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By Root 1009 0

classes. Feudal, landowning families lived lavishly in hilltop villas and sent their children abroad to the best universities. Small landholders lived in walled mud compounds and farmed tiny plots. Artisan-caste members, including blacksmiths and weavers and other craftspeople, made products for the landowning families, to whom they were indentured, in return for raw materials and a small share of grain. Some artisan-caste members, however, had cut their ties with the landlords. They were buying raw materials and selling their products in the markets. Ann interviewed carpet weavers, pottery makers, blacksmiths, leather workers, tailors, and others during her first six-month stay. She talked with branch managers of banks. She surveyed buyers, suppliers, and intermediaries in Lahore. When she returned a year later, she conducted training courses for sixty-five extension workers, including the first women, who would work with the artisans. She also made recommendations for increasing lending to poor rural women. Over a two-year period, she told Dewey in a letter, the program made loans to nearly fifteen hundred artisan families and landless or near-landless agricultural families. “So there are some satisfactions in a job pretty well done under difficult field circumstances,” she said.

Details of the pleasures of Pakistan she saved for Suryakusuma, her flamboyant friend from Jakarta. In one letter, dated August 28, 1987, she wrote:

I am now ensconced in the Canadian Resthouse on the canal bank in beautiful Lahore. . . . They don’t have any guests at the moment, so I’ll be able to stay here at least till October 10 and maybe longer. Meanwhile, I have the whole upper floor to myself, with an enormous verandah that looks out over flowering tree tops, a cricket lawn and the canal beyond. It’s a perfect place to drag a blanket out to about 6:00 AM and sit and meditate with nothing between me and God but the sky. (My, I am waxing romantic today.) It’s also a good place for a cup of coffee in the evening with friends once the weather cools down a bit. Summers in Delhi and Lahore are ferocious, and everyone with money leaves and goes to London or at least to a hill station, but the weather should be perfect by the end of September when you come. . . . Three or four days a week I drive by jeep from Lahore to my project area about one and a half hours from here. I spend all day in our regional office or in the project villages, getting back to Lahore, hot and dusty, about 7:00. Usually, I stop at the Hilton on my way home and throw myself in their rooftop pool to wash the dust away. After 2 or 3 fresh lime sodas I begin to feel human again. Two of my Pakistani women friends are also brave enough to swim there in the evenings (braving the glares of all the male guests who feel they should be in purdah), so I often don’t get home till 9:00. In the village, on the other hand, I have made good friends with a family of blacksmiths (6 big boys, and 4 girls, all very “healthy” and strong, like you would expect peasant blacksmiths to be), and I usually stop for a meal or tea (with lots of sugar and buffalo milk) with them a couple of times a week. So my life is full of contrasts as usual.

Ann’s approach to matters of the spirit was eclectic. She would meditate in Buddhist monasteries and make small offerings in the Hindu communities that she visited. When she had a kris made for herself in Java, Maya said, she went through the ritual of sleeping with it under her pillow—a process through which a kris is thought to communicate with its owner through dreams—and having her dreams interpreted. “It was important to just sort of acknowledge that everyone had something beautiful to contribute spiritually,” Maya told me. “She always counseled us to be very open-minded, to have deep respect for everyone’s religions, to recognize that every religion had something good to offer.” According to others, she was skeptical of organized religion and ceremonial excess. Don Johnston, a Southern Baptist from Little Rock, Arkansas, and a colleague of Ann’s