A Singular Woman (28 page)

The quandary was especially difficult because Maya was half Indonesian.

In the spring of 1980, officials at the Ford Foundation in New York and Jakarta had begun talking about creating a new position in the Jakarta office. The job would entail encouraging research, at the village level, on rural employment and the role of women. Women, it seemed, were playing a critical role in keeping poor households afloat. But Indonesian government policies and programs would not reflect that reality until there were more data to prove it. Officials at Ford wanted to encourage more village-level studies. Research, they hoped, would not only help explain the causes of rural poverty, it might also suggest how to enable poor households to take advantage of opportunities the government or other agencies offered. In March, Sidney Jones, a Ford program officer in Jakarta, wrote an interoffice memo listing six people who should be sent the description of the job in case they might want to apply. Jones knew Ann through Nancy Peluso. All three of them, along with other scholars, had begun to collaborate on a possible book of articles on women's economic activities in Java, which Ann intended to edit. The six names on Jones's list had come from Peter Goethals, an American anthropologist who was a Harvard classmate of Alice Dewey's and a former denizen of the house in Mānoa. Goethals had been working on the same Agency for International Development project as Ann, but in another part of Indonesia. All six candidates were anthropologists, fluent in Indonesian, who had done fieldwork in the country. But Ann was described at the greatest length. After listing Ann's scholarly credentials, Jones concluded, “She's a specialist in small scale industries/non-farm employment and would be superb.”

F
our Americans lingered at the entrance to a teeming street market in an out-of-the-way neighborhood in Yogyakarta. It was the fall of 1981, and their little landing party must have made an unusual sight—a stout white woman, a six-foot-four-inch-tall black man, and two white male colleagues, all towering above the eddying crowd. The place was a used-book market, Tom Kessinger, the head of the Jakarta office of the Ford Foundation at the time, remembered years later. But a Westerner might have mistaken it for a paper-recycling operation. Sellers trudged in, humping inventory in fabric bundles on their backs. The market was chaotic, densely packed, and dominated by men. One year into her job at Ford, Ann was increasingly immersed in the world of street vendors, scavengers, and others who eked out a living in the informal economy, where as many as nine out of every ten Indonesians made at least part of their living. On that day, the used-book market was being forced to close, under pressure from merchants or the police. Ann was accompanied by Kessinger, who had lived for years in India, and Franklin Thomas, who had overseen the restoration of the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn before becoming the president and chief executive officer of Ford. “We waded into the market in a way that nobody outside the country would have,” Kessinger remembered. “If you weren't someone as big as Frank is, you might even feel physically threatened. It was so dense and out of control.” Ann strode into the chaos, leading the way. Thirty years later, Kessinger would remember the ease with which she unlocked the obscure logic of the place, the relationships and patterns of organization. He said, “I could see, and she communicated it nonverbally, just how comfortable and easy it was going to be.”

When he had hired Ann, Kessinger had been looking for someone capable of working “close to the ground,” as he put it later. The Ford Foundation, one of the leading philanthropic organizations in the United States, defined its mission as strengthening democratic values, reducing poverty and injustice, promoting international cooperation, and advancing human achievement. After going from a local to an international foundation in 1950, it had operated initially by hiring expatriates with specialized knowledge, and making them available to emerging countries trying to build democratic forms of government. By the early 1980s, countries such as Indonesia had experts and institutions of their own, so Ford was becoming a source of funding more than a supplier of outside expertise. Thomas, after ten years in community-based development in New York, believed in local talent. The Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, which he had headed, had enlisted neighborhood people in the work of urban redevelopment. At Ford, he wanted local people engaged in every aspect of the foundation's international work. “There was an evolving sense that you probably had more knowledge in the experience of people in almost any setting than you could bring in from the outside, no matter how diligently the outsiders worked or studied,” Thomas told me. Tom Kessinger, arriving in Jakarta in August 1979 to head the Ford office, had set about making contact with Indonesia's small but growing universe of civil-society organizations, in which an emerging generation of leaders was working for social and economic change. He wanted to know how those organizations could be nurtured. It was easy to find the bigger ones; they tended to be based in Jakarta and had English-speaking staffs who knew how to write reports. Harder to reach were the smaller, more numerous, less sophisticated, so-called nongovernmental organizations scattered all over the archipelago. “What Ann represented to me was getting out into the NGO circuit beyond what I could do because of my obligations and my poor Indonesian,” Kessinger told me. She arrived at Ford, Thomas said, “at a time when the institutional focus had shifted from the elite to the grassroots. She personified someone all of whose ties were at a non-elite level.”

Kessinger also wanted someone interested in women. There was a new focus at Ford on gender equality and the status of women. In Indonesia, the position of women had been relatively high compared with what it was in some other Muslim and even non-Muslim countries. But population pressure and technological change were pushing rural women into menial work. The extent of the problem was difficult to gauge, because there had been few studies of village women. Members of the Ford staff in Jakarta had suggested hiring someone to spend half their time as a program officer based in Jakarta, developing and managing projects addressing the need for paying work for village women. The rest of the time, he or she would work as a so-called project specialist at the Bogor Agricultural Institute, helping Indonesian researchers analyze village-level data on women, and teaching younger scholars how to do field research. Sidney Jones, the only female program officer in the Jakarta office of Ford at the time, invited Ann and Tom Kessinger to dinner at her house. Not long after that, Kessinger hired Ann.

