Fawzia Koofi

The mother with an important but dangerous job sat down to write a goodbye letter to her two 10- and 12-year-old daughters. Just in case, she thought.

The Taliban could get lucky this time and finally kill her…[symple_spacing size=”5″]

Fawzia Koofi spends time with her daughters Shuhra and Shaharzad.[symple_spacing size=”5″]

While campaigning for the presidency of Afghanistan, Fawzia Koofi began by writing this:[symple_spacing size=”5″]

“Today I am going on political business to Faizabad and Darwaz. I hope I will come back soon and see you again, but I have to say that perhaps I will not.”

Fawzia Koofi says she coped with the pressure of being a female politician in Afghanistan
by spending time with her daughters. She’s seen here in May 2012.[symple_spacing size=”5″]

If she didn’t come home, she wrote to young Shuhra and Shaharzad, they should take their mother’s advice on how to get on without her. “First,” she wrote, “don’t forget me.”

Finish school, live independently, stay with your aunt, study abroad.
All the money I have in the bank, it’s all yours. Spend it wisely, on school.
“A girl needs an education if she is to excel in this man’s world.”
Explore the world. Be brave. Make your country a better place.

“Maybe today is the day I will die. But if I do, please know that it was for a purpose.” – Fawzia Koofi

4GGL thanks CNN for this story and Tedx Talks for this video. [symple_spacing size=”10″]

{Defying death} By Ashley Fantz, CNN[symple_spacing size=”5″]

“Even the day I was born, I was supposed to die.” That’s how Koofi explains her first 24 hours, when after a 30-hour labor in a countryside shack, and falling semi-conscious, Koofi’s mother was told what was to her at the time disappointing news– she had given birth to a daughter, not a son. The woman turned away from her newborn and refused to hold her child.

“No one cared if the new girl lived, so while they focused on saving my mother, I was wrapped in cloth and placed in the baking sun,” Koofi wrote. After nearly a day left alone, screaming, and her parents believing that “nature would take its course” and she would die, someone went outside and brought the baby indoors.[symple_spacing size=”5″]

Her mother’s instincts to love her kicked in. From then and throughout her early life, Koofi and her mother forged a bond built from surviving circumstances that would probably break most people. “My mother always [regarded me] as a special person in her life,” Koofi said. “She would always tell me one day you will become something.”[symple_spacing size=”5”]