A Singular Woman (35 page)

Ann had been hired to work on the design and initiation of the pilot phase of the first credit project for women and artisan-caste members carried out by the Agricultural Development Bank of Pakistan, the country's largest development institution. In the Punjab, where she was working, Ann observed that village people fell into three classes. Feudal, landowning families lived lavishly in hilltop villas and sent their children abroad to the best universities. Small landholders lived in walled mud compounds and farmed tiny plots. Artisan-caste members, including blacksmiths and weavers and other craftspeople, made products for the landowning families, to whom they were indentured, in return for raw materials and a small share of grain. Some artisan-caste members, however, had cut their ties with the landlords. They were buying raw materials and selling their products in the markets. Ann interviewed carpet weavers, pottery makers, blacksmiths, leather workers, tailors, and others during her first six-month stay. She talked with branch managers of banks. She surveyed buyers, suppliers, and intermediaries in Lahore. When she returned a year later, she conducted training courses for sixty-five extension workers, including the first women, who would work with the artisans. She also made recommendations for increasing lending to poor rural women. Over a two-year period, she told Dewey in a letter, the program made loans to nearly fifteen hundred artisan families and landless or near-landless agricultural families. “So there are some satisfactions in a job pretty well done under difficult field circumstances,” she said.

Details of the pleasures of Pakistan she saved for Suryakusuma, her flamboyant friend from Jakarta. In one letter, dated August 28, 1987, she wrote:

Ann's approach to matters of the spirit was eclectic. She would meditate in Buddhist monasteries and make small offerings in the Hindu communities that she visited. When she had a kris made for herself in Java, Maya said, she went through the ritual of sleeping with it under her pillow—a process through which a kris is thought to communicate with its owner through dreams—and having her dreams interpreted. “It was important to just sort of acknowledge that everyone had something beautiful to contribute spiritually,” Maya told me. “She always counseled us to be very open-minded, to have deep respect for everyone's religions, to recognize that every religion had something good to offer.” According to others, she was skeptical of organized religion and ceremonial excess. Don Johnston, a Southern Baptist from Little Rock, Arkansas, and a colleague of Ann's in the early 1990s, said she seemed at that time to be leaning toward deism or Unitarianism—the religion of the church in Bellevue, Washington, she attended as an adolescent. God, she thought, could be found at the intersection of many belief systems. “As anthropologists, we tend to talk about religion more as ritual practice and part of human society,” said Nina Nayar, who became a close friend of Ann's several years later. “Rarely do we converse about belief in God. I would not say Ann was a Christian or a Hindu or a Buddhist. I would not put a label on her. But she had a general interest. And I think she probably had more spiritual stuff in her than most people who profess to be religious and faithful. She never once used words in my presence about being atheist or agnostic. She was not a woman of labels. The only label she would not shun was the label of anthropologist.”

In
The Audacity of Hope,
Obama describes his mother, despite her professed secularism, as “in many ways the most spiritually awakened person that I've ever known.” Without religious texts or outside authorities, he says, she worked to instill in him the values that many Americans learn in Sunday school. She possessed, too, “an abiding sense of wonder, a reverence for life and its precious, transitory nature that could properly be described as devotional.” She would occasionally wake him in the middle of the night, as a child, he writes, to look at the moon or have him close his eyes as they “walked together at twilight to listen to the rustle of leaves. . . . She saw mysteries everywhere and took joy in the sheer strangeness of life.”

In the late summer of 1986, Ann arranged for Maya to fly to Jakarta, on her way back to Hawaii from Pakistan, to visit her father. Lolo Soetoro had been hospitalized in Jakarta with the liver disease that had been diagnosed a decade earlier when Maya was a small child. Though Ann had been led to believe by his doctors, during his hospitalization in Los Angeles, that the disease would cut short his life, Lolo had lived another seven years. Now he was gravely ill. Maya, having just turned sixteen, flew by herself to Jakarta, where relatives met her at the airport and took her to the home of her uncle Trisulo. Lolo, released from the hospital, spent a week with her in Trisulo's house. He was more talkative than Maya had remembered. He asked about her school, her favorite subjects, and her friends. He brought photographs of himself that he wanted her to keep. There were moments of affection and tenderness. But their time together felt awkward to Maya. “I felt a teenage resentment that he hadn't been present in a more meaningful way and that he had left the rearing of me to Mom,” she remembered later. “I was sort of feeling like I wanted him to be sorry about that.” Later, she would come to regret not having stayed longer. But she had been away from Hawaii for three months, and she was impatient to go home. It never occurred to her that her father might be dying—and that he might know it. Afterward, she wrote him a long letter from Hawaii and tried to send it in time to reach him before his birthday on January 2. She wanted them to have a meaningful relationship, she told him in the letter; she wanted to know him better. But the letter was waylaid in the Christmas rush, she told me, and did not arrive as planned. In the meantime, a family member telephoned from Indonesia to say that Lolo had fallen into a coma. In early 1987, he died.

