Saturday 11 October 2014

Malala Yousafzai


Malala Yousafzai: ‘Nobel award is for all the voiceless children’

At 17, campaigner Malala, the schoolgirl the Taliban could not silence, becomes youngest Nobel peace prize recipient

Pakistani rights activist Malala Yousafz
Pakistani rights activist Malala Yousafzai, stands with her father Ziauddin Yousafzai, as she holds bouquets of flowers after her Nobel peace prize win. Photograph: Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty Images
Malala Yousafzai once wrote: “We realise the importance of our voices only when we are silenced. I was shot on a Tuesday at lunchtime, one bullet, one gunshot heard around the world.”
Two years and a day after her attempted assassination by Taliban gunmen, that shot continued to reverberate with the Nobel committee’s announcement that the 17-year-old Pakistani schoolgirl is to share the peace prize, its youngest recipient ever.

When the news broke, Malala was in a chemistry class at Edgbaston high school for girls, Birmingham, far away from the mountain-fringed city of Mingora in the picturesque Swat valley where she was born, and where she began her outspoken campaign for the right to education, and where she almost died on 9 October 2012.

Malala – a name now instantly recognisable worldwide – shares the 8m kronor (£690,000) prize with Kailash Satyarthi, 60, an Indian child rights campaigner, as both are lauded for their “struggle against the suppression of children and young people”.
Malala’s campaign, noted the Nobel committee, has been carried out “under the most dangerous circumstances”, and it places her alongside previous recipients Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King and Aung San Suu Kyi.

Congratulations to Malala Yousafzai!

She is still a teen-ager, and she has done something so important and great, that nobody will ever forget her.  Taliban has drawn the attention to this girl and to all the girls who are not allowed to go to school.

4 comments:

Dina said...

God bless Malala and her cause!

Miss_Yves said...

Un beau et noble combat : puisse-t-il aboutir,grâce à son courage et avec tous ceux qui la soutiendront!

Sylvia K said...

Bless Malala and her cause indeed!! What an incredible young woman!! Thank you so much, Wil, for sharing this with us today!!

Sallie (FullTime-Life) said...

Thank you Wil. I was happy to read the news about this brave young woman the other day and I love reading your beautifully-expressed thoughts.

i didn't know she was in class when the Prize was announced. That certainly calls attention to how young she really is! And of course how wonderful it is that she can continue her education!

(Just as a lighter aside, can you imagine how intimidating it must be for the other students in her class to know that they have a Nobel Prize Winner in the next desk?)