Dear Muslim Kids,

I am a thirteen year old boy, and for my school project I am supposed to look up a bunch of stuff about your culture.

I found out the Middle East once had the biggest library anywhere, and that most science stuff came from you guys, you know, math and astronomy and that stuff. I like those subjects but not as much as baseball. Do you play baseball there? I couldn’t find anything about it on google, but I did see some pictures that looked like kids were playing something like it. I play second base, and pitch a little sometimes too.

It seems like there’s a lot of war in your countries, some of it with our guys and some of it with eachother. What happened? Is it all about the religion stuff like they say on our TV’s?

I go to church on Wednesday and Sunday every week. My mom even makes me dress nice, no blue jeans. I don’t know what you guys pray for, but we pray for peace a lot, and tell God we love him and ask Him to help us with being better people. Our church group is really nice. We do stuff like raise money for the poor and give them coats and blankets when its cold out. Do you do that too in your Churches? Grown ups always tell us kids that God loves all his children, but then on TV I hear how evil Islam or is it Muslim is. I think grown ups forget that part. I mean God is pretty cool right? He can understand a prayer in any language without having to take Spanish class with Miss Nelson. If you pray and we pray, doesn’t God still love us all as his children, and not much care which way we pray as long as we do it?

I know you don’t like how we dress and stuff. My older sister Becca is 15 and a half, and is kinda boy crazy. But she would never have sex or anything, they just giggle a lot, her and her friends and whisper “He’s sooooo cute.” and dream about getting married and stuff. Sisters. They can be annoying. She used to be cool. She used to play baseball too, but now she’s too girly.

I want to ask about something else now. Why are you guys so poor? It looks like you’re poor by the pictures. There’s a lot of garbage and broken up buildings there. I mean, heck, you have all the oil, so why aren’t you rich? We’re not rich either, but I wish you had shoes and stuff. My Mom won’t let me buy Nikes, and they are so cool, because she says that company is mean. I really want them, but at least I have shoes.

So what I really want to ask, is how can we be friends?

I mean our TV guys say you are bad, and your TV guys say we are bad, but we all love God don’t we? None of us want eachother to be poor. So whats the big deal?

I know you probably want us out of your country but I hear we give you a lot of money too. Do you want us just to leave you alone, or do you want us to be friends?

I think if we kids could talk, we’d be friends. I even have an extra mitt I would lend out to play baseball with me, and I’d pitch underhand until you caught on. It wouldn’t be fair to fast pitch to a new guy. I don’t think God or baseballs care about where we are from, they just want us to play nice and be fair.

Your friend in America,

Jake