A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [102]
It was assumed, Sasono suggested, that rapid industrialization and the exploitation of natural resources were the best route to economic development and high employment. But industrialization was failing to absorb the growing labor force in the cities. Poverty was increasing, and the gap between rich and poor was widening. The benefits of growth were not trickling down. In Jakarta, people were squatting in cemeteries, encamped beside garbage dumps, crowded in shanties alongside railroad tracks. The government was demolishing makeshift settlements to make way for high-rise buildings and the widening of roads, and the police were confiscating pedicabs to clear streets for cars. There was talk of shipping vagrants to a nearby island. Shantytowns, demolished one day, were being reborn the next. “They were doing constant battle with authorities,” Bigalke remembered. “Police were needing to be bribed to allow people to continue setting up their stands on the street.” Sasono made the case for a broad-based, decentralized approach to growth—“for the people, by the people, and with the people.” Even without government help, he believed, the poor would prosper on the strength of their energy and wits. Sasono was a figure not unlike Saul Alinsky, the author of Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals and the father of community organizing in the United States, Richard Holloway told me. Alinsky wrote that book, he said, for those “who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be.” Community organizing, of course, was the line of work that Barack Obama would take up in Chicago just a couple of years after Ann began working with Sasono in Jakarta. Alinsky’s phrase, about wanting to change the world, echoes what Craig Miner, the historian, had told me about Kansans—that they were people who said, “You’re not okay, I’m not okay, and I know how to fix it.”
Through Sasono, Ann widened her circle of acquaintances to include a diverse group of labor activists, reformers, people in cultural organizations, and organizers from the slums. Her fieldwork in the handicraft villages and on the provincial development project in Central Java had convinced her, like Sasono, of the vitality of the informal sector, and the value of development from the bottom up. “She was very interested in demonstrating what a significant contribution to the overall economy the informal sector was making,” Bigalke told me. That way, the informal sector might be encouraged by the authorities rather than stifled. Ann and Sasono, along with others, traveled together to Malang in East Java to visit the largest grassroots women’s cooperative in Indonesia, the Setia Budi Women’s Cooperative, which had been set up exclusively to meet the financial needs of women. They attended seminars and workshops in Jakarta, Semarang, and Bali. “They got along well together,” said her close friend Rens Heringa. “With him, she could really talk—politics and social and economic problems, that kind of thing.” Holloway said, “She was friendly with Adi professionally and possibly personally. Of course, you don’t express emotion in Java. So whatever emotion they had was always concealed. They hung around a lot together. It would have been talked about a bit. But no big deal.” Through Sasono, Ann told Holloway, “I’m able to find really impressive people that I respect greatly, who are Indonesians and not privileged foreigners like myself, but who are working with down-and-out and poor people.”
Ann had a strong