Magic Pencil Dreams PDF

# 3 A Magic Pencil By the time I was eight years old, my father had more than eight hundred students and three campuses - an elementary division and two high schools, one for boys and one for girls - so our family finally had enough money to buy a TV. That's when I became obsessed with owning a mag...

# 3 A Magic Pencil By the time I was eight years old, my father had more than eight hundred students and three campuses - an elementary division and two high schools, one for boys and one for girls - so our family finally had enough money to buy a TV. That's when I became obsessed with owning a magic pencil. I got the idea from Shaka Laka Boom Boom, the show Safina and I watched after school. It was about a boy named Sanju, who could make anything real by drawing it. If he was hungry, he drew a bowl of curry, and it appeared. If he was in danger, he drew a policeman. He was a little hero, always protecting people who were in danger. At night I would pray, God, please give me Sanju's pencil. I won't tell anyone. Just leave it in my cupboard. I will use it to make everyone happy. As soon as I finished praying, I would check the drawer. But the pencil was never there. # I AM MALALA One afternoon the boys weren't home and my mother asked me to throw away some potato peels and eggshells. I walked to the dump, just a block or so from our house, wrinkling my nose as I got close, swatting away flies, and making sure I didn't step on anything in my nice shoes. If only I had Sanju's magic pencil. I would erase it all: the smell, the rats, the giant mountain of rotting food. As I tossed our rubbish onto the heap, I saw something move. I jumped. It was a girl my age. Her hair was matted and her skin was covered in sores. She was sorting rubbish into piles, one for cans, one for bottles. Nearby, boys were fishing in the pile for metal using magnets on strings. I wanted to talk to them, but I was scared. Later that day, when my father returned home, I told him about the children at the dump and dragged him to see them. I asked him why they weren't in school. He told me that these children were supporting their families, selling whatever they found for a few rupees; if they went to school, their families would go hungry. As we walked back home, I saw tears on his cheek. I believe there is something good for every evil, that every bad person, God sends a good one. So I decided it was time to talk to God about this problem. Dear God, I wrote in a letter. Did you know there are children who are forced to work in the rubbish heap? I stopped. Of course he knew! Then I realized that it was his will that I had seen them. He was showing me what my life might be like if I couldn't go to school. Until then, I had believed a magic pencil could change the world. Now I knew I would have to do something. I didn't know what it was. But I asked God for the strength and courage to make the world a better place. I signed my letter, rolled it up, tied it to a piece of wood, placed a dandelion on top, and floated it in a stream that flows into the Swat River. Surely God would find it there. As much as I wanted to help the children from the dump, my mother wanted to help everyone. She had started putting bread crusts in a bowl on the kitchen windowsill. Nearby was an extra pot of rice and chicken. The bread was for the birds; the food was for a poor family in our neighborhood. I asked her once why she always gave food away. "We have known what it is like to be hungry, *pisho*," she said. "We must never forget to share what we have." So we shared everything we had. We even shared our home with a family of seven who had fallen on hard times. They were supposed to pay my father rent, but more often than not, he ended up lending them money. And although my father's school wasn't really making a profit, he gave away more than a hundred free places to poor children. He wished he could have given away more. My mother, meanwhile, started serving a few girls breakfast at our house each day. "How can they learn," she said, "if their stomachs are empty?" # 4 A Warning from God One autumn day when I was still in primary school, our desks started to tremble and shake. "Earthquake!" we yelled. We ran outside, some of us falling as we crowded through the narrow door and gathered around our teachers for safety and comfort, like chicks around a mother hen. A few of the girls were crying. We lived in a region where earthquakes happened often, but this felt different. Even after we returned to class, the buildings continued to shake; the rumbling didn't stop. *Miss Ulfat*, my all-time favorite teacher, told us to stay calm. She assured us that it would soon be over. But when another strong earthquake hit within a few minutes of the first, the students were sent home. When I arrived home, I found my mother sitting in the courtyard (where she felt safest because there was no roof above her). She was reciting verses from the Holy Quran as tears streamed down her face. The aftershocks kept coming and continued past nightfall, and every time they did, my mother ran outside and insisted we go with her. My father told her to not upset the children, but we were already upset because the ground was shaking! That earthquake of 8 October 2005 turned out to be one of the worst in history. It was 7.6 on the Richter scale and was felt as far away as Kabul and Delhi. Aftershocks continued for at least a month. Our city of Mingora was largely spared, but the northern areas of Pakistan, including our beloved Shangla, were devastated. When we finally heard from our family and friends there, they said they had thought it was the end of the world. They described the roar of rocks sliding down hills and everyone running out of their houses reciting the Holy Quran, the screams as roofs crashed down and the howls of buffalo and goats. They were terrified; and then when the destruction stopped, they waited for help. The government was slow to arrive, but help came immediately from rescue workers from a conservative religious group called *Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Sharia-e-Mohammadi* (TNSM), or the Movement for the Enforcement of Islamic Law, led by Sufi Mohammad and his son-in-law, Maulana Fazlullah. Eventually the government tried to help, and aid from the Americans (who had troops and helicopters in nearby Afghanistan) made it in. But most of the volunteers and medical help came from organizations that were linked with militant groups like the TNSM. They helped clear and rebuild destroyed villages. They led prayers and buried bodies. They took in many of the eleven thousand orphaned children. In our culture, orphans had been so bad that entire families had been wiped out or lost everything and were