RE- coucou !!!
1)
- an autobiographical novel
- We can clearly see the name of the novel and the author, so it has to be a novel, not a newspaper. Otherwise, the name of the newspaper would be written.If it w a personal diary, the author would have described every day, more precisely. Maybe not day after day, but she wouldn't have summarize the beginning so fast. In fact, the extract we're reading looks like the beginning of the novel the introduction of what's going to happen further.
She is about to begin a new life.
2)
- The narrator, Gael Harrisson, is a woman. She is a primary school teacher in Edinburgh (Scotland), has got grown-up children, so she could be in her forties. She is divorced. She grew up in Malaysia and spent nine off her married years in Singapore and East Malaysia.
3)
- She decided to have a new life because she had no more ties. So she applied to be a volunteer with VSO (Volunteer Services Overseas)
4)
- b) line 3 = "Surely I had something worthwhile that I could contribute elsewhere"
5)
- Her children were grown-up, she 's divorced, had no real ties. She realized , while she was still working as a teacher, that she could change her life, if she wanted to . It has became a routine, she had a love-affair not working out, and she thought it was the right time to give herself a challenge.She was still young, fit and healthy , and she could in return have the experience to live in another culture.
6)
-" I had no idea why I had set in motion for myself"
I guess all her life, or mostly a great part of it, had been dedicated to her work, her children , her husband. She probably never thought about her own
priority, her own feelings, her own wishes, desires. And so it was completely new to act only for herself.
7)
-b) line 21 = "The month leading up to my departure saw my arm turn into a pincushion for exotic diseases"
8)
- She had spent her childhood in Malaysia and her first wedding years in Singapore. She didn't know about Vietnam. To her, each country of Asia would be quite the same as Malaysia and its gentle people.Asia ws as a colourful rainbow in her dreams. Why Vietnam would be different ? But, in fact, she soon realized that , as in Europe, each country is different. Different languages, way of living, culture, food, clothes....everything was different from one country to another one. And when she arrived in Vietnam, she was told that she would go northeast of Hanoi , in Quang Ninh province where are living minority ethnic groups, among the poorest in this country. Was she able to stay in a such isolated places? She didn't know yet.
J'ai fait au mieux.....
Bonne soirée !!!!
