1 No Party for Malala Ziauddin Yousafzai was over the moon On the hot sticky morning of July 12 1997 his wife gave birth to their first child a beautiful bouncing baby girl Over the next few days he was so excited that he told everyone he met about the new addition to his family People were polite but confused It's a girl Why was he so happy and proud After all his wife had a baby girl The thing is in Pakistan even today from the second they enter the world boys and girls are mostly treated very differently When a baby boy is born the family celebrates Guns are fired up into the sky and visitors come to coo over the cradle and cram it with sweets and money But when a baby girl is born no gunshots no gifts people don’t even bother to visit Instead they sympathize with the poor mother and hope for her sake that her next child will be a boy 4
Girls play as important a role in Pakistan as they do anywhere else in the world but some families see raising girls as a financial burden Girls aren’t allowed allowed to go out to work and provide for their families like boys do and it can cost over a million rupees about 15,000 to marry a daughter off Most girls spend their lives at home being wives and mothers cooking and looking after the house and their children And for some reason that doesn’t seem as important as earning a regular income This is the way it’s been for hundreds of years which is why Ziauddin’s celebrating his daughter was so unusual That's my dad for you With a different set of parents I'd probably be married with at least two babies by now To get to know me you need to understand them first High Flying Ziauddin Ziauddin had a habit of challenging tradition that started when he was a boy and brother to five sisters While he and his older brother went off to school the girls stayed at home and learned how to run a house so that when they got married and 5
had families of their own they’d know what to do Ziauddin thought this seemed really unfair and as soon as he was old enough he planned to do something about it But my dad had a really bad stutter which made speaking in public unbelievably scary In spite of his stutter Ziauddin entered a public speaking competition He practiced practiced and practiced and practiced until he knew his speech so well he could recite it in his sleep When the day of the competition rolled around Ziauddin was terrified A-hem But then he spoke and something amazing happened his anxiety melted away and he made it to the end of his speech without stuttering once 6
He even won first prize After that there was no stopping him Ziauddin’s dad saw a great future ahead for his son but it wasn’t the future Ziauddin had planned for himself Dad Dad I got into college To study medicine Shaheen I'm so proud No to study English I want to open a school for boys and girls If Ziauddin didn’t want to be a doctor his dad wasn’t going to pay his living expenses That meant Ziauddin couldn’t afford college 7