in no position to care for additional children. Many of the orphans went to live in fundamentalist madrasas. Mullahs from the TNSM preached that the earthquake was a warning from God. If we did not mend our ways and introduce sharia, or Islamic law, more severe punishment would come. The whole country was in shock for a long time after the earthquake. We were vulnerable. Which made it that much easier for someone with bad intentions to use a nation's fear for his gain. # 5 The First Direct Threat Each morning, as my friends passed through the gate to school, a man across the street stood scowling at us. Then one night he arrived at our home, along with six elders from the community. I answered the door. He claimed to be a mufti, or an Islamic scholar, and said he had a problem with the school. My father shooed me into the other room as this mufti and the elders crowded into our little house, but I heard every word. "I am representing good Muslims," the mufti said. "And we all think your girls' high school is a blasphemy. You should close it. Teenage girls should not be going to school. They should be in purdah." This mufti was clearly under the influence of a maulana who had been running an illegal radio broadcast through which he gave sermons and railed against people whom he deemed "un-Islamic." What we knew, but the mufti did not, was that his own niece attended my father's school in secret. As my father debated with the mufti, one of the elders spoke up. "I'd heard you were not a pious man," the man said to my father. "But there are Qurans here in your home." "Of course there are!" my father said. "I am a Muslim." The mufti jumped back into the conversation, complaining about girls entering the school through the same gate that men also used. So my father came up with a compromise: The older girls would enter through a different gate. Eventually the mufti backed down and the men left. But even as the door shut behind them, I had a knot in my stomach. I had grown up watching stubborn, prideful Pashtun men. Generally, when a Pashtun man loses an argument, he never really forgets. Or forgives. Even though I was a child, I knew this man was mistaken. I had studied the Quran, our holy book, since I was five; and my parents sent me to a madrasa for religious studies in the afternoons when school finished. It was an open-air mosque where boys and girls studied the Holy Quran together. I loved learning the Arabic alphabet. I loved the strange and mysterious shapes of the letters, the sounds of the prayers as we all recited together, and the stories about how to live a life according to the teachings of Allah. My teacher there was a woman. She was kind and wise. For me, the madrasa was a place for religious education only; I would go to the Khushal School for all my other studies. But for many of these children, the madrasa would be the only place they would ever study. They wouldn't take any other classes: no science, no math, no literature. They would study only Arabic so that they could recite the Holy Quran. They didn't learn what the words actually meant, though, only how to say them. I didn't think much of this difference until later, after the mufti's visit to our house. One day I was playing with the neighborhood children in the alley, and when we were choosing up sides for a game of cricket, one of the boys said he didn't want me on his team. "Our school is better than yours," he said, as if that explained things. I didn't agree one bit. "My school is the better one," I said. "Your school is bad," he insisted. "It is not on the straight path of Islam." I didn't know what to make of this, but I knew he was wrong. My school was a heaven. Because inside the Khushal School, we flew on wings of knowledge. In a country where women aren't allowed out in public without a man, we girls traveled far and wide inside the pages of our books. In a land where many women can't read the prices in the markets, we did multiplication. In a place where, as soon as we were teenagers, we'd have to cover our heads and hide ourselves from the boys who'd been our childhood playmates, we ran as free as the wind. We didn't know where our education would take us. All we wanted was a chance to learn in peace. And that is what we did. The crazy world could carry on outside the walls of the Khushal School. Inside, we could be who we were. Our only concerns, once we dropped our schoolbags in the classroom, were the same as any child's at school: Who would get the highest grade on the day's test, and who would sit with whom at recess? It was a point of pride for me that almost every year in primary school, I won the trophy for first place at the end of the term. I was considered one of the top girls - and the principal's daughter - and some girls thought maybe there was a connection between the two. But it was a point of pride for my father that he gave me no special treatment. And the proof was obvious to everyone when a new girl came to school when I was about nine. Her name was *Malka-e-Noor*, and she was bright and determined, but I did not think she was nearly as clever as me. So on the last day of school that year when the awards were announced, I was stunned. She had gotten first place and I was second. I smiled politely as she received her trophy, but the minute I got home I burst into tears. When my father saw me, he comforted me, but not in the way I wanted. "It's a good thing to come in second," he said. "Because you learn that if you can win, you can lose. And you should learn to be a good loser, not just a good winner." I was too young - and too stubborn - to appreciate his words. (And, truth be told, I still prefer to be first.) But after that term, I worked extra hard so I would never have to learn that particular lesson again! Another of my regular worries was whether Moniba was angry with me. She was my best friend, bookish like me, almost like my twin. We sat together whenever we could - on the bus, at recess, in the classroom - and she made me laugh as no one else could. But we had a habit of fighting, and always over the same thing: when another girl came between us. "Are you my friend or hers?" Moniba would say if I sat with another girl at recess. "Moniba," I'd say, "you were the one ignoring me!" The worst part was when Moniba would refuse to talk to me. Then I would get angry at her for being so angry at me! Sometimes these spats would last for days. Eventually I would miss her too much and I would take responsibility for the fight. (I seemed to always take the blame!) Then she would make a funny face, and we'd fall apart laughing and forget our differences. Until the next time another girl came between us. How could a place where I learned so much and laughed so much be bad?