He felt enormous pressure, but the family wasn't going to just leave Swat.
That was not what he was teaching his children.
"(The Taliban) left my people in hard days," he said, trying to find the right words in English.
"I should be beside them. This is my duty. And if I die for it, I think there would be no better chance for me to die than this."
Hundreds of schools torched
It was, without a doubt, a huge risk to educate girls in Swat around this time.
One need only look at the headlines in the region. "Militants destroyed 125 girls' schools in 10 months,' the Pakistan newspaper Daily Times reported in August 2008.
Human rights workers and aid agencies held a seminar in the area in 2008 to try to voice their concerns. They said Pakistani politicians and leaders were not listening.
Between 2007 and March 2009, 172 schools were shelled, blasted, demolished or ransacked. About 23,000 girls and 17,000 boys could no longer go to school, according to the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights.
In October 2010, months after massive floods caused widespread devastation in Pakistan, the Taliban stepped up its bombing campaign against schools that defiantly continued to educate girls.
For girls who weren't hurt, fear that they would be accomplished the Taliban's objective. Parents kept their daughters home to protect them.
In her BBC blog, Malala wrote on the eve of the edict that she had just ended her routine winter break from school. Usually before break, the principal would announce when classes would resume.
But this time, the principal didn't.
"I was in a bad mood," Malala blogged.
Vacation was normally fun but no one was in the mood to celebrate.
But what do you do when you're 11? You go to the playground and you play, so that's what they did.
Some of the girls said they thought everything would work out. They'd be back, they said.
Malala wanted to be hopeful, too. But before she left, she turned around and took one long look at the building.
Ice cream and diplomacy
Malala was right about the edict and what it meant.
After January 2009, she was forced to stay at home and read books, Ellick said.
Eventually she was moved around the country where she attended ad-hoc schools.
She still loved stories, and she always would.
Malala wondered on her blog if she should adopt a pen name -- Gul Makai.
Meaning corn flower in Urdu, the native language of the region, Gul Makai is a name taken from a character in a Pashtun folk story. It's not well known, but Pashtun experts say the story is a kind of Romeo and Juliet tale. It's a sweet love story laced with tragedy.
It's the kind of story that a young girl would know and would romanticize.
This was Malala. She toggled between two existences.
She was a global symbol of girls' rights but also just a kid.
In 2010 she met with U.S. Special Envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke.
Ellick remembers being with Malala in a coffee shop after the meeting.
"She said, 'I want to get ice cream...I love vanilla ice cream,'" Ellick recalled. "Here is this girl that can go from being at a negotiating table, a high-level diplomatic meeting, but she also wanted ice cream."
Ellick remembered another time when they were out shopping in Islamabad, having fun and hunting for English language books and DVDs.
"I was disappointed that she wanted some trashy American sitcoms," Ellick laughs. "I kept telling myself, 'I know you want her to want to watch a documentary about Sierra Leone but she is just a girl.'"
Using the Quran, Malala's way
Malala told Geo TV in Pakistan in 2012 that the Taliban could do whatever they liked, but she was still going to get an education.
"We live in the 21st century," Malala said. "How can we be deprived from education?"
Those were bold words, the kind the world knows so well now.
But Malala wasn't always this way, Ellick said.
When he first met Malala, in tow with her father, she was kind of bashful.
"She wasn't as confident then as she has become," he said. "They've received attention and awards. They felt like their labor was paying off."
