INTRODUCTION

A Choice to BeMade

Malala was only fifteen years old. After boarding the bus that would bring her home from school, she took her seat and bantered with classmates about the exam they had just taken and perhaps the homework to be completed before the day’s end. Education was more than just important to Malala; it was in her blood. Her father was an executive administrator for a learning institution in the city while her grandfather was a high school theology teacher. When Malala was but a mere toddler her father would bring her to his school where she would pretend to teach, waving her arms and babbling incoherent baby noises because she hadn’t learned to talk yet. Even now as a teenager, Malala still cared deeply about school and enjoyed the company of other kids who appreciated the liberating power of learning as much as she did.

Malala, however, was not an ordinary teenager, and the 9th of October 2012 would not be an ordinary day. She was the primary target of an armed gunman who stopped her bus as it proceeded along its route. Boarding the bus, a menacing bearded man scanned the faces of the children. Malala knew exactly who the man was and why he was there. As he barked out her name, she looked up and stared him directly in the eyes. He recognized her and Malala knew it. Crippled by fear, she gripped her friend’s hand so tight that her friend would later report thatit still hurt days later. The man found what he was looking for. Time stoodstill.

The bullet that penetrated Malala’s skull arrived before the sound of the gunshot, ripping a hole in her left temple, grazing her eye, lacerating her facial nerve, collapsing her left eardrum, and breaking her jaw before exiting the back of her head and lodging into her shoulder. Unconscious, she slumped into her friend’s lap. High-velocity blood-spatter stained the white walls of the bus as the shooter fled the scene.

According to a report byThe Guardian, the motive for killing Malala Yousafzai was recounted by a spokesman for the Taliban who complained that “the teenager’s work had been an ‘obscenity’ that needed to be stopped.”

The so-called obscenity for which Malala was targeted was her demand that her right to an education be respected. Living in the beautiful Swat Valley of northwest Pakistan, her community was overrun by a Taliban insurgency that, among its many atrocities, banned girls from attending school with promises of killing them if they disobeyed. A campaign by the Pakistani army to drive the Taliban out of the valley was underway and young Malala sought to support the campaign by attracting attention to what the Taliban were doing to her people.

So, she began writing a blog hosted by the British Broadcasting Company that attracted an international following. She told the story of how the Taliban burned down schools for girls and sought to bolster its own power and twisted ideology by accelerating the socioecono