I am Malala

When I complained about my books my brothers whined about their chickens.
    We’d heard on the radio that the army had started the battle for Mingora. They had parachuted in soldiers and there had been hand-to-hand fighting in the streets. The Taliban were using hotels and government buildings as bunkers. After four days the military took three squares including Green Chowk, where the Taliban used to display the beheaded bodies of their victims. Then they captured the airport and in a week they had taken back the city.
    We continued to worry about my father. In Shangla it was hard to find a mobile phone signal. We had to climb onto a huge boulder in a field, and even then we rarely had more than one bar of reception so we hardly ever spoke to him. But after we had been in Shangla for about six weeks, my father said we could travel to Peshawar, where he had been staying in one room with three friends.
    It was very emotional to see him again. Then, a complete family once more, we travelled down to Islamabad, where we stayed with the family of Shiza, the lady who had called us from Stanford. While we were there we heard that Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, the American envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan, was holding a meeting in the Serena Hotel about the conflict, and my father and I managed to get inside.
    We almost missed it as I hadn’t set the alarm properly so my father was barely speaking to me. Holbrooke was a big gruff man with a red face but people said he had helped bring peace to Bosnia. I sat next to him and he asked me how old I was. ‘I am twelve,’ I replied, trying to look as tall as possible. ‘Respected Ambassador, I request you, please help us girls to get an education,’ I said.
    He laughed. ‘You already have lots of problems and we are doing lots for you,’ he replied. ‘We have pledged billions of dollars in economic aid; we are working with your government on providing electricity, gas . . . but your country faces a lot of problems.’
    I did an interview with a radio station called Power 99. They liked it very much and told us they had a guesthouse in Abbottabad where we could all go. We stayed there for a week and to my joy I heard Moniba was also in Abbottabad, as was one of our teachers and another friend. Moniba and I had not spoken since our fight on the last day before becoming IDPs. We arranged to meet in a park, and I brought her Pepsi and biscuits. ‘It was all your fault,’ she told me. I agreed. I didn’t mind; I just wanted to be friends.
    Our week at the guesthouse soon ended and we went to Haripur, where one of my aunts lived. It was our fourth city in two months. I knew we were better off than those who lived in the camps, queuing for food and water for hours under the hot sun, but I missed my valley. It was there I spent my twelfth birthday. Nobody remembered. Even my father forgot, he was so busy hopping about. I was upset and recalled how different my eleventh birthday had been. I had shared a cake with my friends. There were balloons and I had made the same wish I was making on my twelfth birthday, but this time there was no cake and there were no candles to blow out. Once again I wished for peace in our valley.

PART THREE

    Three Girls, Three Bullets

    Sir de pa lowara tega kegda
Praday watan de paki nishta balakhtona
    O Wayfarer! Rest your head on the stony cobblestone
It is a foreign land – not the city of your kings!

16

    The Valley of Sorrows
    I T ALL SEEMED like a bad dream. We had been away from our valley for almost three months and as we drove back past
    Churchill’s Picket, past the ancient ruins on the hill and the giant Buddhist stupa, we saw the wide Swat River and my father began to weep. Swat seemed to be under complete military control. The vehicle we were in even had to pass through an explosives check before we could head up the Malakand Pass. Once we got over the other side and down into the valley it seemed there were army checkpoints everywhere and soldiers had made nests for their machine guns on so many of the rooftops.
    As we drove through villages we saw buildings in ruins and burned-out vehicles. It made me think of old war movies or the video games my brother Khushal loves to play. When we reached Mingora we were shocked. The army and Taliban had fought street to street and almost every wall was pockmarked with bullet holes. There was the rubble of blown-up buildings which the Taliban had used as hideouts, and piles of wreckage,