Xiu Ying Kueh

Singapore

We should be like all the beautiful colorful flowers of one garden.'

My name is Xiu Ying Kueh and I'm eleven and a half years old. I'm from Singapore, which is in southeast Asia. I've been in Israel for two and a half years. I go to a Hebrew school in Haifa. At the beginning it was difficult to learn Hebrew, but I've got a lot of help from tutors and friends in my class, and I soon got used to it. I speak Hebrew, English, and Chinese. At home, my mother speaks English to me, and my father and I try to speak Mandarin.

The Bahá'ís in Singapore come from Chinese, Indian, and Malaysian backgrounds. They are very active, and they are very conscious of the environment, so they plan activities such as helping to clean the beaches, helping to recycle paper, and other things. Bahá'ís think it is important to protect the environment. If there were no more trees or plants, we couldn't live. Bahá'u'lláh tells us we should take care of this world.

I am really attracted to the Bahá'í teaching about universal peace . Nowadays we see in the news that the world is suffering so much and people are being killed by the fighting in the wars, and I think it will be a much better place if we all live together in peace, and if we work together it will come about. I think people fight each other and there are so many wars because they all believe in different faiths and religions and they think differently and they think that what they think is right and what other people think is wrong.

The religions are all kind of the same. They all believe in one God, and they all believe in praying, they all believe in fasting. But they're different culturally.

I think it is important that the different cultures come together and begin to understand each other. Here at the Bahá'í World Centre it has been good to meet all the different Bahá'ís. The Bahá'ís all over the world don't fight or do war. They live in peace. They help each other, and they don't look at the skin of other people. They treat people the same. There is lots of love between the Bahá'ís.

I think that we should not fight and that we should live together, like different races, different religions, and we should help one another. We should be like all the beautiful colorful flowers of one garden, the waves of one sea, the leaves of one tree.

People can start loving each other. Bahá'u'lláh's teachings are from God. When people investigate the Bahá'í Faith and they start to believe in it and they become Bahá'ís, they stop fighting. I think that people should follow Bahá'u'lláh's teachings and not fight and live together in peace.