Each life is gifted a voice

I neglected last week to acknowledge the remembrance for 9/11, when Al-Qaeda terrorists attacked our country. 

I am backtracking to include an excerpt from the book, “I Am Malala” — the young reader edition — which I read aloud to our 11-and 13-year-old grands on our recent camping trip. Malala is a then-15-year-old girl from Pakistan who was shot in the head in 2012 on her way home from the school her father had founded. The young man who shot her was from another Islamic terrorist group, the Taliban which did not think girls should go to school. Malala and her father boldly spoke against this ideology. 

"There it was in black and white. A death threat against me. I thought back to those mornings in 2009, when school first reopened and I had to walk to school with my books hidden under my scarf. I was so nervous in those days. But I had changed since then. I was three years older now. I had traveled and given speeches and won awards. I closed the computer and never looked at those words again. The worst had happened. I had been targeted by the Taliban. Now I would get back to doing what I was meant to do.   

“I might have been calm, but my dear father was near tears. ‘Aba,’ I said, trying to reassure him. ‘Everybody knows they will die someday. It doesn't matter if it comes from the Taliban or from cancer.’ 

"'Maybe we should stop campaigning for a while,’ he said. My proud, fearless Pashtun father was shaken in a way I'd never seen. It was one thing for him to be a target of the Taliban. He'd always said, ‘Let them kill me. I will die for what I believe in.’ But he had never imagined the Taliban would turn their wrath on a child. On me. 

"I knew my father would honor my wishes no matter what I decided. But there was no decision to make. This was my calling. Some powerful force had come to dwell inside me, something bigger and stronger than me, and it had made me fearless. 

"'Aba,’ I said, ‘You were the one who said if we believe in something greater than our lives, then our voices will only multiply, even if we are dead. We can't stop now.’ 

"On the trip back home, though, I asked myself what I would do if a Talib came to kill me. I thought: You must not treat others with cruelty. You must fight them with peace and dialogue. 

"'Malala,’ I said to myself, ‘Just tell him what is in your heart. That you want an education. For yourself. For all girls. For his sister, his daughter. For him.’ 

“That's what I would do. Then I would say, ‘Now you can do what you want.’” 

Malala's story — I am currently reading the adult version — is heroic. When she was flown for medical care to Birmingham, England — and finally told she'd been shot, she was furious. “Not that they'd shot me. That I hadn't had a chance to talk to them.” 

Each life is gifted a voice. Though Malala is short in stature, her voice has lifted far above her size. It has traveled the world. It has found me, in North Idaho. I hear it ask, directly, quietly, “What do you care about? How is your voice speaking?”