Chapter 18 Indonesian Stories (17)

"I am very sure!" "Never married once?" she asked. Ok.She sees right through me. "Well," I confessed, "once..." Her face lit up, as if to say, "Yeah, I think so." She asked, "Divorced?" "Yes," I said now with shame, "divorced." "I can see you were divorced." "Isn't that unusual here?" "Me too," said the eldest sister, completely out of my surprise, "I'm divorced too." "you?" "I did everything I needed to do," she said. "Before the divorce, I tried everything I could. I prayed every day. But I had to leave him."

She was in tears, and I held my eldest sister's hand, just because I met the first Balinese divorcee, and I said, "I believe you did your best. I believe you did what you had to do." "Divorce is a sad thing," she said. I agree. For the next five hours, I stayed at my eldest sister's shop, talking to my new best friend about her problems.She cleaned my knee wound and I listened to her stories.My eldest sister told me that her Balinese husband "drinks all day long, gambles all day long, loses all our money, and when I stop giving him money to gamble and drink, he beats me, and several times he beats me to the hospital." She Pushed my hair back, showed me the scar on my head, and said, "That's the result of him beating me with his motorcycle helmet. He's always beating me with his helmet, when he's drinking, when I'm not making any money. He's beating me Very hard, made me unconscious, dizzy, and blind. I am lucky to be a doctor and my family are doctors, so after he hit me, I knew how to treat myself. If I am not a doctor myself, I may have died a long time ago lose their ears and become deaf; or lose their eyes and become blind." She told me that she left him after being beaten so badly that "the second child in her womb was aborted."After the incident, their first child, a bright little girl named Tutti, said: "I think you should have divorced, Mommy. Every time you go to the hospital, you leave too much housework to Tutti."

Tutti said this when he was four years old. Walking out of marriage and being alone in Bali is unimaginable to Westerners.The family unit enclosed within the wall is everything in life in Bali - four generations of relatives live together in small bungalows surrounding the family shrine, taking care of each other from birth to death.The homestead is a source of strength, financial security, health, day care, education, and - most importantly to the Balinese - faith. The importance of the house makes the Balinese people regard it as a living person.The population of villages in Bali is traditionally calculated not by the number of people, but by the number of houses.Homes are self-sufficient universes.So you can't live without it. (Unless, of course, you're a woman, and you only have to move once—from your father's house to your husband's.) This system, if it works—and it almost always does in this healthy society—produces the healthiest, most stable children in the world. , calm, happy, balanced human being.What if it doesn't work?Just like my new friend Big Sister, these outcasts get lost in tracks lacking air.She had only two choices, either she chose to stay in the safety net of the house and continue to stay with her husband who beat her to the hospital, or she chose to save herself and leave with nothing left.

In fact, there is not really nothing.She brings with her great medical knowledge, a kind heart, a work ethic and Tutti - the daughter she earned so hard for.After all, Bali is a patriarchal society, and in rare cases of divorce, children automatically belong to the father.In order to win Tutti, the eldest sister must exhaust everything to hire a lawyer.I mean -- "everything."She sold not only furniture and jewellery, but knives, spoons, socks, shoes, old rags and burnt candles—everything to pay off her lawyers.After two years of fighting, she finally did win her daughter.Tutti is a girl, which is the eldest sister's luck; because if Tutti is a boy, the eldest sister will never see the child again, and the boy is much more precious.

For the past few years, Big Sister and Tutti have lived independently - alone in a hive-organized Bali! --Moving every few months as money comes and goes, always worrying about where to go next.This is not easy, because every time she moves, her patients (mostly Balinese, who are also struggling to protect themselves these days) find it difficult to find her.In addition, Tutti had to change schools every time he moved.Tutti had always been at the top of his class, but since the last time he moved, he had dropped to twentieth out of fifty schoolchildren. While my eldest sister was telling me this true story, Tutti herself came home from school and walked into the store.Now eight years old, she shows incomparable charm.This lovely girl (with a ponytail, skinny, and hyperactive) asked me in lively English if I wanted lunch, and the older sister said, "I forgot! You should have lunch!" The mother and daughter rushed into the kitchen -- Plus 2 shy girls hiding inside to help out - the best food I've tasted in Bali in a while.