Bassim
VIP Member
- Joined
- Mar 1, 2008
- Member Type
- Student or Learner
- Native Language
- Bosnian
- Home Country
- Bosnia Herzegovina
- Current Location
- Sweden
Please would you proofread the second part of my short story, Neighbours.
Although Anna was a great fighter, she was not a saint. She was aware of her own shortcomings and prejudices. A sense of shame would sweep her mind whenever she remembered the moment when her daughter Sanna told her that she had a black boyfriend, from Ghana. As soon as Sanna left the room, Anna sat at her computer and searched on the Internet the number of AIDS patients in that country. Her brain was quickly assessing the chance that her daughter’s boyfriend could be one of them. She fought off that thought but it returned most of the time. Please always use a condom, she wanted to warn Sanna, but bit her tongue, afraid she would be misunderstood. Thorsten did not show any signs of worry, and she did not dare to mention it to him. You’re paranoid, he would have said and laughed it off. Her thoughts had not changed even when he met her daughter’s boyfriend. She brought him one afternoon to a dinner. John was a nice looking and intelligent man, who studied electronics and communication engineering and had ambitious plans for the future. Anna kept her thoughts at bay all the evening, and then when the guests left, she caught herself washing John’s plates, glass and cutlery three times. Three months later her daughter arrived crying and seeking comfort. She told her mother she had broken up with her boyfriend, and Anna was enormously relieved.
Later she pondered on her irrational fear and understood that root of it must have been in her travel to Gambia many years ago. As newly married couple, she and Thorsten wished to experience something exceptional and at the same time escape dark and cold Sweden. Africa awaited them with open arms, hot weather and kind people, but unfortunately, it gave Anna terrible diarrhoea, which kept her inside her hotel room for three days. When she recovered and walked around, she saw that many of her fellow travellers did not come to enjoy beautiful beaches and warm weather but sex with young African man. Those middle-aged Swedish women, whose fat fingers groped at the muscular dark bodies, disgusted her. She asked Thorsten to leave Banjul and travel into the countryside, which they eventually did. There in the villages, there was no trace of sex tourists, but poverty was widespread. There were neither social services nor proper healthcare, and some people shuffled around with their deformed limbs and haggard faces stretching out their gnarled arms and begging for money. In the end, she was happy when the plane landed at Arlanda airport, and she was back in safety where everything functioned properly and where poverty was extinguished.
TO BE CONTINUED
Although Anna was a great fighter, she was not a saint. She was aware of her own shortcomings and prejudices. A sense of shame would sweep her mind whenever she remembered the moment when her daughter Sanna told her that she had a black boyfriend, from Ghana. As soon as Sanna left the room, Anna sat at her computer and searched on the Internet the number of AIDS patients in that country. Her brain was quickly assessing the chance that her daughter’s boyfriend could be one of them. She fought off that thought but it returned most of the time. Please always use a condom, she wanted to warn Sanna, but bit her tongue, afraid she would be misunderstood. Thorsten did not show any signs of worry, and she did not dare to mention it to him. You’re paranoid, he would have said and laughed it off. Her thoughts had not changed even when he met her daughter’s boyfriend. She brought him one afternoon to a dinner. John was a nice looking and intelligent man, who studied electronics and communication engineering and had ambitious plans for the future. Anna kept her thoughts at bay all the evening, and then when the guests left, she caught herself washing John’s plates, glass and cutlery three times. Three months later her daughter arrived crying and seeking comfort. She told her mother she had broken up with her boyfriend, and Anna was enormously relieved.
Later she pondered on her irrational fear and understood that root of it must have been in her travel to Gambia many years ago. As newly married couple, she and Thorsten wished to experience something exceptional and at the same time escape dark and cold Sweden. Africa awaited them with open arms, hot weather and kind people, but unfortunately, it gave Anna terrible diarrhoea, which kept her inside her hotel room for three days. When she recovered and walked around, she saw that many of her fellow travellers did not come to enjoy beautiful beaches and warm weather but sex with young African man. Those middle-aged Swedish women, whose fat fingers groped at the muscular dark bodies, disgusted her. She asked Thorsten to leave Banjul and travel into the countryside, which they eventually did. There in the villages, there was no trace of sex tourists, but poverty was widespread. There were neither social services nor proper healthcare, and some people shuffled around with their deformed limbs and haggard faces stretching out their gnarled arms and begging for money. In the end, she was happy when the plane landed at Arlanda airport, and she was back in safety where everything functioned properly and where poverty was extinguished.
TO BE CONTINUED
