A Singular Woman (26 page)

Ann lived on the Indonesian end of the expatriate spectrum. She spoke the language, ate the food, sat with her legs folded under her on the floor. She accumulated Indonesian friends and ran her household in an informal, open Indonesian style. Blenkinsop was amazed by the sheer numbers of people there often seemed to be in the house. “She had quite a staff because she was such a softie with people who said they had relatives who needed a job,” recalled John Raintree, who lived in the house for a time with his wife, Kadi Warner, and their two-year-old daughter. There were long-term houseguests, friends of Maya's, the friends' mothers, young volunteers such as Ann Hawkins, colleagues dropping by. In a letter to Dewey in May 1979, Ann put out the word: “By the way, if anyone should need a stopover in Semarang while I'm gone, feel free to use my house. We have a good old dog named Spot (we inherited him from another family), two rabbits and two absolutely hilarious baby goats born on Easter evening.”

Hawkins rode the bus down from Ungaran on weekends to visit. No matter how early in the morning she got up, she would find Ann seated at a small table with a large cup of coffee, reading or writing in the relative cool before the sun rose and the heat set in. “She had such a wealth of background, information, contact with Indonesia, perspective—books, colonial history, things I hadn't yet grappled with,” remembered Hawkins, who, because of her work, had on-the-ground information that was useful to Ann. “In an interesting way, we traded things with each other.” Don Flickinger, another volunteer, could hardly believe that a person like Ann existed in Semarang. When Hawkins introduced him to Ann, Flickinger quickly realized she knew everything he knew and a lot more. She knew the villages in Gunung Kidul where he was working, trying to develop prototypes for fuel-efficient stoves. She had all sorts of connections. Because she was married to an Indonesian, she had standing and was not easy for Indonesian officials to dismiss. “I remember her saying, ‘You're dealing in the mountains of Central Java, I can help you with this,'” he told me. “‘Let me see if I can let somebody know that this is a project that should be supported.'”

To Flickinger, her house felt like a haven. It was possible to talk openly there about politics, about the relentless control exercised by the Suharto regime. Ann seemed almost maternal. Flickinger would want her to say something encouraging about the country's future, but she was simply realistic, always looking for ways to make the situation better. “Because she was living the life she was, I guess I would have to say she was optimistic,” he remembered. “But with her eyes wide open.” Richard Holloway described her sitting on a settee, clutching a cushion to her chest “and sort of, I suppose, ‘tut-tutting' is the way I would put it. Not a spinsterish tut-tutting, but she would tone down some of the outrageous statements people were making.” On Thanksgiving, she held a “Ducksgiving” feast. Colleagues, friends, and younger volunteers living on stipends all turned up. In the absence of turkey, they plucked and cooked several ducks. “Ann was extremely gregarious and, of course, entertaining and fun,” Blenkinsop said. “She was generous-spirited.”

Ann did not, as has been said, suffer fools gladly. Semarang, like any place, had its share of fools. Ann found it incredible that one American family ate only imported food, said Glen Williams, Holloway's predecessor at Oxfam, who was also friendly with Ann. She could not see the point. She found it bizarre that many expatriates made little effort to learn the language. There were hilarious malapropisms to savor: In a speech to an audience of Indonesians, a colleague of Blenkinsop's intended to use the expression
masuk angin,
which means a draft of wind has entered the body, and which is used to refer to a slight cold with flu-like symptoms. Instead, he said
masuk anjing,
which would mean a dog had entered the body. “She was not like most of the other expatriates there, who would never, ever have dreamed of going to a
wayang
performance,” said Williams, who went once, determined to sit through the performance, but drifted off. “It was out of their comfort zone, but she didn't respect expatriate comfort zones.” She and Blenkinsop were not above laughing about other expatriates.

If Ann found their behavior curious, however, the feeling was mutual.

“In Semarang, Ann was—I wouldn't say eccentric, but she was an unusual woman,” Blenkinsop said. “Living in Central Java as a single white American woman with her own household setup—I can't think of another one.” Ann's decision to educate Maya at home may also have struck some as questionable: “Running tiny schools in your garage may not have been what they thought was mainstream,” Blenkinsop said. Ann's friendliness with Indonesians “was thought to be strange and perhaps a little inappropriate.” Ann “must have represented something that was a bit of an eyebrow raiser, frankly,” Blenkinsop said. Remarks were made. “The gossip in those sorts of communities was absolutely fantastic,” she said.

