Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

The next day Liz is back at Wayan’s restaurant, eating lunch. Armenia and Tutti are there, too. Wayan expresses her concern that her lease is up in three months and her rent will be raised. She will have to move, has nowhere to go, and Tutti will be taken out of school again. Two orphans she adopted live with her, too. They all sleep together on the same mattress in the bedroom behind the shop.

Liz wants to help her. Then she sees Tutti playing with a blue tile. She tosses it, whispers to it, sings to it, and then sits on it in the corner. Wayan tells her Tutti found the tile at the construction site of a hotel and said, “Maybe if we have a house someday, it can have a pretty blue floor, like this” (300). Tutti likes to sit on the tile for hours on end.

Liz decides she must help Wayan. She sends emails to her friends and family telling them Wayan’s story and asking them to celebrate her 35th birthday with donations for Wayans’s house. Liz will match the donations from her savings. The donations pour in. In seven days, she has raised $18,000.