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

by Malala Yousafzai

  While I was in surgery Mr Irving, the surgeon who had repaired my nerve, also had a solution for my damaged left eardrum. He put a small electronic device called a cochlear implant inside my head near the ear and told me that in a month they would fit the external part on my head, and then I should be able to hear. I was in theatre five hours and I’d had three operations, but I didn’t feel like I’d had major surgery and was back in the apartment within five days. A few weeks later when the receiver was fitted behind my ear, my left ear heard beep beep for the first time. To start with, everything was like a robot sound, but soon it was getting better and better.

  We human beings don’t realise how great God is. He has given us an extraordinary brain and a sensitive loving heart. He has blessed us with two lips to talk and express our feelings, two eyes which see a world of colours and beauty, two feet which walk on the road of life, two hands to work for us, a nose which smells the beauty of fragrance, and two ears to hear the words of love. As I found with my ear, no one knows how much power they have in their each and every organ until they lose one.

  I thank Allah for the hard-working doctors, for my recovery and for sending us to this world where we may struggle for our survival. Some people choose good ways and some choose bad ways. One person’s bullet hit me. It swelled my brain, stole my hearing and cut the nerve of the left side of my face in the space of a second. And after that one second there were millions of people praying for my life and talented doctors who gave me my own body back. I was a good girl. In my heart I had only the desire to help people. It wasn’t about the awards or the money. I always prayed to God, ‘I want to help people and please help me to do that.’

  A talib fires three shots at point-blank range at three girls in a van and doesn’t kill any of them. This seems an unlikely story, and people say I have made a miraculous recovery. My friend Shazia, who was hit twice, was offered a scholarship at Atlantic College in Wales so has also come to the UK for schooling, and I hope Kainat will too. I know God stopped me from going to the grave. It feels like this life is a second life. People prayed to God to spare me, and I was spared for a reason – to use my life for helping people. When people talk about the way I was shot and what happened I think it’s the story of Malala, ‘a girl shot by the Taliban’; I don’t feel it’s a story about me at all.

  EPILOGUE

  One Child, One Teacher, One Book, One Pen . . .

  Birmingham, August 2013

  IN MARCH WE moved from the apartment to a rented house on a leafy street, but it feels as if we are camping in it. All our belongings are still in Swat. Everywhere there are cardboard boxes full of the kind letters and cards that people send, and in one room stands a piano none of us can play. My mother complains about the murals of Greek gods on the walls and carved cherubs on the ceilings watching her.

  Our house feels big and empty. It sits behind an electric iron gate and it sometimes seems as if we are in what we in Pakistan call a sub-jail, a kind of luxury house arrest. At the back there is a large garden with lots of trees and a green lawn for me and my brothers to play cricket on. But there are no rooftops to play on, no children fighting with kites in the streets, no neighbours coming in to borrow a plate of rice or for us to ask for three tomatoes. We are just a wall’s distance from the next house but it feels miles away.

  If I look out, I see my mother wandering around the garden, her head covered by a shawl, feeding the birds. She looks as if she is singing, maybe that tapa she likes: ‘Don’t kill doves in the garden./ You kill one and the others won’t come.’ She is giving the birds the remains of our dinner from the night before and there are tears in her eyes. We eat much the same here as we did back home – rice and meat for lunch and dinner, while breakfast is fried eggs, chapatis and sometimes also honey, a tradition started by my little brother Atal, though his favourite Birmingham discovery is Nutella sandwiches. But there are always leftovers. My mother is sad about the waste of food. I know she is remembering all the children we fed in our house, so they would not go to school on empty stomachs, and wondering how they are faring now.

  When I came home from school in Mingora I never found my house without people in it; now I can’t believe that I used to plead for a day of peace and some privacy to do my school work. Here the only sound is of the birds and Khushal’s Xbox. I sit alone in my room doing a jigsaw puzzle and long for guests.