There were advantages and disadvantages to being a Western woman working in Indonesia. Blenkinsop, who had academic degrees in sociology and business and was working for both an Indonesian organization and the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, was often asked in villages why her husband was not with her. But she had access to women that men in the field did not. In fishing villages on the east coast of Sumatra, where the infant mortality rate was astronomical, women flocked to speak to her—especially when they had seen her before and after giving birth to her own child. Ann Hawkins, on trips to villages, found herself invariably seated, during welcoming ceremonies, up front with the men. The other women would be off to the side, passing out fried bananas and tea. Jerry Silverman, Ann's colleague, worried initially that having a woman in Ann's job might be a problem in a Muslim country with what he described as a largely patriarchal family structure and male power structure. But he found he need not have worried. She had an entrée with women that Western men in her position did not have, Silverman came to realize; and because she was a foreigner, Indonesian men saw her as gender-neutral. If Ann had “gone native,” that would not have been the case, Silverman told me. “There are people who think the way you work effectively in other cultures is to try to deny your own and become them,” he said. “Ann never did that. She understood the differences, she was respectful, she was knowledgeable, but she was ‘us' and not ‘them.' I think that's a point that a lot of people looking at her miss: It wasn't that she got inside so well, it was that she was outside but appreciative.” Silverman, who went on to live half of his life outside the United States, said that was a lesson he learned from Ann. It made him more comfortable in his own skin.

Being a foreigner could be liberating. “It kind of doesn't matter what I do, because I'm from Mars,” Ann used to say to John Raintree. The impossibility of fitting in, in any conventional sense, seemed to make it possible to find a place of a different sort. Ann Hawkins had been shy, bookish, and tongue-tied as a child. After graduating from college, an organization called Volunteers in Asia sent her to teach English in South Sulawesi. “If one has grown up and always thought to oneself, ‘I don't know quite what it is, I don't seem to fit, people don't quite seem to get me,'” she told me, “then you go to someplace like Indonesia and you think, ‘It's true, they don't get me, and it doesn't matter, it's a given.' Just walking off the plane and having that sheer wall of heat and humidity in your face, your body, your bones—you're not sure you will survive. Then you realize, ‘That's right. I'm a foot taller than everybody else, I'm white, I have blue eyes, I totally stand out, and I can barely say hello. I am back to essentials.' In a very funny way, through having to learn another language, I became verbal and social in a completely different way.”

Javanese manners and behavior were so appealing that some Westerners found themselves dressing differently, pointing with their thumb instead of their index finger and being careful how they crossed their legs. The Javanese temperament seemed well suited to Ann. Her personality, Richard Holloway told me, was “ameliorative.” From time to time, she would be called on to take visiting representatives from the aid agencies into the field. They might not speak the language, know the country, or know how to behave. They would insist on visiting villages, eyeballing projects, and seeing results, whether it was convenient or not. Some were aggressive or arrogant or unaware, say, that it was rude to plant your hands on your hips. In her now flawless Indonesian, Ann would soothe any hard feelings. “All he was trying to do was cool his armpits down,” Holloway remembered her once explaining to some Indonesians. Several years later, when she was living in Jakarta, Holloway recalled a rash of kidnappings of dogs from expatriate-dense neighborhoods, to be sold for eating. Because Ann owned a dog, her driver became alarmed at the sight of a stranger in her garden, grabbed a cable, and began beating the interloper to a pulp. “Ann stopped him with real difficulty, calmed him down, uttered the palliative Javanese phrases,” Holloway remembered. “She generally tried to lower the tone of the tension, which is a very Javanese thing to do, but I had the impression that it was also her. She lived Indonesia without playacting. It was her.”

