By Katie Halper • @kthalps • 11 years ago

Teenager shot by Taliban is ready to serve after latest surgeries

Malala Yousafzai Malala Yousufzai, the 15-year fearless blogger and advocate for girls’ education from Pakistan survived two more surgeries over the weekend. In October Taliban militants stormed her school van, yelled her name and shot her in the head. On Sunday, doctors attached a titanium plate to her skull and implanted a cochlear device to to her left ear so she can hear. Malala’s doctor has said she has no long-lasting brain injuries and won’t require any more operations. “I’m happy that both of the operations are successful…. I can walk a little bit and I’m feeling better,” Yousufzai said from her hospital bed in Birmingham, England.

Here is a video of Malala speaking on Saturday before her surgery. As you can see, she is ready to “serve the people” and to keep on fighting for “every girl, every child to be educated.” She’s even started the Malala Fund, which you can check out and support.  

transcript after the jump.

 “Today you can see that I’m alive. I can speak, I can see you, I can see everyone and today I can speak and I’m getting better day by day. It’s just because of the prayers of people, because all the people – men, women, children – all of them have prayed for me. Because of these prayers, God has given me this new life and this is a second life. I want to serve the people and I want every girl, every child, to be educated and for that reason we have organised the Malala Fund.”

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Born and raised on the mean streets of New York City’s Upper West Side, Katie Halper is a comic, writer, blogger, satirist and filmmaker based in New York. Katie graduated from The Dalton School (where she teaches history) and Wesleyan University (where she learned that labels are for jars.) A director of Living Liberally and co-founder/performer in Laughing Liberally, Katie has performed at Town Hall, Symphony Space, The Culture Project, D.C. Comedy Festival, all five Netroots Nations, and The Nation Magazine Cruise, where she made Howard Dean laugh! and has appeared with Lizz Winstead, Markos Moulitsas, The Yes Men, Cynthia Nixon and Jim Hightower. Her writing and videos have appeared in The New York Times, Comedy Central, The Nation Magazine, Gawker, Nerve, Jezebel, the Huffington Post, Alternet and Katie has been featured in/on NY Magazine, LA Times, In These Times, Gawker,Jezebel, MSNBC, Air America, GritTV, the Alan Colmes Show, Sirius radio (which hung up on her once) and the National Review, which called Katie “cute and some what brainy.” Katie co-produced Tim Robbins’s film Embedded, (Venice Film Festival, Sundance Channel); Estela Bravo’s Free to Fly (Havana Film Festival, LA Latino Film Festival); was outreach director for The Take, Naomi Klein/Avi Lewis documentary about Argentine workers (Toronto & Venice Film Festivals, Film Forum); co-directed New Yorkers Remember the Spanish Civil War, a video for Museum of the City of NY exhibit, and wrote/directed viral satiric videos including Jews/ Women/ Gays for McCain.

Katie is a writer, comedian, filmmaker, and New Yorker.

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