"Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying. 'I will try again tomorrow.' " Mary Anne Radmacher.

A card smaller than an index card displaying the phrase hangs on the hall closet at the top of the stairs at home.

Impossible to miss, the card is bright pink and at eye level. Open or close the closet door and the petite sign is there, as a reminder to gather resolve and stand up to whatever challenge the next day brings.

Can you imagine gathering the resolve to stand up to the challenge of the next day when the challenge may be at the lethal end of a pistol?

Malala Yousafzi, this year's co-laureate of the Nobel Peace Prize, and winner of the Liberty Medal, describes doing so in her book "I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban," a New York Times bestseller.

She received the Liberty Medal Oct. 21 in Philadelphia.

"It's an honor to be awarded the Liberty Medal. I accept this award on behalf of all the children around the world who are struggling to get an education," Malala Yousafzi said.

The outspoken children's rights activist imagined an ambush on a flight of stairs leading to her home, she writes. Yousafzi pictured herself coming home when "a terrorist might jump out and shoot me on those steps." In her mind, she prepared talking points to use when confronting her imagined attacker.

On Oct. 9, 2012, two attackers from the Taliban stopped the van in which Yousfazi was riding on her way home from school in the Swat Valley of Pakistan. One attacker buttonholed the van driver with questions. Another boarded the rear of the van and asked other students to identify Malala.

The attacker fired three shots. One bullet struck Malala Yousafzi, 15, in the left eye and she slumped into her best friend's lap. The other shots struck two schoolmates.

Earlier this month, in a press conference soon after her award was announced, Malala Yousafzi, now 17, spoke of courage.

"I felt more powerful and more courageous because this award...is an encouragement for me to go forward and believe in myself," Yousafzi said of the moment she learned she was a Nobel laureate. She was at school when the news came from a teacher.

"This award is especially for them (children around the world). It gives them courage."

I don't know about you but when I was 17 courage did not have worldwide implications but was more a matter of mustering up the nerve to ask parental permission to go to a rock concert.

"Through my story, I want to tell other children all around the world that they should stand up for their rights. They should not wait for someone else," Malala Yousafzi said to reporters at a news conference in Birmingham, England, where she now lives in exile with family.

To step up, to speak up, to listen to the quiet voice at the end of the day encouraging another try tomorrow, all types of courage in their own right. Every now and then, however, an exemplar like Malala Yousafzi, activist for girl's education and children's rights, illustrates courage writ large.

"I used to say that I think I do not deserve the Nobel Peace Prize," Yousafzi said at the close of the press conference. "I still think that," she added. "I have received this award but it is not the end," she continued.

Yousafzi is the youngest person and the first person from her native Pakistan to be a Nobel laureate. She shares this award with Kailash Satyarthi, of India.

Let's hope this, as she sees it, is just the start for Yousafzi, who now is setting a goal of becoming what she describes as "a good politician."

If anyone can define such an entity, it is she.

Congratulations, Malala Yousfazi.

April

Peterson

editorial assistant

east penn press

salisbury press