  We didn’t have much money and my parents knew what it was like to be hungry. My mother never turned anyone away. Once a poor woman came, hot, hungry and thirsty, to our door. My mother let her in and gave her food and the woman was so happy. ‘I touched every door in the mohalla and this was the only one open,’ she said. ‘May God always keep your door open, wherever you are.’

  I know my mother is lonely. She was very sociable – all the women of the neighbourhood used to gather in the afternoons on our back porch and women who worked in other houses came to rest. Now she is always on the phone to everyone back home. It’s hard for her here as she does not speak any English. Our house has all these facilities, but when she arrived they were all mysteries to her and someone had to show us how to use the oven, washing machine and the TV.

  As usual my father doesn’t help in the kitchen. I tease him, ‘Aba, you talk of women’s rights, but my mother manages everything! You don’t even clear the tea things.’

  There are buses and trains but we are unsure about using them. My mother misses going shopping in Cheena Bazaar. She is happier since my cousin Shah came to stay. He has a car and takes her shopping, but it’s not the same as she can’t talk to her friends and neighbours about what she bought.

  A door bangs in the house and my mother jumps – she jumps these days at the slightest noise. She often cries then hugs me’. ‘Malala is alive,’ she says. Now she treats me as if I was her youngest rather than eldest child.

  I know my father cries too. He cries when I push my hair to the side and he sees the scar on my head, and he cries when he wakes from an afternoon nap to hear his children’s voices in the garden and realises with relief that one of them is still mine. He knows people say it’s his fault that I was shot, that he pushed me to speak up like a tennis dad trying to create a champion, as if I don’t have my own mind. It’s hard for him. All he worked for for over almost twenty years has been left behind: the school he built up from nothing, which now has three buildings with 1,100 pupils and seventy teachers. I know he felt proud at what he had created, a poor boy from that narrow village between the Black and White Mountains. He says, ‘It’s as if you planted a tree and nurtured it – you have the right to sit in its shade.’

  His dream in life was to have a very big school in Swat providing quality education, to live peacefully and to have democracy in our country. In Swat he had achieved respect and status in society through his activities and the help he gave people. He never imagined living abroad and he gets upset when people suggest we wanted to come to the UK. ‘A person who has eighteen years of education, a nice life, a family, you throw him out just as you throw a fish out of water for speaking up for girls’ education?’ Sometimes he says we have gone from being IDPs to EDPs – externally displaced persons. Often over meals we talk about home and try to remember things. We miss everything, even the smelly stream. My father says, ‘If I had known this would happen, I would have looked back for a last time just as the Prophet did when he left Mecca to migrate to Medina. He looked back again and again.’ Already some of the things from Swat seem like stories from a distant place, like somewhere I have read about.

  My father spends much of his time going to conferences on education. I know it’s odd for him that now people want to hear him because of me, not the other way round. I used to be known as his daughter; now he’s known as my father. When he went to France to collect an award for me he told the audience, ‘In my part of the world most people are known by their sons. I am one of the few lucky fathers known by his daughter.’

  A smart new uniform hangs on my bedroo
m door, bottle green instead of royal blue, for a school where no one dreams of being attacked for going to classes or someone blowing up the building. In April I was well enough to start school in Birmingham. It’s wonderful going to school and not having to feel scared as I did in Mingora, always looking around me on my way to school, terrified a talib would jump out.

  It’s a good school. Many subjects are the same as at home, but the teachers have PowerPoint and computers rather than chalk and blackboards. We have some different subjects – music, art, computer studies, home economics, where we learn to cook – and we do practicals in science, which is rare in Pakistan. Even though I recently got just forty percent in my physics exam, it is still my favourite subject. I love learning about Newton and the basic principles the whole universe obeys.

