Sunday Times 2
‘Now I am not afraid’
For one month the dreams kept coming. The voice, the shots, the blood. Her friend Malala slumped over.
Shazia Ramazan, 13, who was wounded by the same Taliban gunman who shot her friend Malala Yousufzai, returned home last week after a month in a hospital, where she had to relearn how to use her left arm and hand. Memories of the Taliban bullets that ripped into her remain, but she is welcoming the future.
‘For a long time it seemed fear was in my heart. I couldn’t stop it,’ she said. ‘
Recovering well: Shazia Ramazan, 13, returns to her home in Mingora, Swat Valley, Pakistan
But now I am not afraid,’ she added, self-consciously rubbing her left hand where a bullet pierced straight through just below the thumb.
Now Shazia and her friend Kainat Riaz, who was also shot, return to school for the first time since the October 8 attack when a Taliban gunman opened fire on Malala outside the Khushal School for Girls, wounding Shazia and Kainat in the frenzy of bullets.
The Taliban targeted Malala because of her outspoken and relentless objection to the group’s regressive interpretation of Islam that keeps women at home and bars girls from school.
Malala is still undergoing treatment and unable to come back. But among her friends in her hometown of Mingora in the idyllic Swat Valley, she is a hero.
‘Malala was very brave and she was always friendly with everyone. We are proud of her,’ said the 16-year-old Kainat, wrapped in a large purple shawl and sitting on a traditional rope bed.
Her mother Manawar, a health worker, sat by her side, praised her daughter’s bravery and with a smile said: ‘She gets her courage from me.’
Although conservative and refusing to have her picture taken, Kainat’s mother slammed attacks on girls’ education and warned Pakistan will fail if girls are not educated.
Quick to laugh, Kainat – who comes from a long line of educators in her family – looked forward to returning to school. ‘I want to study. I am not afraid,’ she said.
The authorities however are not taking any chances. Armed policemen have been deployed to both Shazia’s and Kainat’s home and will escort them both to school.
Kainat’s home is hidden behind high walls with 8ft-high steel gates, tucked away in a neighbourhood of brown square cement buildings. A foul smelling sewer runs the length of the street where armed policemen patrol, eyeing everyone suspiciously.
Outside Shazia’s home, a policeman wearing a bullet proof vest sits on a plastic garden chair with a Kalashnikov resting across his knees. Three policemen patrol a nearby narrow street that is flanked by roaring open fires where vats of hot oil boil and sticky sweets are made and sold.
Shazia, who has ambitions to become an army doctor, is a stubborn teenager. She doesn’t want the police escort.
‘They say I need the police. But I say I don’t need any police,’ she said, pushing her glasses firmly back on her nose. ‘I don’t want the police to come with me to school because then I will stand out from the other students. But I shouldn’t.’
At their school, the students are quick to attack the Taliban and display a giant poster of Malala. The school, which has more than 500 students, only closed its doors briefly at the height of the Taliban’s hold on the region in 2008 and early 2009. It was then that Malala began to blog, recording her unhappiness with Taliban edicts ordering girls out of school.
Although she was barely nine-years-old then, Shazia remembers those days.’Times were very bad. Girls were hiding their books under their burqas. Compared to then, now is a very good time,’ she said, her pink shawl covering her head. ‘We are strong.’
© Daily Mail, London
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