I Am Malala

The day my world changed began like any other. It was a Tuesday in October, the middle of exam season, and the school bus was hot and sticky. We girls sat cramped on the benches, our exam folders clutched to our chests, gossiping and laughing as the white van rumbled along the familiar roads of Mingora. Then, just past the deserted cricket ground, we stopped. A young man with a handkerchief over his face leaned into the back of the van, his eyes scanning our faces. “Who is Malala?” he demanded. No one spoke, but in a flicker of movement, several heads turned toward me. I was the only girl with her face uncovered. That's when he raised a black pistol. My friends say he fired three shots. The first tore through my left eye socket and out under my shoulder. I slumped forward, and the world went dark.

I was born in a land where rifles are fired to celebrate the birth of a son, while daughters are hidden behind a curtain. But my father, Ziauddin, was different. When I was born, he looked into my eyes and fell in love. He added my name to the family tree, a document stretching back 300 years that contained only the names of men. Our home was in the Swat Valley, a heavenly kingdom of mountains and waterfalls that people called the Switzerland of the East. It was a place of wild flowers and fruit orchards, of ancient Buddhist statues carved into the rock, smiling over our valley. I grew up in the school my father founded, the Khushal School. It was my playground, and before I could even talk, I would toddle into the classrooms and pretend to teach. My father always told me, “Malala will be free as a bird.”

My father's own freedom had been a struggle. Born with a stutter, the son of an impatient, thundering imam, he found his voice by entering a public speaking competition, pouring all his passion into the words his father wrote for him. That first victory gave him the courage to follow his own path. He dreamed of an education that was not about learning by rote, but about thinking for oneself. He built his school from nothing, facing down corrupt officials and crushing debt. He and my mother, who could not read or write, created a home filled with love, poetry, and endless political discussions. They were a love match in a world of arranged marriages, and I would sit at my father's knee, listening as he and his friends debated the fate of our country, a nation lurching between military dictatorships and fragile democracy.

I was ten when the Taliban came to our valley. They arrived like vampires in the night, men with long, straggly hair and Kalashnikovs. Their leader, Maulana Fazlullah, started an illegal radio station, Mullah FM, that soon had everyone under its spell. At first, he sounded like a reformer, advising people on good habits and the proper way to pray. My own mother was impressed. But his broadcasts soon turned dark. Music was declared sinful, then dancing, then movies. He thundered that these acts had caused the great earthquake and that God's wrath would return if we did not mend our ways. Huge bonfires of televisions, CDs, and DVDs filled the streets with black smoke. His words were aimed especially at women, ordering us to stay in purdah, to remain inside.

The valley became a place of fear. Fazlullah's men patrolled the streets, looking for anyone who disobeyed his edicts. They began to target girls' education, congratulating girls by name on the radio for dropping out of school. “Miss So-and-so has stopped going to school and will go to heaven,” he would say. Then they started blowing up the schools themselves, usually at night, their explosions echoing through the mountains. Soon, more than four hundred schools were destroyed. The fear was a thick fog that settled over our town. Bodies began appearing in the main square, left overnight as a warning. We called it the Bloody Square. Still, my father refused to be silent. “If we believe in something greater than our lives,” he told me, “then our voices will only multiply even if we are dead.”

I knew he was right. If one man could destroy everything, why couldn't one girl change it? When a BBC correspondent asked my father to find a schoolgirl to write a diary about life under the Taliban, I volunteered. I wrote under the name Gul Makai, or “cornflower,” telling the world about the dream I had of military helicopters and the Taliban, and the fear I felt walking to school. I wrote about how we had to wear plain clothes instead of our uniforms and hide our books under our shawls. My words traveled far beyond Swat, and I began giving interviews, speaking out for the rights of all girls to an education. “They can stop us going to school,” I said, “but they can't stop us from learning.”

The threats grew more direct. A letter was taped to our school gate. My father received warnings. His friend and fellow activist, Zahid Khan, was shot in the face on his way to prayers. I began checking the locks on our doors and windows every night before bed, praying for protection. I worried a terrorist would jump out and shoot me on the steps leading to our house. I wondered what I would do. It would be better, I thought, to plead with him. “OK, shoot me, but first listen to me. What you are doing is wrong. I'm not against you personally, I just want every girl to go to school.”

After the shooting, I woke up in a green room with bright lights and no windows. I was in Birmingham, England. A tube in my neck kept me from speaking, and my vision was a blur of double images. I was terrified. Where was I? Where was my father? I spelled out his name on an alphabet board, my hand shaking. The doctors told me he was safe in Pakistan, but I didn't believe them. I was sure he was dead, and I was alone. For ten days, I drifted in and out of consciousness, convinced I had to find work to pay for my treatment and for a phone call home.

When my family finally arrived, I wept with a relief so profound it felt as if my heart might burst. But when I looked at them, I saw their shock. My father, who had always praised my “heavenly smile,” now saw a face that could not form one. The left side was paralyzed, my eye wouldn't close, and my hair had been shaved away. “The Taliban are very cruel,” he cried to my mother. “They have snatched her smile.” It would take months of surgery and rehabilitation - to repair the facial nerve, to fit a titanium plate where my skull had been removed, to install a cochlear implant so I could hear again - before I began to feel like myself.

I have been given a second life, and I know it was for a reason. While I was in the hospital, the world had risen up. Thousands of letters and cards arrived, addressed simply to “The Girl Shot in the Head, Birmingham.” The UN declared my birthday, July 12, as Malala Day. The Taliban made my voice louder. I don't want to be known as the girl who was shot, but as the girl who fought for education. Today, I live in a quiet house in England, a place of unimaginable safety, but I long for the mountains and streams of my valley. I know I will return one day. Until then, I will continue my fight. We have been spared, I believe, to use our lives for helping people. As I said at the United Nations, “Let us pick up our books and our pens. They are our most powerful weapons. One child, one teacher, one book and one pen can change the world.” My world has changed, but I have not. I am Malala.