, Neb., who wanted to listen to the Everly Brothers instead of her father’s Russian polkas, to Elvis instead of her mother’s “war stories.”

But at age 64, Lucy realizes that her parents’ struggles, their sacrifices – and their ultimate survival – are testaments to freedom, faith, and the strength of the human spirit.

Her parents, both originally from the Eastern European country of Belarus, met during the summer of 1943, after tragic circumstances found them both prisoners of war in a Nazi labor camp in Poland, near the border of their home country.

In the chaotic place and times of the Eastern Front of World War II, while the German Reich and the Soviet Union desecrated central and Eastern Europe, both had lost their spouse.

Both had lost their children.

Both had lost their country.

But neither had lost hope.

“My mother appeared in this camp,” Lucy said. “My father learned she was a fellow country person and he told her, ‘We need to be together, and somehow we need to get out of this.'”

Prior to the war, and prior to meeting each other, Lucy’s mother had been a dental surgeon, her father a math teacher.

Both raised Catholic, they had grown up in Belarus prior to World War II, under the communist rule of the Soviet Union, during a time when their families prayed secretly, when villagers’ livestock was taken from them and placed in community farms.

“They would go to the individual farms and take their cows, pigs, chickens,” she says of the Soviet soldiers. “It was their livelihood, their cheese, milk, butter, eggs.

“The women would go and steal their cows back at night – they knew which ones were their cows – and then the soldiers would come and take the cows back and tell them, ‘if you take your cow, we’re going to come and take your husband and you’ll never see him again.’ It was a way to put fear into people.

“They have been under somebody’s thumb for centuries and centuries,” Lucy says of the Belorussians.

Prior to the 1917 Russian Revolution, Belorussia fell under the reign of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. Following the abdication and execution of the tsar and his family, the Romanovs, Vladimir Lenin gained control of what would become the Soviet Union, and Belorussia became the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic.

“My father used to say, ‘The czar wasn’t the greatest, but at least we could have our own cow,'” Lucy says.

Following Lenin’s death in 1924, Joseph Stalin gradually consolidated power and became dictator of the Soviet Union.

It was during this era, the mid 1930s, when Lucy’s parents, Bronislav and Maria, who did not yet know each other, began the separate journeys that led to their fateful union.

Lucy’s father taught sixth-grade math in a school where Stalin’s portrait hung in every room, during a time when Bronislav refused to join the communist party.

“Somebody defaced one of the pictures,” Lucy says. “My father was blamed for it, and he was arrested. They interrogated him for 10 days trying to get him, through sleep deprivation, to sign a confession.”

He wouldn’t sign a confession, nor would he join the communist party – nor take the bait of a revolver left on a desk within his reach – so he was exiled, put on a train and sent more than 700 miles away to work long hours and hard labor in a brick factory. A year later, his wife and their two children were allowed to join him.

He was soon drafted into the Russian army and sent to Spaask, on the Sea of Japan, where he spent three months training as a surveyor. In March of 1941, after returning and serving on the front lines of the European theater of World War II, he was captured by the Germans. He never saw his wife and children again.

“He had to walk 60 miles, with no food, no water,” Lucy says. “The women would put water out for the soldiers and the Nazis would kick the buckets over.

“He was in prison for quite a while, in a cell with 15 men. They all had lice. There was only a bucket to urinate and eliminate in. They slept on the floor, and if one man turned, everyone had to turn. It was that cramped.

“My father was a wonderful baritone, and he used to sing old Russian folk songs,” Lucy says. “The commander heard him singing and asked the guards, ‘Who’s singing?’ The guards told him it was ‘one of those Russians.’

“The German commander loved Russian music, and he told my father, ‘I’ll give you some food if you’ll come sing and translate for me.’

“There was this mass of people from all of these different countries, and my father spoke Russian, German, Polish, Belorussian, Czechoslovakian and Ukrainian.

