Eat, Pray, Love

baby, my second child, the one in my belly.” After which incident their firstborn child, a bright
little girl with the nickname of Tutti, said, “I think you should get a divorce, Mommy. Every time
you go to the hospital you leave too much work around the house for Tutti.”
Tutti was four years old when she said this.
To exit a marriage in Bali leaves a person alone and unprotected in ways that are almost
impossible for a Westerner to imagine. The Balinese family unit, enclosed within the walls of a
family compound, is merely everything—four generations of siblings, cousins, parents, grand-
parents and children all living together in a series of small bungalows surrounding the family
temple, taking care of each other from birth to death. The family compound is the source of
strength, financial security, health care, day care, education and—most important to the
Balinese—spiritual connection.
The family compound is so vital that the Balinese think of it as a single, living person. The
population of a Balinese village is traditionally counted not by the number of individuals, but
by the number of compounds. The compound is a self-sustaining universe. So you don’t leave
it. (Unless, of course, you are a woman, in which case you move only once—out of your fath-
er’s family compound and into your husband’s.) When this system works—which it does in
this healthy society almost all the time—it produces the most sane, protected, calm, happy
and balanced human beings in the world. But when it doesn’t work? As with my new friend
Wayan? The outcasts are lost in airless orbit. Her choice was either to stay in the family com-
pound safety net with a husband who kept putting her in the hospital, or to save her own life
and leave, which left her with nothing.
Well, not exactly nothing, actually. She did take with her an encyclopedic knowledge of
healing, her goodness, her work ethic and her daughter Tutti—whom she had to fight hard to
keep. Bali is a patriarchy to the end. In the rare case of a divorce, the children automatically
belong to the father. To get Tutti back, Wayan had to hire a lawyer, whom she paid with every
single thing she had. I mean—everything. She sold off not only her furniture and jewelry, but
also her forks and spoons, her socks and shoes, her old washcloths and half-burned
candles—everything went to pay that lawyer. But she did get her daughter back, in the end,
after a two-year battle. Wayan is just lucky Tutti was a girl; if she’d been a boy, Wayan never
would have seen the kid again. Boys are much more valuable.
For the last few years now, Wayan and Tutti have been living on their own—all alone, in
the beehive of Bali!—moving from place to place every few months as money comes and
goes, always sleepless with worry about where to go next. Which has been difficult because
every time she moves, her patients (mostly Balinese, who are all on hard times themselves
these days) have trouble finding her again. Also, with every move, little Tutti has to be pulled
out of school. Tutti was always first in her class before, but has slipped since the last move