20 Free Wedding Dresses?

Today was an awesome day. It started out with a two hour Old Testament class, but our midday class got canceled so we got some free time! On Sunday we went to the post office where we met a very interesting man named Ibrahim. (Mom and dad, maybe you should just skip over the next few paragraphs....) He invited us over to his house to come and talk to him more, so today we took him up on that offer. We called him and twelve of us went to his house to learn more about Ibrahim and his family. It was really cool to go into a different part of town than I'm used to. We were walking through the Arab neighborhoods just as school was getting out so there were a lot of children in the streets, all of them said hello to us and waved. I really enjoyed seeing the real part of East Jerusalem, the homes and the people, rather than just the Old City.


Ibrahim, leading the way


Turns out Ibrahim is an awesome guy! He has lived on the Mount of Olives his whole life but travels the world. He said that he travels out of the country at least once a month. The address he first gave to us to meet him at was a house he owned where he let people stay for free when they were visiting the Holy Land. When we asked him how many people were there right now he said that 17 people were living in that house. On the walls in his living room were pictures of him in the United States, Holland, Russia, and many more places. He also had newspaper clippings of him and important people taped on his walls. He had books laying around his coffee table, and he told me that one of them (it was in Korean) was a biography about him. (To learn more about Ibrahim go to www.jerusalempeacemaker.org/ibrahim).


Us at Ibrahim's house


Ibrihim is a peace activist and travels around the world to petition for peace in the Holy Land. He has been to the White House and at the end of this summer he is coming to Utah (again) and it has been arranged for him to meet with President Monson. He is invited all over the world to speak on peace in Israel and to share his side as the Palestinian.


Ibrahim showing us the view from his roof


When we met Ibrahim at the post office one of my friends asked him if he knew where any good wedding dress stores were in town. Ironically enough, he said that he had a business that made schools and gave supplies to the Bedouins in the West Bank who get no help from the Israeli government--along with supplies, he also happened to have about 20 free wedding dresses that he was dying to get rid of. So after we talked to Ibrahim in his "hostel" like house he took us to his home to meet his wife. Sure enough, right when we got there we saw all of the wedding dresses laying out on his front porch! Hilarious. So we decided to take all of them back (some are nice, some are ugly) and then figure out what to do with them. Conveniently enough Ibrahim had boxes ready for us to pack our dresses in (can you see how badly he wanted to get rid of them?) I think my favorite part was the guys' reaction when the girls decided we wanted all of them...we had walked quite a distance to get to Ibrahim's house and some guys were a little sketchy about carrying wedding dresses all the way back to the Jerusalem Center. Luckily Ibrahim called a taxi for us and so we got back home humiliation free.


Outside of Ibrahim's house, with our dresses


Loading up the dresses into the boxes


When we got back to the center we decided that we were going to wear these dresses to dinner. We had to sneak them into the building without anyone seeing them and we hid them in "The Dan Jones", aka the student lounge area. After our classes we all met and put on our dresses, the girls picked out the biggest, most obnoxious dresses of the bunch and the guys dressed up to be our escorts/grooms. We got a good reaction from everyone and it was actually really fun. We are pretty confident in saying that we made Jerusalem Center history tonight. Pretty confident, indeed.


Eating dinner at the Oasis


Photo Shoot