I am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban



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I am Malala The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education ( PDFDrive )

New York Times
documentary 
Class
Dismissed in Swat Valley
and tracked us down. We saw then the power of the media and she became
a great support to us. My father was almost bursting with pride at how I came across on the
documentary. ‘Look at her,’ he told Adam Ellick. ‘Don’t you think she is meant for the skies?’ Fathers
can be very embarrassing.
Adam took us to Islamabad. It was the first time I had ever visited. Islamabad was a beautiful place
with nice white bungalows and broad roads, though it has none of the natural beauty of Swat. We saw
the Red Mosque where the siege had taken place, the wide, wide Constitution Avenue leading to the
white-colonnaded buildings of the Parliament House and the Presidency, where Zardari now lived.
General Musharraf was in exile in London.
We went to shops where I bought school books and Adam bought me DVDs of American TV
programmes like 
Ugly Betty
, which was about a girl with big braces and a big heart. I loved it and
dreamed of one day going to New York and working on a magazine like her. We visited the Lok Virsa
museum, and it was a joy to celebrate our national heritage once again. Our own museum in Swat had
closed. On the steps outside an old man was selling popcorn. He was a Pashtun like us, and when my
father asked if he was from Islamabad he replied, ‘Do you think Islamabad can ever belong to us
Pashtuns?’ He said he came from Mohmand, one of the tribal areas, but had to flee because of a
military operation. I saw tears in my parents’ eyes.
Lots of buildings were surrounded by concrete blocks, and there were checkpoints for incoming
vehicles to guard against suicide bombs. When our bus hit a pothole on the way back my brother
Khushal, who had been asleep, jerked awake. ‘Was that a bomb blast?’ he asked. This was the fear
that filled our daily lives. Any small disturbance or noise could be a bomb or gunfire.
On our short trips we forgot our troubles in Swat. But we returned to the threats and danger as we
entered our valley once again. Even so, Swat was our home and we were not ready to leave it.
Back in Mingora the first thing I saw when I opened my wardrobe was my uniform, school bag and
geometry set. I felt so sad. The visit to Islamabad had been a lovely break, but this was my reality
now.


14
A Funny Kind of Peace
W
HEN MY BROTHERS
’ schools reopened after the winter break, Khushal said he would rather stay at
home like me. I was cross. ‘You don’t realise how lucky you are!’ I told him. It felt strange to have no
school. We didn’t even have a television set as someone had stolen ours while we were in Islamabad,
using my father’s ‘getaway’ ladder to get inside.
Someone gave me a copy of 
The Alchemist
by Paulo Coelho, a fable about a shepherd boy who
travels to the Pyramids in search of treasure when all the time it’s at home. I loved that book and read
it over and over again. ‘When you want something all the universe conspires in helping you achieve
it,’ it says. I don’t think that Paulo Coelho had come across the Taliban or our useless politicians.
What I didn’t know was that Hai Kakar was holding secret talks with Fazlullah and his
commanders. He had got to know them in interviews, and was urging them to rethink their ban on
girls’ education.
‘Listen, Maulana,’ he told Fazlullah. ‘You killed people, you slaughtered people, you beheaded
people, you destroyed schools and still there was no protest in Pakistan. But when you banned girls’
education people spoke out. Even the Pakistan media, which has been so soft on you till now, is
outraged.’
The pressure from the whole country worked, and Fazlullah agreed to lift the ban for girls up to ten
years old – Year 4. I was in Year 5 and some of us pretended we were younger than we were. We
started going to school again, dressed in ordinary clothes and hiding our books under our shawls. It
was risky but it was the only ambition I had back then. We were lucky too that Madam Maryam was
brave and resisted the pressure to stop working. She had known my father since she was ten and they
trusted each other completely – she used to signal to him to wind up when he spoke for too long,
which was often!
‘The secret school is our silent protest,’ she told us.
I didn’t write anything about it in my diary. If they had caught us they would have flogged or even
slaughtered us as they had Shabana. Some people are afraid of ghosts, some of spiders or snakes – in
those days we were afraid of our fellow human beings.
On the way to school I sometimes saw the Taliban with their caps and long dirty hair. Most of the
time they hid their faces. They were awkward, horrible-looking. The streets of Mingora were very
empty as a third of the inhabitants had left the valley. My father said you couldn’t really blame people
for leaving as the government had no power. There were now 12,000 army troops in the region – four
times as many as their estimates of the Taliban – along with tanks, helicopters and sophisticated
weapons. Yet seventy per cent of Swat was under Taliban control.
About a week after we had returned to school, on 16 February 2009, we were woken one night by
the sound of gunfire. Our people traditionally fire rifles in celebration of births and weddings but
even that had stopped during the conflict. So at first we thought we were in danger. Then we heard the
news. The gunfire was in celebration. A peace deal had been struck between the Taliban and the
provincial government, which was now under the control of the ANP, not the mullahs. The
government had agreed to impose sharia law throughout Swat and in return the militants would stop


fighting. The Taliban agreed to a ten-day truce and, as a peace gesture, released a Chinese telephone
engineer who they had kidnapped six months before.
We were happy too – my father and I had often spoken in favour of a peace deal – but we
questioned how it would work. People hoped that the Taliban would settle down, go back to their
homes and live as peaceful citizens. They convinced themselves that the 
shariat
in Swat would be
different to the Afghan version – we would still have our girls’ schools and there would be no
morality police. Swat would be Swat just with a different justice system. I wanted to believe this but I
was worried. I thought

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