“At first impression, you would say she was easygoing,” Kessinger told me. “Once you got to know her, she was really quite intense and, in a certain sense, driven.” She was serious and focused, and willing to engage with people. “But there was also a little bit of reserve as well, which I never totally figured out,” Kessinger said. “I could see that some people might see that as a kind of snobbishness—though I don't mean snobbishness. When someone is distancing, sometimes it's personality or they're protecting themselves. Sometimes it's read as not very open or warm. Ann had that quality. I felt it the first evening we had dinner at Sidney Jones's house. I was doing the interview kind of thing—not the formal interview. I just had a sense that there were areas where I was going to get a certain distance, not further. There seemed to be a time when the conversation had to go in a different direction.”

By January 1981, Ann was back in Jakarta with Maya and working for Ford.

“Life in the bubble” is the phrase one longtime Ford employee used to describe life as a Ford program officer in Jakarta. The economy was growing, the oil industry was booming, and Jakarta was becoming a modern city, but Ford families lived in a style that resembled an earlier, colonial-era, expatriate existence. They were housed in Kebayoran Baru, a quiet neighborhood of wide, shaded streets planned by the Dutch, where Ford owned or leased a number of high-ceilinged bungalows with ceiling fans, verandas, and gardens dense with flowering trees. The foundation furnished the houses in teak and rattan or to the tastes of the Ford families. It dispatched its own maintenance crew to fix toilets that ceased to flush. Ann's house was comfortable, not lavish. (“My oven has collapsed!” she wrote to a Ford support-staff member in April 1981. “I have to wire the door shut and it sprinkles flakes of rust on the food while the food is cooking.” Some months later, she reported a termite infestation: “The wood is riddled with holes already and in the evening hours literally thousands of termites pour out of these holes and fly about, making the room and the back sitting area unusable.”) Ford had a fleet of cars with drivers—though Ann employed her own, a man who had driven her Agency for International Development jeep in Semarang. The foundation ferried expatriate staff members in a carpool back and forth along the twenty-minute drive between Kebayoran Baru and the office. There was annual home leave for the entire family, with travel arrangements made by the foundation. There were provisions for spouse travel and “educational travel for dependent children,” annual physicals and vaccinations. Children of the program staff rode a school bus together to the Jakarta International School, where—along with the offspring of diplomats, oil company executives, and missionaries—they performed in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas and recited the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore in the original Bengali. Ford arranged for enrollment and paid the tuition. “Everything seems set at the school for Maya,” Kessinger, who served on the school's board, wrote to Ann in December 1980. He had, he said, “personally spoken to the Superintendent and [had] been assured that a place will be saved for her.”

Ann worked three days a week in the Ford offices in a white-washed colonial-style building with a steeply sloping tile roof on Taman Kebon Sirih (Betel Tree Garden) in Central Jakarta. Formerly a private home, the building sat squarely on a low-lying lot next to a canal. In the rainy season, brown water seeped up through the tile floors, swamping the metal file cabinets, saturating paperwork, and staining the walls. The staff fell roughly into two groups: The program staff was transient, white, and mostly male; and the administrative, clerical, and support staff tended to be permanent, Indonesian, and female. A photograph taken during Ann's tenure shows a dozen Indonesian women, all smiling and many of them dressed in batik, arrayed in front of a half-dozen mostly Caucasian men in neckties and short-sleeved plain white shirts. Floating half hidden in between is the only Western woman, Ann. Kessinger, whose title as the head of the office was country representative, had been a member of the first group of Peace Corps volunteers sent to India in the early sixties. He had worked in community development in the Punjab before returning to the United States to study history and anthropology, writing his dissertation for his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago on the social and economic history of an Indian village. He was a tenured professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, married to an Indian, when Ford hired him in 1977 and sent him first to New Delhi. In the Jakarta office, Kessinger was a jovial presence, inclined toward the informal management style of academia, not the top-down style of the corporate world. The program officers, with Ph.D.'s in fields like comparative world history, specialized in areas such as natural resources, epidemiology, education, and traditional Indonesian culture. “There was a sense of idealism, but there was also a certain smugness of the ‘best and the brightest' culture,” said Sidney Jones, who went to work for Ford in Jakarta in 1977, initially in a job she said was known as “the ingenue role,” because it was not expected to lead anywhere better. “You never referred to ‘Ford.' It was always ‘The Foundation.'”

The job of program officer required a mix of skills and talents. As Kessinger described it to me, a program officer had to talk to a lot of people, then think about the issues, then consider the context—within the Ford Foundation, in the Indonesian government, among other donors. As Jones put it, one had to think strategically about how to plant money in different places in order to bring about a desired transformation or change. “If you want to increase access to justice, for example, you think, ‘Okay, we've got the legal-aid group that works with one set of people,'” she said. “‘It would probably be a good idea to get a couple of really bright people trained in some kind of legal approach so that you can have those people in law faculties in a number of places. It would be good to get some judges or others to have exposure to what's done in places where there is really good access.' You put all the pieces together and you get a program.”

As for herself, she said, “I just tended to take really interesting projects and fund them—without thinking very far ahead about what the end result was.”