About JUC
JUC is proud to say that they are the biggest accredited evangelical Christian school of higher learning in Israel, and the whole Middle East for that matter. Right now, they are not so big. Because of recent events, few of which occurred in Jerusalem, attendance has gone way down, with the school actually completely closing a few semesters back. Now there are a total of 20 students, with 13 of that 20 living on-campus. Classes that used to have 70 students per semester are now lucky to have 10 a year. But we don't mind. The small numbers make the school feel spacious and quiet, and it makes field trips so much more manageable.
JUC has never had a very large endowment, and now that attendance is down, the school is having a hard time financially. There is no longer a full time librarian, cook, gardener, counselor, or housekeeper. Rachel and I have small on-campus jobs that attempts to fill in some of those gaps, but the school can only afford to pay for a total of 16 hours a week, and that's at less than US minimum wage.
The greatest needs are:
- Money. The school pays merchants in Jordan for the food they buy about three months after the purchase date. Which is not highly unusual in the Middle East, but they would love to get caught up in order to ensure continued goodwill with the community.
- Computers. There are about five desktops on campus, which the thirteen of us can share rather nicely, but the network is slow, and many of the computers are running on old software, if they are not almost completely disabled by various bugs. New machines, software, or accessories (scanners, speakers, disk drives, etc.) would be greatly appreciated.
- Library acquisitions. The library has about 10,000 volumes, which may seem like a lot, but for a graduate school it is very small, especially because it serves the entire evangelical Christian community in Jerusalem. Also, many of the volumes are old, worn, and out of date. Because of funding problems the monies for new books and journal subscriptions has been drastically reduced. New books, even if they are slightly worn or a few years old would be greatly appreciated.
If you have any things that you would like to donate, especially books, Rachel and Sarah can get them from you at Christmas time and take them back to Israel in our luggage so there will be no shipping cost (we won't have much of our own luggage to take back in January because we can leave our stuff here over break). So please talk to any book publishers or companies you know of and see if they would like to donate anything as an end of the year tax write-off. If you have any leads, just email Sarah and she will be able to have the school administrators give an official receipt.
Click here for the needs as listed on the JUC website
