Name:
Class:
(adapted from Scholastic Scope magazine)
Malala the Brav Brave e BY KRISTIN LEWIS
On October 9, 2012, Malala Yousafzai, 15, was sitting calmly on a school bus with her classmates waiting to go home when a gunman boarded the bus. “Which one of you is Malala? Speak up, otherwise I will shoot you all!” all!” he demanded angrily. The students were terrified. The gunmen opened fire. One bullet pierced Malala’s Malala’s head near her left eye. eye. Two Two of her friends were shot in their arms. Then the gunmen fled, leaving her to die. The hours following the shooting were a nightmare. nightmare. Malala’s friends were not badly injured, but she was. The bullet had destroyed her left ear and sent fragments of her skull into her brain tissue, causing her brain to swell dangerously. Miraculously, she lived. She was flown to a military hospital in Peshawar, Peshawar, then to Birmingham, where doctors worked tirelessly to save her. Why would anyone try to murder a schoolgirl on a bus? Malala is from the Swat Valley in Pakistan, a place controlled by the Taliban, a group who ordered all girls’ schools schools there to close in January 2009. But Malala used her voice to speak out about this. She wrote a blog about living in Swat and how hard it was to go to school in Swat. She wrote honestly about her dream of becoming a doctor one day, and how she would get the education she needed even though she was afraid of the Taliban. People all over the world read her blog. She appeared on television and spoke powerfully to Pakistani children. Her message was always: all children deserve the right to an education . Because Malala inspired other children, she became a target of the Taliban. Around 132 million children and teenagers around the world do not attend school, often because they must work to help support their families, or because they have no school to go to. Malala hopes to change that. Her dream is to see a world in which all children, including girls, can get the education they need to become whatever they want – want – from from doctors and scientists to politicians and journalists. In March 2013, she started high school in Birmingham in the UK. When talking to news reporters on her first day at school, she spoke clearly and confidently even though she had not fully recovered. “Today, I am wearing a uniform,” she said proudly. “It is important, because it proves that I am a student. It is the happiest day for me because I am living my life, I am going to school, I am learning.”
