POLITICIAN AFGHANISTANI have stared death in the face countless times . . . but still I’m alive. I can’t explain this, other than knowing that God has a purpose for me.
—FAWZIA KOOFI
Ascream came from inside the shack. A woman inside was giving birth, and her pain was great. She was older and this was her seventh child, so her body was tired. Her heart was too. Her husband, whom she adored, was in love with another woman: his new wife.
She prayed to Allah, “Please give me a boy.” Maybe if she could return home proudly carrying a son, who would bring honor to her husband, then she could win back his favor.
Inside, the shack was crowded with the midwife and other village women helping with the birth. The heat was unbearable, the smell of cows and sheep suffocating. The mother labored for hours, drifting in and out of consciousness. She was barely awake when she delivered the tiny, blotchy newborn.
Her eyes fluttered open as a helper brought the baby close to her. “It is just a girl,” she whispered sadly. “A poor girl.” The mother refused to hold her tiny daughter and turned away.
The helper asked the midwife, “What should we do with it?”
The midwife could see that the mother had no will to live. It would be hard to bring her back.
“The baby doesn’t matter. We must save the mother.”
And so the women wrapped the newborn baby girl in a cloth and put her outside in the pasture. It was a summer day, and the hot, baking sun would soon take care of the unwanted child. The women went back inside to nurse the sick mother.
By evening, the mother’s condition took a turn and she began to recover. Since the baby was still alive—still crying, in fact—the women thought they should try again and brought the baby back to its mother. This time, when she saw the screaming baby, its tiny face burned and blistered, the mother gasped in horror. What have I done?
She knew this baby was a fighter. She clutched her daughter to her breast and wept. Again, she prayed to Allah: “It is a miracle that she is still alive. Please spare her, and I promise I will love her and never allow any harm to come to her.”1
This baby would become her mother’s most beloved child, and the two would remain incredibly close through the rest of her life. The mother would keep her word and protect her daughter from all manner of dangers. They both knew that Allah had chosen this girl for a special purpose. She was born in a time and place where girls were unwanted, less valuable. And from that fragile beginning, Fawzia Koofi rose to become a leader of her country, a politician who fights for girls, and the first woman elected to Afghanistan’s Parliament.
Fawzia Koofi was born in 1975 in the remote northeastern corner of Afghanistan. Her father was a respected member of the country’s Parliament for twenty-five years, and her mother was the second of his seven wives. Fawzia was his nineteenth child out of twenty-three. When Fawzia’s depressed, exhausted mother saw that her baby was a girl, she did not want her to live. But after Fawzia survived a full day out in the sun (her face was so burned that she still had visible scars in high school), her mother felt great regret and believed her survival was a sign.
Why do some Afghan families prefer sons? In parts of the country (and other areas of the world), if a son is born, the family knows that when he grows up, he will get a job and represent and help feed the family. So any money spent on his education is a “good investment” because it will help the family in the long run. But when a girl grows up, she will marry and join her husband’s family. Any money spent on her education will be lost. In places where girls aren’t allowed to work, they can’t bring any money into the family, so some families consider them a burden.
The government Fawzia’s father worked in during the 1970s was in upheaval. In 1978, there was a Communist coup, and Russia supported the new government. When Fawzia was three, Afghan fighters called the mujahedeen, who were against the Soviet-backed government, killed her father. A few days later, the killers came looking for Fawzia’s family, but they fled from their home and escaped into Russian-controlled territory.
The family moved in with Fawzia’s older brother in the city of Faizabad. Fawzia was seven when she first noticed city girls walking to school. Fawzia asked her mother if she could go too. Her mother thought about it for a long, long time and then answered with a big smile, “Yes, Fawzia, you can go to school.”2
This decision changed Fawzia’s life. She loved school and was so happy to be there that she worked very hard. She caught up to her fellow students who had started before her and soon passed them to become one of the top students in her school.
When Fawzia was eleven, the family moved to Kabul, the busy capital. It wasn’t yet illegal for Afghan girls to go to school, but it wasn’t normal either. Her brothers teased her, and her mother worried about her: “If this English class makes you president, I don’t want you to be president—I want you to be alive.”3 In Kabul there was much fighting between the mujahedeen and government troops. Even when rockets roared overhead and shrapnel exploded around her, Fawzia kept walking to school. She wanted to learn, to get a job someday—to be able to support herself.
Fawzia’s neighbors hid her and her mother from the mujahedeen in a very unusual spot: a pile of cattle poop! They piled the poop all around them until they couldn’t be seen. Fawzia remembered, “It felt like I was being buried alive.”5 But the killers didn’t find them.
In the early 1990s, when Fawzia was a teenager, the mujahedeen forced the Soviet army out and took over Afghanistan. Almost immediately, the mujahedeen began to fight among themselves, and Afghanistan was plunged into a civil war that lasted more than ten years.
During this time, the mujahedeen also cracked down on women’s rights. Fawzia had to cover herself with a burqa—a loose-fitting dress that covered her from head to toe, with only a slit for her eyes. “I was furious. I had never worn a burqa in my life,” she remembered, “And here I was in my nicest clothes, with my hair and makeup done . . . and [my mother] was insisting I cover myself in a heavy blue sack.”4 Before then, burqas were something only older, more traditional women chose to wear. Now all women and girls were forced to wear them whenever they went outside.
