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from the countryside.” Her convictions, he said, arose less out of emotional responses than out of empirical data. Her sense of injustice was sharp but informed—not a sentimental reaction. He could not recall having heard Ann “give any passionate speeches about the injustices of the world.” She would just comment, rather matter-of-factly, “I’m looking into this.” She was fully aware of corruption, the government restrictions, the cynicism of elites. She knew all about people exploiting one another, and she did not romanticize any of those things. At the same time, she believed it was not impossible to make life in Indonesia better. “She saw the good and the bad everywhere,” Vayda said. “She was smart about it. She realized these were things she had to accept if she wanted to make a difference.” He said he had no evidence that correcting injustices was what drove her—but if something could be corrected, that was a bonus.

“Other people talk about her warmth and compassion and generosity,” Vayda said, with some impatience, reflecting on characterizations of Ann in the media during the presidential campaign. “All that’s true. But I haven’t seen that much about how funny she was—and how hardheaded.”

What was striking, James Fox said, was not her passion but her authority.

“Ann had lived how many years with poor people?” he said. “She didn’t have to parade it, it was just there. When she talked, she talked as if she knew the villages of Java. You knew she knew. It was a kind of mission, but she didn’t put up a flag to parade it.” At the same time, he said, “she just couldn’t stand some of the bullshit that comes from an expatriate who’s been in the country a week and knows the answer to everything. Ann could be very tough. She didn’t suffer fools who pretended to know what they didn’t know.”

With friends or colleagues, apparently in Yogyakarta, about 1977 or 1978

To some in the Ford Foundation office, she came off as more of an advocate.

“She was a very tough person, and I mean that in a good sense,” said Terance Bigalke, a Ford program officer in Jakarta. At Ford, she did not go out of her way to “nuance” her positions, he said. “In an office setting, you often say things where you’re making your point but very carefully choosing your words,” he said. “That wasn’t her style.” She seemed to believe people should be able to take the full force of her opinions; she was ready to do the same in return. Most people seemed to respect her for it, Bigalke said, even if they might not have taken such an undiplomatic stand. They may even have found it endearing. “They could feel how passionately she felt about the issues she was working with,” he said. “It wasn’t an academic exercise for her, it was something she was really committed to.”

Or as Tom Kessinger put it, “It wasn’t just a professional job. It was something a little more personal.”

One of the Indonesians with whom Ann worked most closely was Adi Sasono, the son of Muslim social activists from Pekalongan on the north coast of Central Java, who had been a student leader at the time of the overthrow of Sukarno. Trained as an engineer and educated in Holland, Sasono had worked in the corporate sector until the mid-1970s, when he had quit and, with a group of young intellectuals who saw themselves as Islamic reformers, formed an organization to explore alternative approaches to development in Indonesia. By the time Ann met him, Sasono was the director of the Institute for Development Studies, an independent organization with a full-time staff of thirty. He was organizing squatters and scavengers in the cities and encouraging the growth of rural cooperatives. Sasono, who would go on to become a minister in the Indonesian government after the fall of Suharto in the late 1990s, wanted to find ways of allowing “development without displacement”; he wanted to integrate the sprawling informal economy into city planning. His ideas were so attractive, Richard Holloway of Oxfam told me, that many of the international-development people wanted to work with him. “Of all the Indonesians