The house in Menteng Dalam, to which Maya and Ann had returned from Hawaii in 1975, went to Maya (and was sold some years later, with the proceeds going to help pay for her graduate-school education). To protect Maya's rights, Ann stopped in Jakarta on her way home from Pakistan the following November. The house was being rented by Dick Patten, whom she had gotten to know while she was working on the provincial planning project in Central Java in 1979 and 1980. Patten, who had extensive experience in credit systems in Indonesia, had gone on to work as a consultant to one of the largest banks in Indonesia on a program not unrelated to the work he and Ann had done earlier. The aim of the new program, run by a state-owned bank called Bank Rakyat Indonesia, or the People's Bank of Indonesia, was to make small loans on a broad scale to low-income rural households throughout the country. At a time when the term
microfinance
was not the household word that it has since become, the Bank Rakyat Indonesia project, launched in early 1984, had gotten off to a remarkable start. By late 1985, the bank had made nearly one million small loans, ranging in value from a few dollars to a few hundred dollars. It would soon be initiating new loans at a rate of 120,000 a month. The program held the potential to benefit small enterprises of the sort Ann had studied as an anthropologist, worked with as a development consultant, and tried to help in her years at Ford. So in the summer of 1988, after Maya graduated from Punahou with plans to enroll at Barnard College in the fall, Ann moved back to Jakarta to work with Patten on what was quickly becoming the most successful commercial microfinance program of its kind in the world.

Once again, her dissertation would have to wait.

“Anyway, they are paying me well and I need to fill up my bank account again. (How's that for revolutionary fervor?),” she wrote to Suryakusuma in August 1988.

The credit program had arisen out of the ruins of an earlier effort at rural lending. During the 1970s, Bank Rakyat Indonesia had set up a network of 3,600 small banking units for the purpose of channeling government-subsidized credit to rice farmers under the country's push for rice self-sufficiency. Lending under that program had peaked in the mid-1970s, after which operational losses had ballooned. So it had been phased out, leaving the bank with an extensive network of fully staffed loan offices with little to do. With the encouragement of the Ministry of Finance and advice from the Harvard Institute for International Development, with which Dick Patten was affiliated, the bank had tried something new.

From the beginning, anthropologists had shaped the new credit program. Marguerite Robinson, an American anthropologist who had done fieldwork in India and spent twenty years teaching, had joined the Harvard institute and been sent to Indonesia to work with the Ministry of Finance. James Fox, the anthropologist from Australia whom Ann had known in Jakarta in the early 1980s, had worked with Robinson and Patten advising the bank. From anthropological fieldwork, including Ann's, they knew that rice farming was just one of many economic activities in Indonesian villages that needed credit in order to grow. They also knew, from village studies, that government-subsidized credit, under the old system, had reached only a small fraction of villagers. It needed to be more widely accessible. So, working with the finance minister, the consultants began exploring a program of unsubsidized commercial microfinance. The bank would lend money for any reasonable economic activity, not just rice farming. The program would soon operate without an ongoing subsidy; instead, it would charge interest at the market rate. The market rate was nearly twice the old rate. But most villagers, if they borrowed money, did so through loan groups or moneylenders, who charged in excess of one hundred percent interest on an annual basis. Even with an interest rate of thirty-two percent, it was argued, the new program would be an improvement.

The project took off. Within two years, with the help of a microsavings program, the new general credit program was self-sustaining. By 1989, the bank had 2.7 million rural savings accounts; it had made as many as 6.4 million loans to 1.6 million borrowers. The microfinance program would become the biggest and most lucrative part of the bank's operations. In 1999, Fox called the program “probably the single largest and most successful credit program of its kind in the developing world.”

Ann joined the team in 1988 and worked on and off over the next four years as a research coordinator and consultant under three separate contracts funded by the World Bank and the U.S. Agency for International Development. Ann had what Patten lacked—an intimate knowledge of Indonesian villages. Working with teams of staff researchers from the bank, she designed and carried out what might be described as customer surveys and market research, the results of which were used to fine-tune and measure the success of the microfinance program. She spent weeks at a time traveling with her teams on field trips through Java, North Sumatra, South Sulawesi, and Bali, meeting with bank branch managers and interviewing customers for hours on end. The teams examined how customers were using the money they had borrowed. They gauged its impact on households and rates of employment. They studied repayment rates by gender, estimated the scope of unmet demand, and tracked the rates at which customers were either keeping up with or falling behind on their payments. The consultants used the studies—original research at a time when there was little like it—to refine the microfinance program and to convince the bank not simply to continue the experiment but to expand it, increasing the size of the loans. For every million rupiahs that the bank loaned, Ann told Kamardy Arief, the bank's chief executive officer, her research showed that one additional job was created.

“Ann provided a justification from the field for the approach of commercial microfinance,” said Don Johnston, who joined the Harvard group in early 1990 and worked closely with her and Patten. “She was showing that this was something that was benefiting the customers—not something the banks were doing out of desperation. That left Dick and me free to worry about the operational side. We had our ammunition to deal with outsiders, and we had the information that gave us confidence that the basic product approach and expansion direction we were taking was right. So then we could worry about fighting the internal battles . . . to keep the institution on track.”