Bear Rescue centre

Day 2

luang prabang

Pesan Babah....

Seorang gadis kecil bertanya kepada ayahnya, "Ayah ceritakanlah padaku perihal muslimah yang sejati?"

Si ayah pun menolehkan mukanya seraya melontarkan senyuman manisnya ke arah anak kecilnya itu.

"Anakku...Seorang muslimah yang sejati bukanlah dilihat dari kecantikan dan keayuan paras wajahnya semata-mata. Wajahnya hanyalah satu peranan yang teramat kecil sahaja. Tetapi, muslimah yang sejati dilihat dari kecantikan dan ketulusan hatinya yang tersembunyi. Itulah yang terbaik."

Allah tidak melihat kepada tubuh kalian dan tidak pula kepada bentuk kalian. Allah hanya melihat kepada hati dan perbuatan kalian. (Hadis riwayat Muslim)


Babah sampaikan ajaran al-Quran dalam Surah Luqman: ayat 14 - 19.

14. Nabi Luqman as berkata kepada anak-anaknya, "Wahai anakda, janganlah kamu mempersekutukan Allah. Sesungguhnya mempersekutukan Allah adalah suatu kezaliman besar pada dirimu," dan

15. Firman Allah "Aku perintahkan manusia supaya berbuat baik kepada ayahda dan bonda mereka. Bonda kamu mengandungkan kamu, beban kandungannya semakin hari semakin bertambah berat, dan kemudian menyusui kamu selama dua tahun. Bersyukurlah kamu kepada Aku dan kepada kedua ayahda dan bonda kamu. Hanya kepada Akulah kamu kembali."

16. Nabi Luqman as berkata, "Wahai anakda, apabila ada sesuatu perbuatan baik anakda seberat biji sawi sekalipun, dan walaupun ia berada di dalam batu, atau di atas langit, atau di dalam bumi, nescaya Allah membalas kebaikan anakda itu. Ini adalah kerana Allah itu Maha Halus lagi Maha Mengetahui.

17. "Wahai anakda, dirikanlah solat, dan suruhlah manusia mengerjakan yang baik, dan cegahlah mereka daripada melakukan perbuatan mungkar. Dan bersabarlah anakda terhadap apa kesusahan yang menimpa anakda. Semuanya itu adalah perkara-perkara yang dirancangkan oleh Allah."

18. "Janganlah anakda sombong dan memandang hina kepada manusia lain. Dan janganlah anakda berjalan di atas muka bumi dengan angkuh. Allah tidak menyukai orang-orang sombong dan angkuh." Dan.

19. "Oleh sebab itu, sederhanakanlah perilaku anakda apabila berjalan di bumi Allah ini, dan lunakkanlah suaramu. Sesungguhnya seburuk-buruk suara adalah suara keldai."

My 1st attempt posting a blog entry on the move

Im now in a car on the way back home (Im not driving). Im trying to
see if this place supports mobile blogging. If this is so then Laos is
just as tech savvy as anywhere else.

--
Sent from my mobile device

Integrity is a matter of choice

In life, there are a lot of things that we do not have control or the right to choose. We cant choose where we should be born or the type of parents we have or the siblings that we grow up with. But I believe that we do have a choice when it comes to building our own character and be a person of integrity. We do have a choice if we want to be an honest person or a dishonest one. We do have a choice if we want to be a corruptible person or a man of integrity. But sad to say I have seen too many people who have made these bad choices. I wont go and relate to you some of my experiences at the Bureau. I could probably be spending hours writing on some of the interesting characters that my officers and I had come to deal with.

Take playing golf for instance, the game that I have begun to love. When you hit a ball out of bound, the rule says you must incur a penalty and return to where you last hit the ball. When you finished playing that particular hole you must write down your true score. Golf is a game where you are your own judge with a whole host of ethics and rules that you need to follow. In fact it's been said that golf is a gentleman's game because to be a gentleman there is a list of etiquette you must follow - honesty and integrity are on top of this list. Writing down your own score would certainly be a moment that would test your own character. You would have a choice of returning a true score or you could submit a lowered score. But many a time where I see true characters being shown in the golf courses. I would see players where they would improve the lie of their ball when the rules say they shouldn't as you must play the ball as it lies or declare it unplayable or I would see one who would declare someone's else ball as his when he knew his ball was lost. I had met a few who despite hitting so many strokes on a particular hole and declared a rather impressive score when they knew the score was much worse than that. These kind of people would do anything to win, even to cheat. Were these people born to cheat? I am very sure not. To cheat or to be honest is a matter of choice. There is nothing wrong to be fiercely competitive and to possess that killer instinct but to be a cheat or to bend rules so that you can have an unfair advantage over another is something quite different.

Our everyday life is no different. Often we are called to make choices. So it is really up to us. We can choose to be honest or we can choose to be like the golfing cheat. But one thing is for sure, if a golfer is known to be a cheat he will carry that reputation with him because that is the character that he wanted to show to other fellow golfers. It is our character that people see of us when you make choices. They can see you as a man of integrity or they can see you as a big cheat. It really is up to you on how you build your character and how you want people to see of you.

