We Are Displaced: My Journey and Stories From Refugee Girls Around the World by Malala Yousafzai

Author:Malala Yousafzai
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette UK
Published: 2019-01-08T00:00:00+00:00

I finished my first year of secondary school. But in 2012, my sister’s husband, a soldier, was murdered. Immediately after that, my friend and neighbor burned herself alive on purpose. One of her brothers had heard that she had a boyfriend and told her father. She was so scared that she said there was no choice but death.

When I saw her run out of her home, engulfed in flames, something broke inside me. I couldn’t focus on my education at all. I was miserable.

I went back to school in 2013 and felt that I was becoming a whole person again. I was determined to finish secondary school and go to college.

But in August 2014, ISIS shattered those dreams.

We had heard stories about Daesh, another name for ISIS, kidnapping women and doing terrible things to them. Age did not matter. Children, old women. They targeted the Yazidis. They went to different villages and destroyed everything in sight. They took the girls and women and killed the men. They killed children, too. Some they buried alive. It was genocide.

We heard they took Mosul, which was less than two hours away. We still didn’t believe they would come for us. But one night, as we were watching the news on TV, everything went black. Our village lost electricity, which was a bad sign.

People had already fled the village, worried that ISIS was coming. We worried they were right. We had tried to go to Dohuk, but ISIS controlled the streets. It was too dangerous. We were trapped.

That night, we slept on our roof. Two of my siblings stayed awake because they were worried. When they saw lights in the distance, they woke us all. A stream of cars and tanks was headed our way. We could see the headlights poking through the darkness and hear the hum of engines.

We ran fast without shoes to our car, which we had packed for our escape. As we crammed eighteen people into one car, we heard the explosions and bullets and fighting getting closer.

We drove up into the Sinjar Mountains without headlights, the same mountains I had escaped to a couple of years earlier. My father was struggling to see, so I gave him directions while sitting on my sister’s lap in the back seat. Another sister sat next to him, hyperventilating. She was so scared that she couldn’t speak.

We spent eight days in the mountains. We weren’t the only ones who fled their village. Thousands of people, just like us, were on the run. Some told stories of pretending to be dead, lying among their slaughtered loved ones and family members. We were lucky to be alive and together as a family. And we never went back home.

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