A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [111]
In November 1982, after receiving a call from an aunt in Kenya telling him that his father had been killed in a car accident in Nairobi, Barry telephoned Ann in Jakarta with the news. She had been divorced from Obama for eighteen years and had not seen him since that Christmas in Honolulu eleven years earlier. But when the younger Obama delivered the news of his father’s death, he wrote in his memoir, he heard his mother cry out. Ann telephoned Bill Collier, perhaps the only person she knew in Indonesia who had also known the elder Obama. Collier, a classmate and friend of Obama’s at the University of Hawai‘i, told me that Ann’s sadness was unmistakable. It was clear, he said, that she still felt strongly about Obama. Julia Suryakusuma found Ann in her office on the verge of tears. “I just heard the news that Barack’s father died,” Suryakusuma remembered Ann saying. Then she broke down and wept.
“I always got the impression that she was critical of her husbands,” Suryakusuma said, “but I had the feeling she still loved them in a certain way.”
By early 1984, Ann was at a crossroads. She had spent six years fulfilling her graduate course requirements and doing the fieldwork necessary to graduate with a Ph.D. But she had yet to take her comprehensive exams, complete a dissertation, and sit for its defense. The nine-month leave of absence she had requested from the University of Hawai‘i in 1979 had stretched into five years. “The major reason for the delay in my return to Hawaii is the need to work to put my son through college,” she wrote to Alan Howard, the chairman of the anthropology department, in March 1984. “I am happy to say that he graduated from Columbia in June, so that I am now free to complete my own studies.” Her contract with Ford was set to expire in late September. “I will either not extend it, or extend it but request an educational leave of absence for nine months (one school year),” Ann told Dewey in a letter that February. “If I do not need to be physically present in Hawaii during the whole time, it might be better for me to stay in Indonesia through the end of the year. The deciding factor will probably be finances.” If she could land a part-time fellowship with the East-West Center, she and Maya would return to Honolulu for the 1984–1985 academic year. If not, she might accept an offer from Pete Vayda, who was returning to the United States, to take over the lease on his house in Bogor. “This would be an ideal, quiet place to work and finish up my thesis draft and the house is available very cheaply,” she told Dewey. She hedged her bets. She asked Ford for a ten-month leave of absence, applied to schools in Hawaii for Maya, and approached the East-West Center about a fellowship. At the same time, she began looking into applying for a one- or two-year appointment as a visiting professor in the rural-sociology department at Cornell University, specializing in women in development. It was a long shot: A Ph.D. was a prerequisite for the job. She let Alice Dewey know she had listed her as a reference on applications for fellowships from several foundations and funding agencies. “If anyone asks, you can tell them that I am good with dogs,” Ann said.
Meanwhile, she went to some lengths to make it clear to Dewey, still the chairman of her dissertation committee, that she was swamped with work.
Maybe you remember that I am handling projects for Ford in the areas of women, employment and industry (small and large). Jakarta was made the Regional Southeast Asia office last year, so that we are also working in Thailand and the Philippines. This year I have major projects for women on plantations in West Java and North Sumatra; for women in kretek factories in Central and East Java; for street food sellers and scavengers in the cities of Jakarta, Jogja and Bandung; for women in credit cooperatives in East Java; for women in electronics factories, mainly in the Jakarta-Bogor