A revisit of history : one reason why I admire LKY

This article was first published in 1967 in the Harvard Crimson, the daily student newspaper of the Harvard University.

Lee Kuan Yew
Profile

By JOEL R. KRAMER,
Published: Monday, October 23, 1967

Lee Kuan Yew, prime minister of the city-state of Singapore, is a mayor who talks as though he may one day be a world statesman.

The 44-year-old prime minister is an imposing figure who gives the impression that he is both competent and sure of himself. He speaks with a mild British accent, but, before a Harvard audience, he frequently used American idioms and seemed to have read everything published in the United States--from daily newspapers to the texts of Presidential speeches.

Lee's Singapore is the fifth largest port city in the world. Though plagued by severe unemployment and racial problems, it still has the highest standard of living in Southeast Asia. The tiny country with a predominantly Chinese population is walled in by four Muslim nations. And co Lee must try to maintain Singapore's delicate relations with Malaysia, increase Singapore's trade with both Eastern and Western powers, and prevent a new wave of Communist uprisings in neighboring Southeast Asian nations.

His concern for the fate of Southeast Asia, fortified by his spectacular economic successes and his ambitious style, make Lee a potential international strongman. The prime minister has traveled around the world talking about the Vietnam war and other Southeast Asian affairs. "I've got a very deep interest," he explains, "in my own survival."

Lee reportedly told a Harvard audience Friday that he has no right to tell America or Americans what to do. But he also said that the United States could have sharply limited its Vietnam operation in 1954, 1956, or even 1961, but now it is too late. On those occasions, he thought, the United States could have "drawn a line west of Mekong and said it will defend no more than that."

Now, the prime minister believes, the United States owes it to the Thais in particular and Southeast Asia in general to maintain a "military shield" behind which South Vietnam can build industrially.

Lee thinks there's some point to buying time with a shield because he believes in the great-man theory of history. And the great man is none other than Lee Kuan Yew, who thinks that because of his own competence and shrewdness Singapore has succeeded where South Vietnam has failed. "If you can find the group of men who could do it," Lee said in Dunster, "Saigon can do what Singapore did." In fact, the prime minister boasted, "If one looked at Saigon and Singapore in 1954, one would have said Singapore was the goner, not Saigon."

Because he believes one great man makes the difference, Lee blames the Eisenhower administration for America's present dilemma, because Eisenhower "permitted Diem to systematically eliminate all alternatives to him." South Vietnam no longer had a pool of talent from which a hero-ruler might emerge. "You can't go talent-scouting for leaders like in a telephone directory," Lee points out; "the British didn't create me."

The British may not have created Lee, but they did provide him with a Cambridge education and later bolstered him when his political machine began to sputter. Lee was the head of the ruling People's Action Party, and in 1962, British officials decided his power was eroding so quickly that his three-year old nation left alone would soon become another Cuba. The British decided that the best way to preserve Lee's power over Communist obstructionists was to unite Singapore and Malaysia, an ideal for which Lee had been striving for a decade. With British support, such a federation was effected in 1963. It was unstable from the outset and dissolved two years later, but observers believe that Lee has emerged a stronger Asian figure as a result of the temporary coalition.

Lee's strength probably has derived, in part, from his shrewdness. At Dunster House, he was the complete politician--deftly dodging embarrassing questions about the absence of political opposition in Singapore, humbly reiterating that it is not his place to order Americans around, and mentioning his accomplishments in Singapore just often enough to establish his credentials. The prime minister spoke into what looked like a microphone but was actually an attachment to his private tape recorder, "so I can check back and make sure I wasn't misquoted," he explained.

There is no doubt that Lee has done much for Singapore. The tiny island republic has a per capita income of $500 per year, the highest in the area. From 1961 to 1965, Lee spent $315 million on economic development, focusing on power plants, water facilities, roads and other precursors of industrial growth. Singapore has negotiated trade agreements with the Soviet Union, Hungary, Bulgaria, Great Britain, the United States, and several other nations.

Lee still must tackle an acute unemployment problem. It is estimated that 20,000 more jobless youths emerge from the schools in Singapore each year, and there seems to be no immediate solution in sight.

Perhaps a more important problem, and one Lee refused to discuss in Dunster House, is the lack of political opposition in his country. There is no opposition to speak of at present, except an underground Communist movement. In three of the past four by-elections, all the candidates in Lee's party ran unopposed. Lee said last year that he would like to see a "good, lively, opposition" but he doesn't seem to act with that idea in mind. Newspapers are strictly licensed, and leading Communists who happen to bob above the surface are frequently jailed.

These internal problems, however, are dwarfed by the Vietnam war, which brought Lee to see President Johnson. Lee is not the kind of man who would admit that his future rests entirely in America's hands. On the contrary, he told his Harvard audience, "If you leave, we'll soldier on. We'll try. I'm only telling you the awful consequence which withdrawal would mean." One gets the feeling that Lee believes those "awful consequences" would not mean his downfall. It would take more than the blunders of a misguided super-power to accomplish that.