2º ESO - IES de Catabois - Ferrol (SPAIN)
In October 2012, the Taliban put a bullet in her head,
but they couldn’t silence her. Malala Yousafzai defends the right of school
attendance for women in her country, Pakistan, and raises her voice in
favour of every boys and girls right of Education.
Her fight and courage have been recognised with the
Nobel Peace Prize, shared with the Indian activist Kaliash Satyarthy, founder
of the N.G.O. “Global March against children work”.
Malala is 17, and the youngest person ever receiving a
Nobel Prize. But her fight started when
she was 11.
Now she is living in Birmingham (England) for safety and health reasons. There she wrote her memories (“Malala. My story”), where she remembers how everything started when the Taliban shot her when she was coming back home from school.
Now she is living in Birmingham (England) for safety and health reasons. There she wrote her memories (“Malala. My story”), where she remembers how everything started when the Taliban shot her when she was coming back home from school.
She has become a world symbol since, showing that
terrorists fear a girl with a book more than an army. She never gets tired of
repeating a sentence that could perfectly be her motto: “ A ballpen can change
the world”.
Another important sentence is the one that follows:
“Education is a source of power for women, and this is why terrorists are
afraid of it”. This is so true, because
education makes women more critical
towards unfair and discriminatory situations, and this makes them freer.
Many men all around the world, not only in
underdeveloped countries, fear the freedom that comes with education and try to
avoid it because the know that women play a crucial role in children education,
and so they could make them freer and more critical and then mankind as well.
The Nobel Prize has joined an Indian with a Muslim; an
Indian with a Pakistani; a diplomatic achievement not reached by war and
weapons, but by means of peace, effort, solidarity and books.
“The voice has power; people listen when we speak;
this is not about fighting terrorism with violence, but with words”. (Malala
Yousafsay).
This beautiful relationship between education and
values makes us recommend you a short movie by Javier Fesser , called “Binta y
la Gran Idea” (‘BINTA AND THE GREAT IDEA’).
Binta is an African girl that attends to school and is
eager to learn, but her cousin Soda doesn’t attend because her father wouldn’t
allow it, as he thinks that women, in Africa,
have to stay at home.
This boys and girls interest on learning, the joy of
being able to go to school in spite of their lack of means, makes us reflect.
We have everything, but we don’t value it. We just want to accumulate things
and get them without any effort.
Our welfare makes us think only on keeping, increasing
and defending it, even using weapons.
Rich countries have forgotten cooperation, solidarity,
the calm dedication of our time to others. Children in poor countries don’t
have economic means, but they have some values that we have left behind and
must find again for the good of all.
Binta’s father is a poor African fisherman, illiterate
because he has never had the chance to go to school; however, he has a lucid
mind and he realizes what is needed to fix the world.
One of the remarkable sentences in this short movie is
what follows: “Every child in the world has the right to get Education in a
friendly, tolerant, fraternal environment. Every child, even “tubab” (European)
children”.
Here comes his great idea: He will adopt an European
child so he can learn from Africans, because if the rich countries impose their
idea of progress to the poor ones, the mankind will go to self-destruction.
We can see an evident example of the western lost of
values in Ebola’s epidemic. We have focused on a piece of news published by “El
Periódico de Cataluña” about three articles previously published by The New
York Times (U.S.A.), Le Monde (France) and Il Corrierre della Sera (Italy)
about the Spanish nurse infected by the virus. We think that this could be the
headline:
‘EBOLA THREATENS
THE RICH WORLD’.
The three articles reflect the concern about the
epidemic getting to our rich and well-prepared countries. The New York Times
asks: “Are we ready, the western countries, to treat safely the infected
persons?” Il Corriere della Sera says:
“Ebola has left Africa and is starting to transmit in Europe”.
When the Ebola started spreading in Africa, nobody here was concerned
about people dying, but the instant the Spanish nurse was infected, rumours of
all sorts began and then we also began to worry about our safety. What this
means is that we don’t care what happens to others as long as it doesn’t come
to us.
We have to learn to share our economic and medical
achievements, along with all the good things we have, with the poor countries.
But we have to learn from them all the good they have and we’ve forgotten
about: cooperation, solidarity, calm, happiness…
Does Binta’s father idea look good to you?
We will leave here one of his sentences for you to
think about it: “We must learn from birds. They are so smart, they take the
best from the North and the best from the South”.
We would like to finish this article suggesting a
reading: The poem “El Sur también existe” (“The South also exists”) by Mario
Benedetti, wich could help us to wake our conscience up, and invites to mix up,
because we are all people, in spite of our differences.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
-
“A boy, a teacher,
a book, a pencil”. La Voz de Galicia, October 22nd. 2014.
-
“International
press focus on Ebola in Spain”.
El Periódico. Barcelona. October 7th 2014.
-
“Binta and the
Great Idea”, short movie by Javier Fesser, 2004, in collaboration with UNICEF.
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