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By Root 1055 0

sense of right and wrong about people abusing other people, Holloway had noticed. She knew wealthy women in Jakarta, some educated abroad, who “talked up a great talk about democracy,” Holloway said, then went home and gave their own servants no wages, poor food, and abysmal accommodations. He had been struck by what he described as Ann’s “vituperation about high-class Javanese women treating servants badly.” That sort of thing was a fact of life in Indonesia, he said. “But she was not prepared to just slough that off and say, ‘That’s how Indonesia is.’ She would get angry about it.” To encounter Indonesians who felt passionately about challenging such injustices was emboldening. Holloway said, “She would, I think, feel justified in this because, ‘I’m not just a foreigner getting angry, there are people like Adi getting angry. This is an Indonesian response, not a foreign response.’”

It was an important point, Holloway added.

“There was always a danger that you would become overidentified with the problems of the people you were working with,” he said. “When that happens, you exaggerate the nature of their problems in a way that’s meaningful to you but not to them. They have accommodated such problems in their view of life; for you to go on about it seems naive or foolish.”

Ann played an unusual role during that period: At a time when fledgling independent-sector organizations offered just about the only opportunity for the exercise of democratic values, Sasono told me, Ann served as a catalyst and a bridge. The Suharto government tolerated a limited amount of activity. But the organizations had a tendency, Bigalke said, “to kind of carve out their own little territory and not be all that interested in interacting with others.” Rarely did one group try to bring others together. “In a way, Ann was doing that through the various grants that she had, and then bringing people together at her home for dinners in the evening, having the kinds of social interaction that we had with the institutes that we were giving grants to,” Bigalke said. Sasono, who had been impressed as a young man by the stories of American democratic institutions as told in booklets distributed by the United States Information Service to libraries all over Indonesia, said he learned about pluralism from Ann’s example.

“Bridging is not an easy job, because she has to understand the ideas of many people with different ideas,” he said. Being an anthropologist, she talked to people as partners, not “as target beneficiaries.” Her involvement was emotional, not simply intellectual. Those discussions, Sasono said, gave people ideas and courage. Many became activists in the reform movement that eventually brought the government down. A few, such as Sasono, went on to work in the governments that followed. “Development, like democracy, is a learning process,” Sasono said. “People have to learn to have freedom, on one side, and also responsibility, the rule of law, social discipline. It must be done through a social learning process. That’s what we learned from both Ann Dunham as well as David Korten, because both come from a society that has learned from democracy in more than two hundred years.”

More important than projects, he said, was the selling of ideas.

In mid-1982, Ann made several field trips to tea plantations in the mountains of Java. An Indonesian organization, the All-Indonesia Labor Federation, had proposed to the Ford Foundation a project aimed at improving the welfare of female tea plantation workers. It was also intended to increase the participation of women in labor organizations. Traveling with women, some of whom she had met through Sasono, Ann talked with plantation owners, managers, and pickers. She kept detailed notes, full of observations about the meddling of managers, the hardships faced by the pickers, the comfortable lives of the owners. “She is a Sundanese and she also lives on the plantation in a large comfortable home with diesel-powered electricity, stereo and cassette collection, etc.,” Ann wrote of the owner of a plantation