น้องสาวของประธานาธิบดีบารัคโอบามา ประกาศตนว่าเป็นชาวพุทธ ต่อการสัมภาษณ์นิตยสาร time นิวยอร์ก
Obama's sister is Buddhist
Questions for Maya Soetoro-Ng
Interview by Deborah Solomon
Q: Let's talk about the Democratic presidential caucuses taking place on Feb. 19, in Hawaii, where Barack Obama was born. Will you be campaigning for your brother?
Yes, of course. I have taken time off from my various teaching jobs in Honolulu and just got back from two months of campaigning. I have a bumper sticker on my car that says: "1-20-09. End of an Error."
What kind of bumper sticker is that?
It doesn't even mention a candidate by name. That's just one bumper sticker. I have three others on my car, including one that says, "Women for Obama."
What is the age difference between you and Barack?
I'm nine years younger. Our mother, after divorcing Barack's father, met my father at the same place, the East-West Centre on the University of Hawaii campus.
Barack's father was Kenyan, and yours was Indonesian. Your mom was what used to be called a freethinker, a white anthropologist from Wichita, Kan., who moved to Jakarta after her second marriage.
My mother was a courageous woman. And she had such tremendous love for life. She loved the natural world. She would wake us up in the middle of the night to go look at the moon. When I was a teenager, this was a source of great frustration because I wanted to sleep.
She died at only 52, from ovarian cancer. Today, more than anything, I wish all the women in Barack's life — our mother, his wife and daughters, my daughter, our grandmother, his Kenyan half-sister — I wish we could all sit together and gaze at the moon.
Your mom has been described as an atheist.
I wouldn't have called her an atheist. She was an agnostic. She basically gave us all the good books - the Bible, the Hindu Upanishads and the Buddhist scripture, the Tao Te Ching — and wanted us to recognize that everyone has something beautiful to contribute.
You didn't mention the Kor