I am Malala

didn’t stop him. The governor of our province issued a statement that anyone who wanted to fight in Afghanistan against NATO forces was free to do so. Some 12,000 young men from Swat went to help the Taliban. Many never came back. They were most likely killed, but as there is no proof of death, their wives can’t be declared widows. It’s very hard on them. My father’s close friend Wahid Zaman’s brother and brother-in-law were among the many who went to Afghanistan. Their wives and children are still waiting for them. I remember visiting them and feeling their longing. Even so, it all seemed far, far away from our peaceful garden valley. Afghanistan is less than a hundred miles away, but to get there you have to go through Bajaur, one of the tribal areas between Pakistan and the border with Afghanistan.
    Bin Laden and his men fled to the White Mountains of Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan, where he had built a network of tunnels while fighting the Russians. They escaped through these and over the mountains into Kurram, another tribal agency. What we didn’t know then was that bin Laden came to Swat and stayed in a remote village for a year, taking advantage of the Pashtunwali hospitality code.
    Anyone could see that Musharraf was double-dealing, taking American money while still helping the jihadis – ‘strategic assets’, as the ISI calls them. The Americans say they gave Pakistan billions of dollars to help their campaign against al-Qaeda but we didn’t see a single cent. Musharraf built a mansion by Rawal Lake in Islamabad and bought an apartment in London. Every so often an important American official would complain that we weren’t doing enough and then suddenly some big fish would be caught. Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the mastermind of 9/11, was found in a house just a mile from the army chief ’s official residence in Rawalpindi. But President Bush kept praising Musharraf, inviting him to Washington and calling him his buddy. My father and his friends were disgusted. They said the Americans always preferred dealing with dictators in Pakistan.
    From an early age I was interested in politics and sat on my father’s knee listening to everything he and his friends discussed. But I was more concerned with matters closer to home – our own street to be exact. I told my friends at school about the rubbish-dump children and that we should help. Not everyone wanted to as they said the children were dirty and probably diseased, and their parents would not like them going to school with children like that. They also said it wasn’t up to us to sort out the problem. I didn’t agree. ‘We can sit by and hope the government will help but they won’t. If I can help support one or two children and another family supports one or two then between us we can help them all.’
    I knew it was pointless appealing to Musharraf. In my experience, if my father couldn’t help with matters like these, there was only one option. I wrote a letter to God. ‘Dear God,’ I wrote, ‘I know you see everything, but there are so many things that maybe, sometimes, things get missed, particularly now with the bombing in Afghanistan. But I don’t think you would be happy if you saw the children on my road living on a rubbish dump. God, give me strength and courage and make me perfect because I want to make this world perfect. Malala.’
    The problem was I did not know how to get it to him. Somehow I thought it needed to go deep into the earth, so first I buried it in the garden. Then I thought it would get spoilt, so I put it in a plastic bag. But that didn’t seem much use. We like to put sacred texts in flowing waters, so I rolled it up, tied it to a piece of wood, placed a dandelion on top and floated it in the stream which flows into the Swat River. Surely God would find it there.

7

    The Mufti Who Tried to Close Our School
    J UST IN FRONT of the school on Khushal Street, where I was born, was the house of a tall handsome mullah and his family. His name was Ghulamullah and he called himself a mufti , which means he is an Islamic scholar and authority on Islamic law, though my father complains that anyone with a turban can call themselves a maulana or mufti . The school was doing well, and my father was building an impressive reception with an arched entrance in the boy’s high school. For the first time my mother could buy nice clothes and even send out for food as she had dreamed of doing back in the village. But all