tonight's about a book i bought in one of my trips-
eat, pray, love by Elizabeth Gilbert (again???...hehe...honestly i grabbed the book without a second look jz to kill my tyme for 4-5 hrs bus trip...but it turns out dat i learnt a lot from it)
since dis book have its copyrights, i'll give a brief summary about it base on my understanding-
dis novel is about her life after divorce.
after dealing high n low with the emotional stresses she decided to take a trip for a year to 3 places:
Italy - where she eats a lot
India - where she prays a lot
Indonesia - where she found her love
long story cut short (hehe...the novel has about 350 pages) in Indonesia, she experienced Bali...
here she met a medicine woman (bomoh kot) who was very poor, divorced, with a child of her own and 2 adopted orphans (she picked them up out of pity while she herself barely have enough for her n her daughter) and about to loose her recent houseshop to a rising rent.
her name is Wayan
so Liz here, being close and soft at heart, emailed her friends for help if they could lend a hand to help this Balinese woman.
surprisingly she managed to gather up almost $18 000!!!
but a twist happened when Wayan kept stalling about buying a land n building a house
- the land is not for sale
- the land is possessed by angry demons
- too near the river, ghost lives there (she found out through a dream she had after visiting that place)
- a house at the corner, whoever wanna go bankrupt and die young, live in a corner-lot house (as everyone knows~)
and etc...
until, Wayan found this perfect padi-field land owned by a person who needs fast cash!...this guy have 7 aro (described to be slightly bigger than a parking lot or so~) but wayan's money is only enough to buy 2 aro...hurm...she didn't buy it albeit all the good taksu (tuah kot) and affordable piece of land, when Liz asked why, she started telling complicated stories (the owner needs to sell all 7 aros, his wife wants it like dat, if she have 7 aros she can build a hotel)...wait a minute...a HOTEL????
this is when Elizabeth realized what Wayan is doing...
Liz was sooooooooooooooooooooooo upset!!!...she's being cheated by one of her closest and trusted friend!
but somehow remarkably, the respond her boyfriend (Felipe the love she found in Bali) told her caught my inner mind!
an understanding i assume we as foreigners here in Egypt should apply-
(i need to copy word by word, cause my words won't give the same meaning-)
"Don't get angry about it, whatever happens. If you get angry, you'll lose her, and that would be a pity because she's a marvelous person and she loves you. This is her survival tactic, just accept that. You must not think that she's not a good person, or that she and the kids don't honestly need your help But you cannot let her take advantage of you. Darling, I've seen it repeated so many times.What happens with westerners who live here for a long time is that they usually end up falling into one of two camps. Half of them keep playing the tourist, saying, 'Oh, those lovely Balinese, so sweet, so gracious...,' and getting ripped off like crazy. The other half get so frustrated with being ripped off all the time, they start to hate the Balinese. And that's a shame, because then you've lost all these wonderful friends."
>>i found this really connected to what am experiencing here in Egypt, well...not with THAT ammount of money...but i've heard friends of mine being ripped off by local desperate Egyptians every now and then...
so the question here...do you really hate 'those' Egyptians??? how far can YOU tolerate?
well...am not telling us to let them "step on out head" (literally translating malay's proverb - pijak kepala...hehe)...but, at least...let's stop criticizing them...:)
if we can pause for a while before we get mad, try to find the reason why things happens that way (husnu az-zonn)...la taghdob! (dun be angry!)
what happens nex?...bace sendirila~
