Finding Courage Part 3 Chapters 11 to 12 PDF

## 11 ## A Chance to Speak Day or night, my father's courage never seemed to waver, despite receiving threatening letters as well as warnings from concerned friends. As the school bombings continued, he spoke out against them; he even went to the site of one school bombing while it was still a smol...

## 11 ## A Chance to Speak Day or night, my father's courage never seemed to waver, despite receiving threatening letters as well as warnings from concerned friends. As the school bombings continued, he spoke out against them; he even went to the site of one school bombing while it was still a smoldering wreck. And he went back and forth to Islamabad and Peshawar, pleading with the government for help and speaking out against the Taliban. I could see that my mother was worried at times. She would hug us close and pray over us before we left for school and as soon as we came home. And she sat late into the night with her phone in her hand-trying not to call my father every hour. She talked to us of plans for what we would do if the Taliban came. She thought she could sleep with a knife under her pillow. I said I could sneak into the toilet and call the police. I thought of the magic pencil I used to pray for. Now would be as good a time as any for my prayer to finally be answered. ## I AM MALALA Back at school my friends and I wondered what we could do. So Madam Maryam and my father worked with us on essays and speeches in which we expressed our feelings about the Taliban's campaign to destroy girls' schools and about how much our own school meant to us. We planned an assembly where we would make our speeches; we called it a peace rally, but it was just going to be a handful of us upper-school girls. The day of the assembly, a Pashto TV crew arrived at our school. We were excited and surprised—we didn't think anyone would care what a group of girls had to say about peace. Some girls were nervous, but I had given a few interviews by this time, and I was a bit more comfortable in front of a camera, although, truth be told, I did still get nervous. We were a democracy at the Khushal School, so every girl would get a chance to speak. The older girls went first. They talked about our friends who had quit school out of fear. They talked about how much we loved to learn. Then it was Moniba's turn. Moniba, our public-speaking champion, stepped to the front and spoke like a poet. “We Pashtuns are a religion-loving people," she said. "Because of the Taliban, the whole world is claiming we are terrorists. This is not the case. We are peace-loving. Our mountains, our trees, our flowers-everything in our valley is about peace." After Moniba spoke, it was my turn. My mouth was as dry as dust. I was anxious, as I often was before interviews, but I knew this was an important opportunity to spread our message of peace and education. As soon as they put a microphone in front of me, the words came out—sure and steady, strong and proud. "This is not the Stone Age," I said. "But it feels like we are going backward. Girls are getting more deprived of our rights." I spoke about how much I loved school. About how important it was to keep learning. "We are afraid of no one, and we will continue our education. This is our dream." And I knew in that instant that it wasn't me, Malala, speaking; my voice was the voice of so many others who wanted to speak but couldn't. Microphones made me feel as if I were speaking to the whole world. I had talked to only local TV stations and newspapers, but, still, I felt as if the wind would carry my words, the same way it scatters flower pollen in the spring, planting seeds all over the earth. And I had started a funny habit: I sometimes found myself looking in the mirror and giving speeches. Our house was often full of relatives from Shangla who came to Mingora when they needed to go to the doctor or do some shopping. The kitchen was full of aunties gossiping. The guest room was full of uncles arguing. And the house was full of little children playing. And crying. And arguing. With all this chaos swirling about, I would escape into the bathroom and look in the mirror. When I looked in the mirror, though, I didn't see myself. I saw hundreds of people listening to me. My mother's voice would snap me out of my daydream. "Pisho," she'd say. "What are you doing in there? Our guests need to use the bathroom." I felt quite silly sometimes when I realized I was giving a speech to a mirror in the toilet. "Malala," I would say to myself, "what are you doing?" Maybe, I thought, I was still that little Malala who lectured an empty classroom. But maybe it was something more. Maybe that girl in the mirror, that girl who imagined speaking to the world, was the Malala I would become. So throughout 2008, as our Swat was being attacked, I didn't stay silent. I spoke to local and national TV channels, radio, and newspapers—I spoke out to anyone who would listen. ## 12 ## A Schoolgirl's Diary "After the fifteenth of January, no girl, whether big or little, shall go to school. Otherwise, you know what we can do. And the parents and the school principal will be responsible." That was the news that came over Radio Mullah in late December 2008. At first, I thought it was just one of his crazy pronouncements. It was the twenty-first century! How could one man stop more than fifty thousand girls from going to school? I am a hopeful person-my friends may say too hopeful, maybe even a little crazy. But I simply did not believe that this man could stop us. School was our right. We debated his edict in class. "Who will stop him?" the other girls said. "The Taliban have already blown up hundreds of schools, and no one has done anything." "We will," I said. "We will call on our government to come and end this madness." "The government?" one girl said. "The government can't even shut down Fazlullah's radio station!" The debate went round and round. I didn't give in. But even to me, my argument sounded a bit thin. One by one, girls stopped coming to school. Their fathers forbade them. Their brothers forbade them. Within days we had gone from twenty-seven girls in our grade to ten. **27:10** I was sad and frustrated—but I also understood. In our culture, girls do not defy the males in their families. And I realized that the fathers and brothers and uncles who made my friends stay home were doing so out of concern for their safety. It was hard not to feel a bit depressed sometimes, not to feel as though the families who kept their girls at home were simply surrendering to Fazlullah. But whenever I'd catch myself giving in to a feeling of defeat, I'd have one of my talks with God. Help us appreciate the school days that are left to