  But like my mother I am lonely. It takes time to make good friends like I had at home, and the girls at school here treat me differently. People say, ‘Oh, that’s Malala’ – they see me as ‘Malala, girls’ rights activist’. Back in the Khushal School I was just Malala, the same double-jointed girl they had always known, who loved to tell jokes and drew pictures to explain things. Oh, and who was always quarrelling with her brother and best friend! I think every class has a very well behaved girl, a very intelligent or genius girl, a very popular girl, a beautiful girl, a girl who is a bit shy, a notorious girl . . . but here I haven’t worked out yet who is who.

  As there is no one here I can tell my jokes to, I save them and tell them to Moniba when we Skype. My first question is always, ‘What’s the latest news at the school?’ I love to hear who is fighting with who, and who got told off by which teacher. Moniba came first in class in the most recent exams. My classmates still keep the seat for me with my name on it, and at the boys’ school Sir Amjad has put a big poster of me at the entrance and says he greets it every morning before going into his office.

  I describe life in England to Moniba. I tell her of the streets with rows of identical houses, unlike home, where everything is different and higgledy-piggledy and a shack of mud and stones can stand next to a house as big as a castle. I tell her how they are lovely solid houses which could withstand floods and earthquakes but have no flat roofs to play on. I tell her I like England because people follow rules, they respect policemen and everything happens on time. The government is in charge and no one needs to know the name of the army chief. I see women having jobs we couldn’t imagine in Swat. They are police and security guards; they run big companies and dress exactly as they like.

  I don’t often think about the shooting, though every day when I look in the mirror it is a reminder. The nerve operation has done as much as it can. I will never be exactly the same. I can’t blink fully and my left eye closes a lot when I speak. My father’s friend Hidayatullah told him we should be proud of my eye. ‘It’s the beauty of her sacrifice,’ he said.

  It is still not definitely known who shot me, but a man named Ataullah Khan said he did it. The police have not managed to find him but they say they are investigating and want to interview me.

  Though I don’t remember exactly what happened that day, sometimes I have flashbacks. They come unexpectedly. The worst one was in June, when we were in Abu Dhabi on the way to perform Umrah in Saudi Arabia. I went to a shopping mall with my mother as she wanted to buy a special burqa to pray in Mecca. I didn’t want one. I said I would just wear my shawl as it is not specified that a woman must wear a burqa. As we were walking through the mall, suddenly I could see so many men around me. I thought they were waiting for me with guns and would shoot. I was terrified though I said nothing. I told myself, Malala, you have already faced death. This is your second life. Don’t be afraid – if you are afraid you can’t move forward.

  We believe that when we have our first sight of the Kaaba, the black-shrouded cube in Mecca that is our most sacred place, any wish in your heart is granted by God. When we prayed at the Kaaba, we prayed for peace in Pakistan and for girls’ education, and I was surprised to find myself in tears. But when we went to the other holy places in the desert of Mecca where the Prophet lived and preached, I was shocked that they were littered with empty bottles and biscuit wrappers. It seemed that people had neglected to preserve history. I thought they had forgotten the Hadith that cleanliness is half of faith.

  My world has changed so much. On the shelves of our rented living room are awards from around the world – America, India, France, Spain, Italy and Austria, and many other places. I’ve even been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, the youngest person ever. When I received prizes for my work at school I was happy as I had worked hard for them, but these prizes are different. I am grateful for them, but they only remind me how much work still needs to be done to achieve the goal of education for every boy and girl. I don’t want to be thought of as ‘the girl who was shot by the Taliban’ but ‘the girl who fought for education’. This is the cause to which I want to devote my life.

  On my sixteenth birthday I was in New York to speak at the United Nations. Standing up to address an audience inside the vast hall where so many world leaders have spoken before was daunting, but I knew what I wanted to say. ‘This is your chance Malala,’ I said to myself. Only 400 people were sitting around me, but when I looked out, I imagined millions more. I did not write the speech only with the UN delegates in mind; I wrote it for every person around the world who could make a difference. I wanted to reach all people living in poverty, those children forced to work and those who suffer from terrorism or lack of education. Deep in my heart I hoped to reach every child who could take courage from my words and stand up for his or her rights.