Ann also had a certain Javanese sense of propriety, which Holloway went so far as to describe as prudery. It surprised him, because most of the Americans he knew were the opposite. Indonesian women in villages kept their arms and legs covered and wore nothing open at the neck. Ann followed the same rules: She wore dark skirts down to the mid-calf and loose shirts made of hand-loomed textiles or batik. She bought fabric and took it to a tailor, who would copy other pieces. “Her wardrobe was primarily blue and black and some tan,” Kadi Warner told me. “That was all the batiking colors. Rusty browns and blacks.” She wore sturdy utilitarian sandals without a heel. She kept her hair long, she told Warner, to cover her ears, which left her head at an uncommonly wide angle. “She wasn't flash,” Holloway said. “She was dumpy.” She would express displeasure with behavior that violated Indonesian standards. In the countryside, where it was common to encounter people attending to bodily functions, anyone approaching would stop, turn his back, and wait for a cough or some other signal to proceed. On one occasion, Holloway said, he and Ann happened on some women gathered beside a spring. As he and Ann approached, it became clear that the women were naked. Ann stopped abruptly, turned on her heel, and walked briskly back down the hill they had just climbed. “As a man, I would probably have called out that I was coming and asked them if it was okay if I came on—which threw the ball in their court,” Holloway said. “She would just defer.” She was deeply attuned to the way the Javanese lived.

In Bali with the Solyoms some years later, she passed up the opportunity for an outdoor shower. In a tone of humorous self-mockery, she explained, “A girl from Kansas never bathes outdoors.”

Ann's title on the development project was adviser on small-scale industries and rural credit, an area of expertise that had arisen naturally out of her fieldwork for her dissertation. The firm that hired her felt lucky to have an anthropologist who also happened to be married to an Indonesian, fluent in the language, and writing a thesis on small-scale industries. The job entailed supporting the ability of the provincial planning agency to oversee small-scale development projects in twenty-two villages in five of the poorest districts in Central Java. That included helping set up a credit program for poor people in those villages. Ann served as an adviser to the planning office and was charged with cultivating closer ties between the planning office and local civic organizations. She oversaw the work of a team from a local university that had been enlisted to collect data, and she monitored the participation of village women in the projects. The work was not unlike the work that her son, who was entering college in California, would take up in Chicago four or five years later. Like a community organizer, Ann understood the need to foster trust, build credibility, and be sensitive to the way other people did things.

“For me, Ann is not the anthropologist doing research,” Silverman said. “For me, Ann is the community organizer in Central Java.”

Ann's style was nonconfrontational but direct. Silverman said he could not remember a single conversation in which Ann came to him, told him he was off track and needed to do something her way. They lived two blocks apart and shared a small office a half-mile away. They did not have meetings, he said, they just talked. The fact was, Ann knew more about what she was doing than he did, he said. His job, he came to believe, was to keep the bureaucracy off her back. “Initially, we're just a bunch of stupid foreigners,” he said. “Over time, I think we emerged as something other than that. Ann was an important part of that. It had to do with demonstrating to them that we saw them as our client, rather than USAID or the central government in Jakarta—i.e., that they could trust us.”

In the summer of 1979, Ann wrote to Dewey asking her to pass along a job offer to a former student and housemate of Dewey's, John Raintree. A newly minted anthropologist, Raintree had intended to become a physicist, majored in psychology, then spent two years in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone with his wife, Kadi Warner, before they both enrolled in graduate school at the University of Hawai‘i. He was fascinated by technology. The late 1970s were the heyday of so-called appropriate technology—often simple gadgets especially suited to the social and economic conditions of a developing community. “At that time, appropriate technology was on everybody's to-do list,” Raintree told me. Development Alternatives Inc. needed an expert in the subject to work in Central Java with Ann. Raintree moved to Semarang with Kadi, their daughter, and a small library of appropriate-technology resources. Over the next six months, he developed half a dozen prototypes designed to relieve production bottlenecks in small industries. For blacksmiths, who used files to sharpen the tools they were making, he came up with a grinder powered by a person pedaling a kind of stationary bicycle. He found a simple method of pressing roof tiles that cost a fraction of the cost of the machine it would replace. “You have to get up very early in the morning to suggest anything of any real relevance to these people,” Raintree told me. “Occasionally, you can. What was nice about working with Ann was she understood the villages and the rural industry situation so well that she could prime me, so that I could find a lot of things that really seemed to make sense. Ann had it all figured out long before I got there.”