《美食祈祷和恋爱》：我想帮助她们

 Other factors have emerged over time. Those two shy girls I noticed on the first day, hid-ing in the back of the kitchen? It turns out that these are a pair of orphans Wayan has adop-ted. They are both named Ketut (just to further confuse this book) and we call them Big Ketut and Little Ketut. Wayan found the Ketuts starving and begging in the marketplace a few months ago. They were abandoned there by a Dickensian character of a woman-possibly a relative-who acts as a sort of begging child pimp, depositing parentless children in various marketplaces across Bali to beg for money, then picking the kids up every night in a van, col-lecting their proceeds and giving them a shack somewhere in which to sleep. When Wayan first found Big and Little Ketut, they hadn't eaten for days, had lice and parasites, the works. She thinks the younger one is maybe ten and the older one might be thirteen, but they don't know their own ages or even their last names. (Little Ketut knows only that she was born the same year as "the big pig" in her village; this hasn't helped the rest of us establish a timeline.) Wayan has taken them in and cares for them as lovingly as she does her own Tutti. She and the three children all sleep on the same mattress in the one bedroom behind the shop.

其他因素亦随时间一一浮现。我头一天留意到那两名躲在厨房后头的害羞女孩呢！原来她们是大姐收养的一对孤儿。她们俩都叫"老四"，我们叫她们大老四和小老四。大姐几个月前发现她们俩在市场挨饿乞讨。她们遭一个狄更斯小说人物般的女人--可能是亲戚--丢弃；这女人担任某种乞儿掮客，把无父无母的孩子放在巴厘岛各市场讨钱，每天晚上再以货车接回这些孩子，收取他们讨来的钱，让他们睡在棚屋。大姐最初看见大小老四时，她们已多天没吃东西，身上满是虱子与寄生虫。大姐推测小的大约十岁，年纪较大的约十三岁，但是她们都不清楚自己的年纪，也不清楚自己姓什么。（小老四只知道她和自己村里的"猪公"同年出生；但这对日期的验证毫无助益。）大姐收留她们，像照顾自己的图蒂般关怀她们。她和三个孩子睡在店铺后方卧室内的同一张床垫上。

How a Balinese single mother facing eviction found it in her heart to take in two extra homeless children is something that reaches far beyond any understanding I've ever had about the meaning of compassion.

一位巴厘岛的单亲妈妈如何在面临被迫搬迁的命运之际，还有心收留两名额外的流浪儿--这已远远超越我对悲悯意义的理解。

I want to help them.www.for68.com

我想帮助她们。

That was it. This is what that trembling feeling was, which I'd experienced so profoundly after meeting Wayan for the first time. I wanted to help this single mother with her daughter and her extra orphans. I wanted to valet-park them into a better life. It's just that I hadn't been able to figure out how to do it. But today as Wayan and Armenia and I were eating our lunch and weaving our typical conversation of empathy and chopsbusting, I looked over at little Tutti and noticed that she was doing something rather odd. She was walking around the shop with a single, small square of pretty cobalt blue ceramic tile resting on the palms of her upturned hands, singing in a chanting sort of way. I watched her for a while, just to see what she was up to. Tutti played with that tile for a long time, tossing it in the air, whispering to it, singing to it, then pushing it along the floor like it was a Matchbox car. Finally she sat upon it in a quiet corner, eyes closed, singing to herself, buried in some mystical, invisible compartment of space all her own.

这正是我头一次遇见大姐后，深深体验的颤抖感受之所在。我想帮助这位单亲母亲和她的女儿及两名孤儿，我想帮忙她们过更好的生活。我只是不知如何着手。但今天大姐、亚美尼亚和我吃着午饭，一如往常进行彼此体谅、互揭疮疤的交谈之际，我留意到图蒂正在做一件颇为奇怪的事。她双手捧着一小块漂亮的银蓝色正方形瓷砖在店里走来走去，以某种吟诵的方式唱歌。我看了她一会儿，看她想做什么。图蒂耍弄这块瓷砖好一段时间，扔入半空中，低语、吟唱，而后像火柴盒小汽车般沿着地板推动。最后她在安静的角落里坐在瓷砖上，闭上眼睛对自己吟唱，沉浸在属于自己的某种神秘、隐形的空间当中。

I asked Wayan what this was all about. She said that Tutti had found the tile outside the construction site of a fancy hotel project down the road and had pocketed it. Ever since Tutti had found the tile, she kept saying to her mother, "Maybe if we have a house someday, it can have a pretty blue floor, like this." Now, according to Wayan, Tutti often likes to sit perched on that one tiny blue square for hours on end, shutting her eyes and pretending she's inside her own house.

我问大姐这一切是怎么回事。她说图蒂在路上一个豪华饭店建筑的工地外头发现这块瓷砖，遂据为己有。打从图蒂发现这块瓷砖，她就不断告诉母亲："哪天我们如果有房子，或许能有这种漂亮的蓝色地板。"据大姐说，图蒂现在经常坐在这一小块蓝色瓷砖上一连数个小时，闭上眼睛假装在自己的房子里。

What can I say? When I heard that story, and looked at that child deep in meditation upon her small blue tile, I was like: OK, that does it.

我该怎么说？我听了这件事，见这孩子坐在自己小小的蓝色瓷砖上陷入冥想，于是心想："好吧，就这么办。"

And I excused myself from the shop to go take care of this intolerable state of affairs once and for all. Eat, Pray, Love

我提早离开店里，去彻底解决这件令人难以忍受的事情。