#GlobalGoals Week The 18th – 25th September 2016 is when our…
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″]
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″]
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”]
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