Learners at the Seven Summits Centre for Learning raised money for the Malala Fund with a bake sale.
Inspired by co-founders Malala Yousafxai and her father Ziauddin, the Malala Fund works to ensure that girls receive a full 12 years of education.
At the bake sale on Thursday, Dec. 10, Grade 8 learners raised $211.35 for the fund.
“Everyone in our class has baked something. Either that or they made a pamphlet or a poster, and we sat out front of our local food store and we told people about Malala, and we told people why we’re raising money for her and why we think it’s important,” said Yasmin Evans, a learner at SSCL.
The bake sale was by donation, and some people even opted out of the baking and just donated.
The fundraiser was part of the unit the learners did on Malala starting in early November. They learned about her work advocating for girls’ education in Pakistan and the Taliban’s attempt to kill her in 2012.
“She got shot by the Taliban, which was really bad because she was speaking out about all this [suppression of girls’ education],” explained Evans. “In her hometown Swat, she was getting really upset because the Taliban were taking over and telling everyone that she couldn’t go to school and her mates couldn’t go to school because they were girls. So she decided to speak out against this and now she’s started this fund to make it so that she can raise money to spread awareness about this and to fund schools for people like her.”
As part of the unit, the learners read the book I Am Malala and watched the documentary He Named Me Malala.
“On the 15th, He Named Me Malala, [which] is a documentary that was just in theatres, came out on DVD, so we watched that,” explained Kylie Stewart, mentor for the class.
The class also learned about Benazir Bhutto, the first female prime minister of Pakistan who was assassinated in 2007, by watching the documentary Bhutto and wrote papers about Malala.
“What really made me happy was that when they wrote their papers, they said you know, ‘I used to come to school and it was so boring and I didn’t think anything of it and didn’t realize how lucky I was,’ and through reading I Am Malala and the documentaries and hearing different stories they realize I think now more how important education is and how lucky they are to have such a great education.”
The SSCL class also shared a Pakistani lunch prepared by Christophe Deck-Tisserand with the Grade 7 students from Sept-sommets on Tuesday, Dec. 15, and shared what they’d been learning.
Learners in the SSCL class were very inspired by Malala’s story.
“She’s very brave, I gotta say, because I remember her saying, ‘They shot me in the head, and they thought it would silence me, but instead it made me louder,’ and she doesn’t yell because she can, she yells because she’s speaking for a large audience, and she’s speaking as if she’s all the people that don’t get the education that they need,” said Evans.
“I think she’s really brave for standing up to the Taliban,” said Scarlet Guy. “I think she’s smart. One of her quotes is, ‘If a Talib came up to me and said that he was going to kill me,’ she said that she would instead of hitting him with her shoe, … tell him all the things she knows about children’s education and then she would let him do whatever he wanted. So I think that’s smart, like she’s wise.”
Stewart said even the boys in the class got into the unit.
“I was a little bit worried about the class saying, ‘Oh, but this is all about girls,’ but really when it comes down to it, it’s just about education for all children and they realized that,” she said. “We had great, intelligent conversations about it.”
Anyone interested in donating to the Malala Fund can do so at malala.org.