Tonight's activity was a somber and yet inspiring evening. With events such as the recent election and the upcoming Veterans Day and Thanksgiving holidays, we decided to take a good hard look at all of the wonderful freedoms we have here in America and take some time out of our busy schedules to pay particular thanks to those individuals who have made our freedom possible.
While it's a splendid but rather obvious thing to write letters to soldiers or veterans, we took it a step further. The story of Malala Yousafzai was told. A girl whose story is certainly not over.
Information on Malala can be found almost anywhere online. There are blogs and articles and videos everywhere! But here are some excerpts that were shared this evening, taken from writers Sherhbano Taseer and Dera Islamail Khan:
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The teenage girls chatted to each other and their teachers as the school bus rattled along the country road. Students from a girls' high school in Swat, they had just finished a term paper, and their joy was evident as they broke into another Pashto song. About a mile outside the city of Mingora, two men flagged down and boarded the bus, one of them pulling out a gun.
"Which one of you is Malala Yousafzai?" he demanded.
No one spoke -- some out of loyalty, others out of fear. But, unconsciously, their eyes turned to Malala.
"That's the one," the gunman said, looking at the 15-year-old girl in the face and pulling the trigger twice, shooting her in the head and neck. He fired twice more, wounding two other girls, and then both men fled the scene.
Over the screams and tears of the girls, a teacher instructed the bus driver to drive to a local hospital a few miles away. She stared in horror at Malala's body, bleeding profusely and slumped unconscious in her friend's lap, then closed her eyes and started to pray.
As of this writing (mid October 2012) Malala fights for her life at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, England. Her would-be killers have not yet been caught. But it's clear who bears responsibility. And, in the days since the Oct. 9 assault on her, sadness, fury, and indignation have swept the world.
For months a team of Taliban sharpshooters studied the daily route that Malala took to school, and, once the attack was done, the Tehrik-e-Talibam in Pakistan gleefully claimed responsibility, saying Malala was an American spy who idolized the "black devil Obama." She had spoken against the Taliban, they falsely said, and vowed to shoot her again, should she survive.
What the attack on Malala makes clear is that this is really a battle over education.
Malala was only 11 when she started blogging entries from her diary for the Urdu-language website of the BBC. Her nom de plume was Gul Makai, meaning cornflower in Pashto and the name of the heroine of many local folk stories. A star student with olive skin, bushy eyebrows, and intense brown eyes, Malala wrote about life under Taliban rule; how she hid her schoolbooks under her shawl and how she kept reading even after the Taliban outlawed school for girls. In an entry from January 2009 she wrote: "Today our teacher told us not to wear colorful dress that might make Taliban angry." She wrote about walking past the headless bodies of those who had defied the radicals, and about a boy named Anis who, brainwashed by the Taliban, blew himself up at a security checkpoint. He was 16 years old.
Encouraged by her father, Ziauddin, a schoolmaster, Malala quickly became known as she spoke out on the right to an education. Ziauddin has two sons also, but he told friends it was his daughter who had a unique spark. She wanted to study medicine, but he persuaded her that when the time came she should enter politics, so she might help create a more progressive society -- at the heart of which was education for all. In Pakistan, 25 million children are out of school, and the country has the lowest youth literacy rate in the world.
In three short years, Malala became the chairperson of the District Child Assembly in Swat, was nominated and runner-up for the International Children's Peace Prize by Desmond Tutu, and won Pakistan's first National Youth Peace Prize. More recently, she started to organize the Malala Education Foundation, a fund to ensure poor girls from Swat could go to school.
Former British prime minister Gordon Brown said the attack had given rise to a children's movement, with children proudly wearing, "I am Malala" t-shirts and defiantly asserting their rights.
"Young people are seeing through the hypocrisy of . . . their leaders [who] deny millions of girls and boys the opportunity to rise," Brown said in an email. "For one Malala shot and silenced, there are now thousands of younger Malalas who cannot be kept quiet."
There is talk now in Pakistan of further military sweeps of militant strongholds. But it is clear that the solution cannot be purely military. The government must address the root causes of terrorism as Malala argues:
"If the new generation is not given pens, they will be given guns by the terrorists. We must raise our voice."
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I strongly encourage you to read more on Malala and her enduring courage. And to take a few moments or more to think about what your education and schooling means to you. It would be naive to think that every girl is permitted to wake up, put on a colorful scarf, and head off to school with no danger of being shot on the way. We now know that there are places where children do not complain about having to wake up early or attend their classes or do their homework because to be allowed to take part in these activities is a rare and precious commodity.
We, as girls and women, are so very blessed to live where we do. To have the opportunities to learn and grow without the kind of serious oppression that Malala has had to deal with and will continue to deal with as she perseveres with a target on her back.
Malala is doing well, recuperating from this traumatic ordeal.
On October 25th, 16 days after she was shot, Malala spoke on the
phone to her father and asked for books. She also vowed that she would
be back in Pakistan soon. Taliban threats notwithstanding.
If you were unable to be at the activity tonight, please consider writing Malala a letter of thanks. Let her know what her story means to you. You can give your letter to Sister Anderson. If you put it in an envelope, please keep it unsealed as it will be combined with other letters to be sent as one. It will be kept private.
Even a simple thank you card will do wonders in showing Malala that she is recognized, appreciated, and supported in her endeavors to fight for her right to an education.
There is a 30 minute documentary about Malala and her hometown on youtube. It was not shown at the activity as it contains graphic images depicting what the Taliban can do. If you are interested, please consider it prayerfully and share your thoughts with your parents. It can be frightening, this world, but people like 15-year-old Malala Yousafzai are sacrificing their time, energy, and even their safety to change that!
It's not what we would die for that keeps us enduring to the end. It's what we would live for.
