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We wait anxiously to hear from universities about how the household teenagers’ applications have gone for the chance to study later in 2013. And if we hold our breaths for a while that’s okay. In the meantime, competing for hero status, is Miss Yousafzai – discharged today from Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham after an emergency flight from Pakistan to bring her back from the brink of death after a cowardly murder attempt by ignorant, frightened men in the Swat Valley.
That Malala’s father Ziauddin has been employed by the Pakistani Consulate in Birmingham is very satisfactory too, as it means the romantic notion of her actions is very practically matched by the family’s government to assist his efforts to support his daughter. His character is eloquently shown in his statement to the effect that as she fell, the world stood and said enough!
We place a significant burden on the shoulders of our children to succeed. Malala Yousafzai quite likely didn’t ask for this particular burden to be placed on her, and yet it’s fallen to her to carry it for everybody from Asian daughters to Nobel adjudicators.
Nobody has ever stood up to deny my children an education, much less at gunpoint, and I’m not sure how I would react. In the old Johannesburg days – when my myopia and innate sense of foul play led me to carry the biggest, loudest and baddest gun I could buy – it would have been simpler because I would have just shot first… or more… or more cleverly… or whatever. But looking from a civilized society into a mediaeval maelstrom makes it much less straightforward.
One can be hopeful that size matters in a primeval world, and that being so, this family are giants in my view. If you pray, vote or pull a wishbone now and again, I urge you to keep the Yousafzais in your thoughts. Their place in history is assured, but their well-being is not as assured, I fear.