I am Malala

printed it out and brought it in to show my father.
    ‘It’s very good,’ he said with a knowing smile.
    I wanted to tell people it was me, but the BBC correspondent had told me not to as it could be dangerous. I didn’t see why as I was just a child and who would attack a child? But some of my friends recognised incidents in it. And I almost gave the game away in one entry when I said, ‘My mother liked my pen name Gul Makai and joked to my father we should change my name . . . I also like the name because my real name means “grief-stricken”.’
    The diary of Gul Makai received attention further afield. Some newspapers printed extracts. The BBC even made a recording of it using another girl’s voice, and I began to see that the pen and the words that come from it can be much more powerful than machine guns, tanks or helicopters. We were learning how to struggle. And we were learning how powerful we are when we speak.
    Some of our teachers stopped coming to school. One said he had been ordered by Mullah Fazlullah to help build his centre in Imam Deri. Another said he’d seen a beheaded corpse on the way in and could no longer risk his life to teach. Many people were scared. Our neighbours said the Taliban were instructing people to make it known to the mosque if their daughters were unmarried so they could be married off, probably to militants.
    By the start of January 2009 there were only ten girls in my class when once there had been twenty-seven. Many of my friends had left the valley so they could be educated in Peshawar, but my father insisted we would not leave. ‘Swat has given us so much. In these tough days we must be strong for our valley,’ he said.
    One night we all went for dinner at the house of my father’s friend Dr Afzal, who runs a hospital. After dinner, when the doctor was driving us home, we saw masked Taliban on both sides of the road carrying guns. We were terrified. Dr Afzal’s hospital was in an area that had been taken over by the Taliban. The constant gunfire and curfews had made it impossible for the hospital to function, so he had moved it to Barikot. There had been an outcry, and the Taliban spokesman Muslim Khan had called on the doctor to reopen it. He had asked for my father’s advice. My father told him, ‘Don’t accept good things from bad people.’ A hospital protected by the Taliban was not a good idea so he refused.
    Dr Afzal did not live far from us, so once we were safely home, my father insisted on going back with him in case he was targeted by the Taliban. As he and my father drove back, Dr Afzal nervously asked him, ‘What names shall we give if they stop us?’
    ‘You are Dr Afzal and I am Ziauddin Yousafzai,’ replied my father. ‘These bloody people. We haven’t done anything wrong. Why should we change our names – that’s what criminals do.’
    Fortunately the Taliban had disappeared. We all breathed a big sigh of relief when my father phoned to say they were safe.
    I didn’t want to give in either. But the Taliban’s deadline was drawing closer: girls had to stop going to school. How could they stop more than 50,000 girls from going to school in the twenty-first century? I kept hoping something would happen and the schools would remain open. But finally the deadline was upon us. We were determined that the Khushal School bell would be the last to stop ringing. Madam Maryam had even got married so she could stay in Swat. Her family had moved to Karachi to get away from the conflict and, as a woman, she could not live alone.
    Wednesday 14 January was the day my school closed, and when I woke up that morning I saw TV cameras in my bedroom. A Pakistani journalist called Irfan Ashraf was following me around, even as I said my prayers and brushed my teeth.
    I could tell my father was in a bad mood. One of his friends had persuaded him to participate in a documentary for the New York Times website to show the world what was happening to us. A few weeks before, we had met the American video journalist Adam Ellick in Peshawar. It was a funny meeting as he conducted a long interview with my father in English and I didn’t say a word. Then he asked if he could talk to me and began asking questions using Irfan as an interpreter. After about ten minutes of this he realised from my facial expressions that I could understand him perfectly. ‘You speak English?’ he asked me.
    ‘Yes, I was just saying there is a fear in my heart,’ I replied.
    Adam was