The Heroine of the Maladies

Malala Yousafzai is the girl we know as the youngest Nobel Peace Prize nominee in 2013 who fought for girls' education in her homeland Pakistan, and shot at the head by the Taliban one day after school. Her fearless memoir, I am Malala is a book voiced by a girl who loves her country so much in spite of what it has to offer her. In her tender age, she has chosen her battle: fighting for girls' right to education in her country, after seeing so many illiterate people in Pakistan living in endless misery. She was believed to be teaching westernization in a country so busy trying to fight for Islam, when all they do is straying away from the true teachings of the religion. In a culture so fond of sons, Malala stands taller and does so much more than what the sons of Pakistan can do. She has made some people back at home proud to have a daughter,and later on after the shooting she was referred to as the 'daughter of Pakistan'. She is only 16 when they nominate her to be the youngest ever Nobel laureate, and even though she might be small and young, she soars higher than other people much older than her. She didn't win, but that's alright. She's young, and there's still more battle for her to fight; the battle her idol, Benazir Bhutto, could not win as she was killed in a bombed accident. Reading her memoir broke my heart in ways I did not know possible. She believed in humanity, when people behead and slaughter other people in daylight; she fights for education, in a nation where all they could think about was how to build a good military system, winning over India and never turning into their poor neighbor, Afghanistan. It is such an atrocious world she lives in; but she proves that you don't have to be brutal to survive. As Ban Ki-Moon stated, "By targeting her, extremists showed what they feared most: a girl with a book."