Summer Sharing: ‘The East and West in Me’

So far this summer, in Summer Sharing sessions after church, Barbara MacGuigan has spoken on her anthropology adventure, and Paul Manulik and Lindsay Diehl have told about their music mission to Haiti.

Summer Sharing continues with Jamileh “Jamie” Gerber on Sunday, August 14 at 11:15 a.m.in Fellowship Hall. Born in Iran, Jamie has worked around the world from Tehran to Trenton, from South Carolina to Spain.

Jamie grew up as a Christian in Iran, where most of the people, including her 2016 august jamie headshotgrandparents, were Muslims. In the early 1930s her father was befriended by Christian missionaries who arranged for his eye disease to be treated in Tehran. “It was his Damascus moment,” says Jamie. She remembers that, following the teachings of Jesus, he brought people into their home from all backgrounds and religions.

Jamie went to college in Beirut and worked in the royal palace, leaving Iran for a year to earn a master’s degree in instructional technology from Indiana University. One of her favorite jobs at UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) was to help newly literate rural farmers read how to improve their agricultural methods. In 1979 she and her family survived the revolution. Jamie moved with her husband and two children to a Spanish fishing village on the Mediterranean Sea, and she found work teaching in an international school.

When Jamie moved to Princeton in 1983, she joined our church. She earned her Master of Library Service at Rutgers and worked at the Princeton University Library and at the state labor department. Then she left town to be an associate professor at Bloomfield College. Remembering Princeton and PUMC fondly, she moved back here and rejoined the church this spring.  Her topic: “The East and the West in Me.”