Still, Fawzia took her exams and graduated from high school. The next year, she was accepted into university—she planned to study to be a doctor.
Afghanistan was changing quickly, however. Fighting got worse, and millions of Afghans fled the country—mostly wealthier people. Those who stayed suffered. Fawzia’s brother was shot to death in his home. Her mother got sick and died. A new, more radical group was taking over: the Taliban.
The Taliban was an Islamic militia that wanted to turn Afghanistan into a country ruled by strict Islamic law. At first, they brought some order and security to war-torn towns, but they soon made a series of laws changing life for everyone. Afghans could no longer listen to music, watch TV, meet friends at a café, or even have wedding celebrations. Men had to wear turbans and long beards.
These laws were hard on all Afghans but especially on girls and women. They made a law that women and girls had to be fully covered and could only go outside with a male relative. Girls couldn’t ride bicycles, wear bright clothes, or laugh loudly. If the Taliban heard that a woman had shamed her husband, they would kill her. For Fawzia, the worst was their law banning girls from going to school or getting jobs. Fawzia had to quit the university. She didn’t leave her home for months.
Taliban mobs drove around enforcing these “morality rules.” Punishment might be a severe beating. Or they might take a rule breaker to the Olympic sports stadium, where a crowd would cheer as they cut off a hand or stoned the perpetrator to death.
During this terrible time, Fawzia met Hamid, who ran a finance company and taught at the university. Fawzia thought he was kind and intelligent. They had a Taliban wedding—no music, no video, no dancing, no party—but Fawzia was happy that at least she’d gotten to choose her own husband.
The first thing the Taliban did when they took over Kabul was destroy their cultural treasures. They wrecked museums filled with priceless artifacts. They blew up ancient stone Buddhas—considered wonders of the world. They burned schools and universities and books.
Ten days after the wedding, however, the Taliban arrested Hamid and threw him in prison. He was released three months later, but it was too late: he’d caught tuberculosis. The couple fled back to their home village in the northeast and lived together long enough to have two daughters. Hamid died of the disease a few years later.
On September 11, 2001, two airplanes flew into the World Trade Center buildings in New York City and a third hit the Pentagon in Virginia, killing nearly three thousand people. The leader of the worst terrorist attack in US history, Osama bin Laden, was hiding in Afghanistan under protection of the Taliban. The United States attacked and, by the year’s end, pushed the Taliban out of Afghanistan.
Before the Soviet and Taliban occupations, Afghanistan was a fairly liberal country. Women made up 50 percent of government workers, 70 percent of teachers, and 40 percent of doctors. Although the Taliban is gone, Islamic fundamentalism still dominates Afghanistan and there is much work to be done. As of 2016, only 12.6 percent of Afghan women can read. Only 40 percent of girls go to elementary school and 6 percent to high school. And while 200,000 Afghans go to college, only 18 percent are girls. Conservative groups who oppose women’s education still regularly attack schools, students, and activists.7
Out from under the thumb of the Taliban, Fawzia was able to go to school again. She graduated from college with a master’s degree in business and management and then went to work for UNICEF, an international children’s aid organization. She helped people forced to flee their homes in Afghanistan and served as the child protection officer, protecting children from violence and abuse.
Soon after, she began her political career. She launched a back-to-school campaign across Afghanistan, promoting education for girls. During meetings with other leaders, the men asked her to take off her burqa so they could communicate more easily. “They respected me for what I did,” she said.6
When Afghanistan prepared to hold parliamentary elections in which women would be allowed to participate, Fawzia decided to run. She believed that the only way to make big improvements in the lives of women and children was to become a leader in her country. She campaigned in 2005 (without her burqa) and won! Fawzia Koofi became the first woman in history to serve in the Afghan Parliament, a position she’s held for more than a decade. She has served as Deputy Speaker of Parliament and as chairperson of Afghanistan’s Women, Civil Society, and Human Rights Commission.
In Parliament, Fawzia fights for equal rights and better conditions for women and girls and for universal education for both sexes. In 2009, she drafted the Elimination of Violence Against Women legislation, which was blocked by conservative members but was voluntarily adopted in communities across the country.
The Taliban and other conservative Islamic groups in Afghanistan do not like Fawzia and the changes she is making for girls and women. They have tried to assassinate her many, many times. In one recent attempt, her car was shot at for 30 minutes (while she was trapped inside), killing two policemen.8
In 2014, Fawzia tried to run for president of Afghanistan, but the election commission moved the registration date so that she was too young for their minimum age requirement of forty. At the time of publication, she was planning to run for president in the next election.
No matter what her position in the government, Fawzia has been making Afghanistan better and safer for girls and women for decades now. From the nature of her very birth—when she had to scream to be heard and fight just for a chance to live—it is no wonder that Fawzia is now inspiring a new generation of Afghan girls to use their voices to fight for the life they, too, deserve.
HOW WILL YOU ROCK THE WORLD?
I will rock the world by discovering cures to diseases in impoverished countries. When I find cures, I will make them attainable to the citizens of those countries. I’ll also help administer the cures and work with people to better their lives. Helping people in need will improve my life as I hope to improve theirs!
CLARA LUCZAK 
AGE 13