Malala Yousafzai Is The Youngest Ever Nobel Peace Prize Winner Source/Image: vogue #bringbackourgirls In light of Malala Yousafzai’s Nobel Peace Prize, here, is a photo portfolio of everyday heroism in the form of young girls around the world going to school. Malala Yousafzai won the Nobel Peace Prize, October 10, 2014. Yousafzai is the seventeen-year-old girl from Pakistan who, almost two years ago exactly, when she was fifteen, was shot in the head by the Taliban while riding a bus to school. Yousafzai recounted the events in a book she published last year, at the age of sixteen: The gunman boarded the bus and asked, “Who is Malala?” Then he fired. Yousafzai has responded to the question, of course, by campaigning for the education of girls, byaddressing the United Nations, and by titling her awe-inspiring memoir I am Malala. When she traveled to the United States last year to spread word about the book, she stopped by The Daily Show. “It’s honestly humbling to meet you,” an almost dumfounded Jon Stewart said. “You are sixteen. Where did your love for education come from?” “We are human beings,” an astonishingly composed Yousafzai said. “And this is the part of our human nature, that we don’t learn the importance of anything until it’s snatched from our hands. And when, in Pakistan, when we were stopped from going to school, at that time, I realized that education is very important. And education is the power for women. And that’s why the terrorists are afraid of education. They do not want women to get education. Because then women will become more powerful.” “These abducted schoolgirls are my sisters,” Malala Yousafzai told Nicholas Kristof in his New York Times column about the April 15 kidnapping of 276 teenage schoolgirls in northern Nigeria by extremist Muslim group Boko Haram. The threat of violence by the Boko Haram is so severe in Nigeria that schools in the area closed this past March. But this school was different—it bravely reopened its doors so that these schoolgirls could take their final exams. Completing their education would make it possible for them to become teachers, doctors, and lawyers—professions, in other words, that could create change in a country that desperately needs it. Malala—wise beyond her sixteen years, who survived a bullet to her head after expressing her wish to become a doctor in Pakistan—is right. Those schoolgirls are her sisters. And they are our sisters, too. For whatever life you lead, however many miles away from what can feel like just another headline in the newspaper, these schoolgirls represent the reality and the challenges of becoming an educated woman in today’s world. A fact that one desperately wishes weren’t true. It is impossible to imagine the courage it takes to wake up every day and be one of those schoolgirls. To realize that each day spent in the classroom is to risk your life. Your future is so unknown as a teenager. But no woman should feel in danger to her right for an education. Here is a collection of photographs from across the globe show young women whose mere presence in the classroom is part of the fight for the human right to the freedom to use their minds, to be considered equals with their peers. #bringbackourgirls
Posted on: Sun, 12 Oct 2014 06:26:50 +0000
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