A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [104]
Accompanying Ann on one of those trips was Saraswati Sunindyo, a young organizer newly graduated from the University of Indonesia in Jakarta with a degree in sociology. “My line about Ann is, ‘She found me in a slum when I was organizing,’” Sunindyo told me when I interviewed her in Seattle, where she was living. Sunindyo was organizing the residents of a squatter settlement in Jakarta for an organization run by Sasono. Later, she moved to Bandung, where, she said, she lived in a shack in a community of scavengers she was organizing into a cooperative. She and Ann met at a meeting of independent and grassroots organizations. “She was this big American woman,” Sunindyo remembered, referring to Ann’s presence more than her size. “She is a big woman with very little ego. She’s not playing the role of an expatriate—not ‘I’m an American, I read lots of books, therefore I know.’ She worked for the Ford Foundation, but she didn’t act like someone who was going to dictate what Ford wanted.” Instead, Sunindyo said, Ann “would listen and listen and listen. She was interested in how people are doing things. Rather than, ‘Okay, this is a story from another place that I read about. . . .’ We all read lots of books, but we don’t have to show it. That’s Ann. She saw potential in people. And when they needed a push, she really pushed.”
In September 1982, Sunindyo traveled with Ann and several younger women to a plantation in the mountains southeast of Bandung. They were housed for the night in a Dutch-period guesthouse with an antique wood-burning stove and a veranda overlooking the adjacent valley and what Ann described as the “tea-covered hills beyond.” The bathroom Ann shared with one other woman, she wrote in her field notes, was the size of the bathroom used by many of the workers, as well as their children. To speak with workers, Ann and the others were taken to where women were picking tea. Sunindyo, wanting not simply to gather information but to help out, fell in beside one picker and began picking with her, dropping tea leaves into her basket. The skin on the faces of the pickers was cracked from the weather and the cold.
“And politely, very politely, Ann asked one of the women, ‘May I see what’s in your lunch box?’” Sunindyo remembered.
There was only rice and sambal, a paste made from ground red chili peppers.
“So, we asked, ‘What else are you going to eat?’” Sunindyo recalled.
“The leaves,” the woman said.
The trip to the tea plantation with Ann was important to Sunindyo. “For us, young women at that time, it was really empowering—in the sense that we were learning from her,” she said. “We just watched, said, ‘Okay, that’s it, that’s how.’” To have Ann recognize their commitment and treat them as friends emboldened them to return to their work in their organizations “knowing that we are in this together,” Sunindyo said.
“There is Ann, who works for the Ford Foundation,” she said. “We see Ann as one of us.”
Ann’s circle of friends in Jakarta kept expanding. There were anthropologists, artists, activists, academics, curators, writers, development consultants, and filmmakers, among others. Yang Suwan, a Chinese-Indonesian anthropologist educated in Germany and newly returned to Jakarta, had done studies