  I wore one of Benazir Bhutto’s white shawls over my favourite pink shalwar kamiz and I called on the world’s leaders to provide free education to every child in the world. ‘Let us pick up our books and our pens,’ I said. ‘They are our most powerful weapons. One child, one teacher, one book and one pen can change the world.’ I didn’t know how my speech was received until the audience gave me a standing ovation. My mother was in tears and my father said I had become everybody’s daughter.

  Something else happened that day. My mother allowed herself to be publicly photographed for the first time. As she has lived her life in purdah and never unveiled her face on camera before, it was a great sacrifice and very difficult for her.

  At breakfast the next day Atal said to me in the hotel, ‘Malala, I don’t understand why you are famous. What have you done?’ All the time we were in New York he was more excited by the Statue of Liberty, Central Park and his favourite game Beyblade!

  After the speech I received messages of support from all over the world, but there was mostly silence from my own country, except that on Twitter and Facebook we could see my own Pakistani brothers and sisters turning against me. They accused me of speaking out of ‘a teen lust for fame’. One said, ‘Forget the image of your country, forget about the school. She would eventually get what she was after, a life of luxury abroad.’

  I don’t mind. I know people say these things because they have seen leaders and politicians in our country who make promises they never keep. Instead things in Pakistan are getting worse every day. The endless terrorist attacks have left the whole nation in shock. People have lost trust in each other, but I would like everyone to know that I don’t want support for myself, I want the support to be for my cause of peace and education.

  The most surprising letter I got after my speech was from a Taliban commander who recently escaped from prison. His name was Adnan Rashid and he used to be in the Pakistan air force. He had been in jail since 2003 for attempting to assassinate President Musharraf. He said the Taliban had attacked me not for my campaign for education but because I tried to ‘malign [their] efforts to establish the Islamic system’. He said he was writing to me because he was shocked by my shooting and wished he could have warned me beforehand. He wrote that they would forgive me if I came back to Pakistan, wore a burqa and went to a madrasa.

  Journalists urged
me to answer him, but I thought, Who is this man to say that? The Taliban are not our rulers. It’s my life, how I live it is my choice. But Mohammed Hanif wrote an article pointing out that the good thing about the Taliban letter was that many people claim I wasn’t shot yet here they were accepting responsibility.

  I know I will go back to Pakistan, but whenever I tell my father I want to go home, he finds excuses. ‘ No, Jani, your treatment is not complete,’ he says, or, ‘These schools are good. You should stay here and gather knowledge so you can use your words powerfully.’

  He is right. I want to learn and be trained well with the weapon of knowledge. Then I will be able to fight more effectively for my cause.

  Today we all know education is our basic right. Not just in the West; Islam too has given us this right. Islam says every girl and every boy should go to school. In the Quran it is written, God wants us to have knowledge. He wants us to know why the sky is blue and about oceans and stars. I know it’s a big struggle – around the world there are fifty-seven million children who are not in primary school, thirty-two million of them girls. Sadly my own country Pakistan is one of the worst places: 5.1 million children don’t even go to primary school even though in our constitution it says every child has that right. We have almost fifty million illiterate adults, two-thirds of whom are women, like my own mother.

  Girls continue to be killed and schools blown up. In March there was an attack on a girls’ school in Karachi that we had visited. A bomb and a grenade were tossed into the school playground just as a prize-giving ceremony was about to start. The headmaster, Abdur Rasheed, was killed and eight children hurt between the ages of five and ten. One eight-year-old was left disabled. When my mother heard the news, she cried and cried. ‘When our children are sleeping we wouldn’t even disturb a hair on their heads,’ she said, ‘but there are people who have guns and shoot them or hurl bombs. They don’t care that their victims are children.’ The most shocking attack was in June in the city of Quetta when a suicide bomber blew up a bus taking forty pupils to their all-girls’ college. Fourteen of them were killed. The wounded were followed to the hospital and some nurses were shot.