Bassim
VIP Member
- Joined
- Mar 1, 2008
- Member Type
- Student or Learner
- Native Language
- Bosnian
- Home Country
- Bosnia Herzegovina
- Current Location
- Sweden
Would you please correct my mistakes in my text?
Bang! Bang! Two stones as big as tennis balls, and pieces of broken glass crashed on the floor. Passengers screamed. Babies wailed. Someone shouted swearwords. The bus stopped with a jerk. Even if I was used to explosions and gunfire from the war I had experienced decades before, I winced and ducked behind the seat in front of me. Through the window on my right, I watched a group of children running away and laughing. They were about twelve or thirteen years old. A boy with a red baseball cap turned back to front, stopped, turned around, gave us a finger, and stuck his tongue out. I sat close to the driver and heard him calling his boss on the radio. “We’ve been attacked. Two stones. Two windows broken.” The crackling voice asked if someone was injured and the driver, a heavyset immigrant, heaved up from his sit and asked, “Anyone injured?” People shook her heads and the driver informed the boss that everyone was all right. “Wait for the police!” the voice ordered.
I was angry at first at the children who did not think about the damage they were doing. Fortunately, the bus was half-full, but if a stone had hit someone, he or she could have been seriously hurt. And as the consequence of the attack, the traffic to the suburb would be suspended for the rest of the day. But the longer I watched the grey, non-descript, concrete buildings, the more my anger dissipated. The children and their parents had not chosen this place. It had been assigned to them by the authorities. Some years before, Swedish politicians had come up with the idea that immigration was good for the economy. They asserted that the more people arrived to this cold country, the more jobs would be created and the more prosperous the country would be. Unfortunately, they could not draw well-educated people from the West, and instead they turned to Africa and Asia and welcomed poor refugees, of which many were illiterate. Although the political and cultural elite officially welcomed thousands of refugees with open arms, they did not want them to live nearby, because their presence in their affluent suburbs would immediately reduce the value of their homes. Therefore the best solution was to locate them to the suburbs which were build in the 1960s, when around one million flats were built in the shortest possible time. Maybe at that time these areas looked fine, but forty years later, they had been transformed into the parts of towns and cities people usually avoided.
The media, which had always endorsed multiculturalism and immigration, tried to portrait a picture of an idyll, but eventually they had to give up when the explosions and automatic gunfire jolted inhabitants from their sleep, and murders on the street turned almost into an everyday occurrence. After decades of denial, the police had decided to call these suburbs no-go areas to warn the natives not to go there because their safety could not be guaranteed.
I imagined being born in one of those suburbs. My eyes would be accustomed to the greyness of the buildings, concrete, and the lack of trees, birds and flowers. I would watch my parents sitting idle at home day after day, year after year, withering away without prospects for a future. They would have applied for dozens of jobs, but the colour of their hair, skin and their foreign names would be their impediment. They had great expectations when they arrived and dreamed about the new beginning, but the years of disappointment took their tool. They both had become depressed, chain-smoked, and drank endless cups of coffee and tea. I would felt their pain, unable to help them. I would go to a bad school where incompetent teachers would never be able to enforce discipline. They would bother more about their own safety than imparting knowledge to their students. I would know nothing about Aristotle, Picasso, Mahler, Bach and other great minds of humankind. My favourite music would be rap and my idols the gangsters who drove a BMW and had thick gold chains around their necks. Instead of the educational program on the radio, I would listen to their stories about their successful robberies, burglaries, car thefts and drug trafficking. Already as a teenager, I would become a member of a gang, and I would dream about emulating my idols. I would probably end my life prematurely, killed in a war with a rival gang.
TO BE CONTINUED
Bang! Bang! Two stones as big as tennis balls, and pieces of broken glass crashed on the floor. Passengers screamed. Babies wailed. Someone shouted swearwords. The bus stopped with a jerk. Even if I was used to explosions and gunfire from the war I had experienced decades before, I winced and ducked behind the seat in front of me. Through the window on my right, I watched a group of children running away and laughing. They were about twelve or thirteen years old. A boy with a red baseball cap turned back to front, stopped, turned around, gave us a finger, and stuck his tongue out. I sat close to the driver and heard him calling his boss on the radio. “We’ve been attacked. Two stones. Two windows broken.” The crackling voice asked if someone was injured and the driver, a heavyset immigrant, heaved up from his sit and asked, “Anyone injured?” People shook her heads and the driver informed the boss that everyone was all right. “Wait for the police!” the voice ordered.
I was angry at first at the children who did not think about the damage they were doing. Fortunately, the bus was half-full, but if a stone had hit someone, he or she could have been seriously hurt. And as the consequence of the attack, the traffic to the suburb would be suspended for the rest of the day. But the longer I watched the grey, non-descript, concrete buildings, the more my anger dissipated. The children and their parents had not chosen this place. It had been assigned to them by the authorities. Some years before, Swedish politicians had come up with the idea that immigration was good for the economy. They asserted that the more people arrived to this cold country, the more jobs would be created and the more prosperous the country would be. Unfortunately, they could not draw well-educated people from the West, and instead they turned to Africa and Asia and welcomed poor refugees, of which many were illiterate. Although the political and cultural elite officially welcomed thousands of refugees with open arms, they did not want them to live nearby, because their presence in their affluent suburbs would immediately reduce the value of their homes. Therefore the best solution was to locate them to the suburbs which were build in the 1960s, when around one million flats were built in the shortest possible time. Maybe at that time these areas looked fine, but forty years later, they had been transformed into the parts of towns and cities people usually avoided.
The media, which had always endorsed multiculturalism and immigration, tried to portrait a picture of an idyll, but eventually they had to give up when the explosions and automatic gunfire jolted inhabitants from their sleep, and murders on the street turned almost into an everyday occurrence. After decades of denial, the police had decided to call these suburbs no-go areas to warn the natives not to go there because their safety could not be guaranteed.
I imagined being born in one of those suburbs. My eyes would be accustomed to the greyness of the buildings, concrete, and the lack of trees, birds and flowers. I would watch my parents sitting idle at home day after day, year after year, withering away without prospects for a future. They would have applied for dozens of jobs, but the colour of their hair, skin and their foreign names would be their impediment. They had great expectations when they arrived and dreamed about the new beginning, but the years of disappointment took their tool. They both had become depressed, chain-smoked, and drank endless cups of coffee and tea. I would felt their pain, unable to help them. I would go to a bad school where incompetent teachers would never be able to enforce discipline. They would bother more about their own safety than imparting knowledge to their students. I would know nothing about Aristotle, Picasso, Mahler, Bach and other great minds of humankind. My favourite music would be rap and my idols the gangsters who drove a BMW and had thick gold chains around their necks. Instead of the educational program on the radio, I would listen to their stories about their successful robberies, burglaries, car thefts and drug trafficking. Already as a teenager, I would become a member of a gang, and I would dream about emulating my idols. I would probably end my life prematurely, killed in a war with a rival gang.
TO BE CONTINUED