“Music was something that saved my father’s life, music and the fact that he was bilingual. I think it was God’s way of saving my father.

“Music is a huge part of my life,” Lucy says. “During hard times, I sit at the piano and pound out a song and cry. It gives me solace.

Lucy’s mother, Maria, was educated in Minsk as a dental surgeon. She married in 1937 and worked in a clinic. Then the war broke out and she was drafted into the Russian Army, as was her husband.

In 1939, two hours late reporting for duty because he was telling his pregnant wife goodbye, her husband was arrested for being late and was sent to Siberia.

“She never saw him again,” Lucy says.

“Siberia covers a large part of Russia. The winters are very cold, and they did very long, hard labor in the camps,” she said. “Most people sent to Siberia died there. If they didn’t die, they either came back insane or very, very ill.”

In December 1939, while World War II raged around her, Lucy’s mother gave birth to a son in a hospital in the Minsk area of Belarus.

“The hospital was bombed as she was giving birth,” Lucy says. “They lost electricity, and they couldn’t keep the baby warm. He got pneumonia and died.

“At that point, my mother wanted to die. She felt absolutely, totally hopeless. She had lost her husband. She had lost her child.

“She went to her father, and he told her, ‘You cannot give up hope. No matter how bad things get, God is still in control.’

“His faith was still there. They never stopped praying. God was still central in their lives.

“He told her not to lose hope. That was the only thing left, hope.”

After her husband’s exile and her newborn son’s death, Maria returned to duty with the Russian army. In 1943, she was captured by the Germans and taken to the same Nazi labor camp where Bronislav was being fed just enough to stay alive in exchange for his singing and translating.

“The camp they were in wasn’t far from the camp were the Jews were held,” Lucy says. “They could smell the incinerators when they were burning bodies.”

Unable to officially marry in the Nazi labor camp, Maria and Bronislav vowed upon their own common law marriage. Shortly after Lucy’s birth, the Russian army came into the labor camp, and they were released.

“They hid and lived in the woods,” Lucy says. “They hid from the Russians and the Germans both. At this point, they had no country. The Russians now considered my father a traitor because he had ‘worked’ for the Germans.

“There were about 16 people living together in the woods,” she says.

“They lived on berries, mushrooms, roots. My mother said she stole two eggs one time and split them between 16 people.

“They lived in the woods for three months during the summer of 1944 in western Poland.

“They got hold of a wagon, and they got hold of a horse. They figured their best chance was to get to Berlin, so they headed west by the sun.”

At one point, Lucy says, both of her parents thought the other had put baby Lucy in the wagon, only to realize in a panic that she had been left behind about 30 minutes earlier.

“They had to turn around and go back,” Lucy says. “I was still lying in the woods.”

Sometime during this chaotic time, Lucy says, her parents were on a train with other prisoners being transported.

She and her mother were in one car with women and children, her father in another car with men.

“The train was being attacked,” Lucy says. “The doors were locked from the outside. My mother took her boots off and broke out a window. She wrapped me in a blanket and tied her belt around me. The train was moving very slowly by that point, so she used the belt to lower me so I didn’t fall too far, and she threw me out the window.

“She jumped out the window, ran back, picked me up, and ran into the woods.

When Maria looked back at the train, it was burning.

Lucy’s father and the men in his car had broken out a window also, and the reunited family finally made it to Berlin in November 1944, when Lucy was six months old.

In Berlin, they pretended to be German. Bronislav spoke German. Maria did not speak.

“Her accent would have given her away,” Lucy says.

They lived in bombed out buildings and ran for the subway when the bomb sirens went off.

“When the sirens would go off, my mother would tie me to her waist and run,” Lucy says.

“One day there had been six raids. My mother was so tired. She got to the subway, and there was no Lucy. She had lost me between the bombed building and the subway. ”

Frantic and crying, Maria tried to leave the subway to go back for Lucy, but the soldiers, who said the baby had most likely been trampled, wouldn’t let her leave.