us, God, and give us the courage to fight even harder for more. School had been due to end the first week of January for our usual winter break, so my father decided to postpone the holiday. We would remain in classes through 14 January. That way we could squeeze in every minute left to us. And the ten remaining girls in my class lingered in the courtyard every day after school in case these were our last chances to be together. At home in the evenings I wondered what I would do with my life if I couldn't go to school. One of the girls at school had gotten married off before Fazlullah's edict. She was twelve. I knew my parents wouldn't do that to me, but I wondered, what would I do? Spend the rest of my life indoors, out of sight, with no TV to watch and no books to read? How would I complete my studies and become a doctor, which was my greatest hope at the time? I played with my shoebox dolls and thought: The Taliban want to turn the girls of Pakistan into identical, lifeless dolls. While we girls savored the days until January 15, Fazlullah struck again and again. The previous year had been hard, but the days of January 2009 were among the darkest of our lives. Every morning, someone arrived at school with a story about another killing, sometimes two, sometimes three a night. Fazlullah's men killed a woman in Mingora because they said she was "doing fahashi," or being indecent, because she was a dancer. And they killed a man in the valley because he refused to wear his pants short the way the Taliban did. And now, we would be forbidden from going to school. One afternoon I heard my father on the phone. "All the teachers have refused," he said. "They are too afraid. But I will see what I can do." He hung up and rushed out of the house. A friend who worked at the BBC, the powerful British Broadcasting Corporation network, had asked him to find someone from the school to write a diary about life under the Taliban for its Urdu website—a teacher or an older student. All the teachers had said no, but Maryam's younger sister Ayesha, one of the older girls, had agreed. The next day, we had a visitor: Ayesha's father. He would not allow his daughter to tell her story. "It's too risky,” he said. My father didn't argue with him. The Taliban were cruel, but even they wouldn't hurt a child, he wanted to say. But he respected Ayesha's father's decision and prepared to call the BBC with the bad news. I was only eleven, but I said, "Why not me?" I knew he'd wanted someone older, not a child. I looked at my father's hopeful-nervous—face. He had been so brave for speaking out. It was one thing to talk to national and local media, but this diary might be read by people outside Pakistan. It was the BBC, after all. My father had always stood by me. Could I stand by him? I knew without even thinking that I could. I would do anything to be able to continue going to school. But first we went to my mother. If she was afraid, I wouldn't do it. Because if I didn't have her support, it would be like speaking with only half my heart. But my mother agreed. She gave us her answer with a verse from the Holy Quran. "Falsehood has to die," she said. "And truth has to come forward." God would protect me, she said, because my mission was a good one. Many people in Swat saw danger everywhere they looked. But our family didn't look at life that way. We saw possibility. It was as if God had at long last granted my wish for that magic pencil. In my next entry, I wrote about how school was the center of my life and about how proud I was to walk the streets of Mingora in my school uniform. As exciting as it was to be Gul Makai, it was hard not to tell anyone—especially at school. The diary of this anonymous Pakistani schoolgirl was all anyone talked about. One girl even printed it out and showed it to my father. “It's very good,” he said with a knowing smile. With the threat of school closing quickly becoming a reality, I appreciated going even more. In the days leading up to the last one, it was decided that wearing our uniforms was too dangerous, so we were told to dress in our everyday clothes. I decided I wasn't going to cower in fear of Fazlullah's wrath. I would obey the instruction about the uniform, but that day I chose my brightest pink shalwar kamiz. As soon as I left the house, I thought for a second about turning back. We'd heard stories of people throwing acid in the faces of girls in Afghanistan. It hadn't happened here yet, but with everything that had happened, it didn't seem impossible. But somehow my feet carried me forward, all the way to school. What a peculiar place Mingora had become, Gunfire and cannons as background noise. Hardly any people in the streets. (And if you did see anyone, you couldn't help but think, This person could be a terrorist.) And a girl in a pink shalwar kamiz sneaking off to school. The BBC correspondent asked for more news from Swat for the next diary post. I didn't know what to tell him. He asked me to write about the killings. It seemed so obvious to him that this was news. But to me, what you experience every day is no longer news. It was as if I had become immune to fear. Until one day, on my way home from school, I heard a man behind me say, "I will kill you." My heart stopped, but somehow my feet kept going. I quickened my pace until I was far ahead of him. I ran home, shut the door, and, after a few seconds, peeked out at him. There he was, oblivious to me, shouting at someone on his phone. I laughed a bit at myself. "Malala,” I told myself, “there are real things to be afraid of. You don't need to imagine danger where there is none." The real worry, it seemed to me, was being found out. And, of course, it was Moniba who was first to guess the identity of Gul Makai. "I read a diary in the newspaper," she told me one day at recess, "and the story sounded like our story, what happens in our school. It's you, isn't it?" she said. I could not lie, not to Moniba. But when I confessed, she became more angry than ever. "How can you say you're my best friend when you're keeping such an important secret from me?" She turned on her heel and left. And yet I knew, as angry as she was, she wouldn't reveal my secret. It was my father who did that. By accident, of course. He was telling a reporter how terrifying it was for children just to walk to and from school. His own daughter, he said, thought a man on his phone had threatened to kill her. Just about everyone recognized the story from the diary, and by April, my days as Gul Makai, the secret diarist, would be over. But the diary had done its job. Now a number of reporters were following the story of Fazlullah's attempt to shut down the girls' schools of Pakistan, including a man from the New York Times.