Pakistani-canadian senator bonds with Malala Yousafzai’s parents

OTTAWA (CP) — Salma Ataullahjan was just another international well-wisher paying a visit to injured Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai in Britain — that is, until the Canadian senator began to speak in the family’s native tongue.

Yousafzai’s father was taken aback when he discovered that not only is Ataullahjan from Pakistan, but also from the very same town in the Swat district, and conversant in Pashto, one of the region’s dominant languages.

The senator spent 90 minutes chatting with mother Toorpekai and father Ziauddin Yousafzai in a private room at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham on Wednesday.

Ataullahjan was unable to see 14-year-old Malala, who is recovering from being shot twice by Taliban assailants as she rode a school bus in early October.

Ziauddin Yousafzai, a poet and schoolteacher, told Ataullahjan he knew the senator’s family.

“They were so surprised,” Ataullahjan told The Canadian Press in a telephone interview.

“When the wife came in and we sat down, and I turned to her and spoke to her in our mother tongue, Pashto, she said, ‘Oh, it’s so nice to have someone speak to me in Pashto, so nice to have someone speak to me in the language.”’

Ataullahjan had been speaking at a World Health Organization conference in Geneva, and made the personal decision to take a detour to Birmingham. She made the arrangements to meet with the Yousafzais through the Pakistan embassy.