Go Big Read- I Am Malala

As a privileged girl from the East Coast, attending one of the most prestigious universities in the world, hearing the story of Malala was incredibly eye opening. As an American, education has become a necessity, a constitutional right, and has veered more and more away from being considered a “privilege.” I can drop out of school with in seconds if I so desire, like the multi-billionaires that are Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates. That’s why plights such as Malala’s are so intriguing to me. Malala, a young girl of seventeen years old, the age of my naïve, college-applying, younger sister, was not given this freedom. Instead of sitting by ideally, she spoke out for this right and was shot in the head three times. To me, it’s incredibly saddening that this poor girl would have to suffer three bullet shots at point blank range and almost lose her life to be heard and understood, but that “shot heard round the world,” certainly did generate the necessary backing to make a change in funding girls’ education.

Malala grew up in a small village, the Swat Valley, in the terrorist and poverty stricken country of Pakistan. Malala, along with thousands of other young girls, were and still are restricted of basic human rights, like the right to attend school. Education, especially the education of women, is the “silver bullet to development,” states the co-founder of the Malala Fund, Shiza Shahid. It’s true, education leads to understanding and knowledge, which then leads to change and power. That’s what the Taliban and other controlling forces fear, a threat to their power, so they attempt to suppress it. It’s terrifying and upsetting to think that people are so crazy about their authority that they would shoot a seventeen-year-old girl for it, a girl who could’ve been my sister. Malala demonstrates a strength and power that we all possess within ourselves, a force to stand up for what we believe in and do anything to achieve it.