“Yes, Malala, you were shot,” she told herself.
She thought back to her dreams – of lying on a stretcher, being in some distant place far from home and school – and realized that they weren’t dreams, but recollections.
“The nurses and doctors, everyone was speaking in English,” she recalls. “I realized that now I am not in Pakistan.”
All Malala Yousafzai wanted was to go to school.
But she lived in an area of Pakistan, the Swat Valley, where the Taliban had effectively taken over governance, and imposed its harsh ideology – of no music, no visible women, and certainly no girls in school.
For defying their will, and refusing to stay silent, the Taliban tried to murder Malala, then a 15-year-old girl.
Miraculously, she survived, and has continued speaking truth to power about education, extremism, and equality.