“Then the door opened and a German soldier walked in. He was carrying me. Mother knew at that moment that she was going to survive the war.”

The soldier had found Lucy in a three-foot snow bank after hearing her crying, cold and wet, but alive.

Maria’s faith did not fail her. The war did end, and she and her second family did survive.

They found an abandoned home in the Alps in southern Germany and they made their plan.

“When the war ended, all of the refugees were being moved out of Berlin,” she says. “They came looking for the Russians. They were going to send them back to be repatriated.” But the Polish, she says, they left alone.

So they became Polish.

They changed their names and, tutored by a Polish friend, they learned about a village in Poland: the names of the schools, the layout of the village.

“They made fake birth certificates and made seals out of cheese,” Lucy says.

They ended up in a camp outside of Munich with 5,000 other refugees. It is there that Lucy’s earliest memories begin.

“They found out my mother was a dentist and asked her if she would like some equipment. They tested her knowledge, and they got her a drill and chair and all she needed to do dental work. She taught my dad how to make false teeth.

“I would sit and watch her,” Lucy says.

“She would stick one knee on somebody’s lap and be yanking that tooth out. There was no Novocain, and people would be screaming.

“If you think about all she had to deal with: these people had had no medical or dental care for years. ”

Meanwhile, Lucy had not learned to walk. She cried all of the time, and Maria and Bronislav learned that she had a dislocated hip.

“I don’t know if it happened when I was thrown off the train, dropped in the snow bank, or whether it happened during childbirth,” she says.

The surgeries began at age 4, and she spent three years in and out of hospitals, in body casts and braces. “They were told it was possible I might not survive, but they took a chance and trusted God.” Lucy survived and learned to walk.

In 1950, her brother was born. In December of 1951, after years of applying for and being denied immigration, the family made the two-week trip across the Atlantic and arrived safely in New York City just days before Christmas.

Their yearning for countryside, for a garden, led them to Nebraska, where her father found work with a railroad and her mother did odd jobs.

“My father didn’t care that he had to go into a freight car and strip it and sand it in the 105-degree heat because he knew that when he walked out of there he could speak his mind. He could read the bible.

“He knew how important freedom was because he had it taken away.”

By Sue Erb

Nov 23, 2008

*Article written by Sue and printed in the Herald Journal Newspaper

The post White County’s Living History: A miracle of faith appeared first on Harmon Insurance.

Not being able to physically meet with all our clients is new; however, we are actually a bit used to not knowing quite a few of your “faces” but instead we are used to knowing you by your voices, just like our own family members.  I like to think it is a part of our job to care and know a little about each one of you if at all possible. We are asking you to trust us with insuring your most valuable items and often times your loved ones, we should know you! Sometimes, as in the most recent conversations with Mrs. Ludmila (Dubovsky) Jacob, these conversations are like talking to someone you have know for years. Many times in my life I have known that I am supposed to have come into contact with certain individuals. Ludmila will be one of the most soul touching of anyone I have ever met, and I have not yet had the honor of physically meeting her. Her words, her story, her heart, her love, and her humanity for even the most horrific people and events of all times is humbling – AND THIS IS WHERE LUDMILA’S MIRACULOUS STORY BEGINS UNFOLDING…If I told you Ludmila was born in 1944 in Poland, your first thought might be that she was born during WWII in Europe and what a scary time that must have been. You would be close. Ludmila was not just born during the war, she was actually born in a Nazi labor camp in Poland. The camp she was born into wasn’t far from were the Jews were held. The prisoners at this camp could actually smell the incinerators when the bodies were being burnt. Unfathomable.  Today as she reflects back over the years and at the bravery her parents exhibited throughout their lives with the “unwavering determination that we would survive.” She tells people she who she is today due to witnessing her parents, “resolve to never, never give up and find a way through each challenge life gives.  So I say to you:  look for the positive, be joyful in the little things, show love to those around you, hug your children and tell them you LOVE them. God loves each and every human being he has created.  Even those we find difficult to love.  Do not let this pandemic dictate how you live.  Be a beacon to those around you.” Lucy, as she goes by today, reminds us that yes, things may be bad right now and sometimes even as if we have no control over certain things in our lives,  but we have choices and can get through anything. Lucy  has shared with me a few articles that give specific accounts of the atrocities that she and her parents lived through. You may click on the links to read her stories – I highly recommend you do and share these with everyone you know. These are stories we all need to remember, to be aware victims like Lucy are right in our own backyards, and to be brave enough to stand up for what is right and good even when it is hard. It just takes us to be like Lucy-loving all humankind, no matter how extremely difficult it can be.

https://www.harmoninsnow.com/white-countys-living-history-a-miracle-of-faith/

https://www.harmoninsnow.com/lifes-challenges-by-lucy-jacob/ ‎

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It is normally hard for me to wish away a year. You may be thinking I am leading up to a spiel about COVID, but not so. All my life I knew my path was to be a wife and mom. Thankfully, I have been blessed to do that.  I have also been blessed to get a nursing degree (thanks Mom and Dad) that has helped me more than we would have even expected in my role as a parent. You see, starting about a decade ago, three of our four children became very ill. It has taken scores of doctors, specialists, emergency rooms visits, specialty hospitals, alternative medical professionals, hundreds of trials medications and suppositions, and thousands of tears to get to the point where we are just as of this month. We have, we hope, just hurdled another milestone. Many of you may have seen our daughter’s picture in one of our previous newsletter. Molly. Miss Molly is what seems to be her tag name for all who come across her.  It just seems to fit.  Molly has been sick since the second grade. She is now a junior in high-school. As I write this, while beaming with pride and welling with tears, she is recovering from a surgery she had at The Mayo Clinic in Rochester Minnesota.  Yes, that Mayo Clinic.  The word renowned hospital. The hospital that has treated Prime Ministers and Sheiks and Dignitaries to the peons like you and I. The long and the short of it: Molly has a form of untreatable/curable chronic pain and was just given a new diagnosis to which she underwent a ground breaking surgery in which she became the 10th child-recipient to receive it world-wide.  Scared, a gift, momentous, life-changing, and so many other words could be used to describe what she and we, as parents, felt going into this surgery.  Now, as we have witnessed her recovery and have been able to hug our daughter for the first time in years, my words are more of an emotions: thankful, joy, the validation that God put us in the right place, in the right hands, all these years. Molly just went out for a mile run with a few of her cross country buddies. Most of her friends didn’t even know that she suffered from her ailments until she was out of school for 2 months and came back with 2 – 4 inch incisions on either side of her torso. She has always just soldiered on; knowing this is her cross to bear. I have challenged my Sunday School class to find someone to look up to this year. Someone to admire not for the wealth that someone has or the songs they sing nor the star athlete that they watch. Instead I would would say those individuals like the Molly’s of the world  e who do not make a fanfare of themselves but instead make it about others. Molly ran cross country to try to make her body stronger and was always last on the team to come in.  If you have ever been to a race, coming in last is very humbling; everyone knows you are last. Molly used to be one the fastest out there when she was healthy. She knows the difference. Yet, Molly did not say a word to why she was last nor ever gave an excuse. What you did see was Molly cheering on every team mate at every race who ran past her and would be at each start and finish line for all the other runners. Let us face this year looking to what we have, not what we don’t have.  I would like for each person reading this to remember  that  we can not all do great things but more so to do small things with great love (do you know this famous quote I paraphrased a bit) then help someone else to do the same and so on and so forth. Can you imagine, in the end, the expanse of so many doing good in this world and how much further reaching it would be compared to looking to just a handful doing a few great things? 

We wish everyone the very best of 2021!

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