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By Root 1044 0

—a long way from Norman, Oklahoma. A divorced father of three, he inhabited the persona of an inveterate bachelor. He liked people who did not need to talk all the time, and he hated the sort of questions that began with “Don’t you think . . .” He was hardworking and occasionally napped on the office floor. For a time, he lived in a house with a two-story cage that served as home for a black Sumatran gibbon—until the gibbon terrorized various neighbors and found its way into the electrical wires above the street, necessitating a neighborhood-wide power shutoff. Patten was opinionated and blunt but not without compassion. After three months as office manager, Flora Sugondo went to him in tears, saying she wanted to quit because, working for Patten, she had become convinced she could do nothing right. Patten apologized, persuaded her to stay, and vowed never to treat her that way again. When Johnston, a graduate student in economics at Harvard, arrived in Jakarta for a temporary stint as a research assistant in Patten’s office, Patten gave him a paper to edit, and Johnston “marked the hell out of it in red ink,” as he put it. Patten was thrilled. Johnston was suddenly the permanent project assistant. “When I got there, everybody was so happy,” Johnston told me. “I was one of the few people who could work productively with Dick.”

Ann was another. Patten valued Ann’s ability to recognize what kind of research would be useful in building the microfinance program. They shared a certain midwestern straightforwardness and a fascination with Indonesian culture and Indonesian people. Patten operated the house in Menteng Dalam as a kind of guesthouse for expatriate consultants. During periods when Ann was between contracts or not renting a house of her own, she stayed there. She treated Patten like a favorite uncle, said Johnston, who lived in the house. Sometimes she called him her surrogate father. There might be as many as ten or twelve people at the table for dinner—pot roast or meat loaf, and vanilla ice cream for dessert. Patten kept the lights dim and the radio tuned to the BBC. He liked Bach—“up and down music,” as Ann dismissively called it. Patten found her good company and entertaining. Once, he told me, Maya telephoned Ann from Yogyakarta, where she was taking time off from college and working for a travel company, leading cultural tours in Java and Bali. An older, unmarried American tourist, who happened to be a teacher, had arranged to have a blind masseur come to her hotel. The woman had become hysterical, accused the masseur of molesting her, and had him arrested. Maya wanted her mother’s advice. “First, give the teacher a good, hard slap,” Patten remembered Ann saying. “Then go to the police station and make sure nothing happened to the masseur.”

Recalling the story, Patten laughed.

“It’s so entertaining and so indicative of the way she thought: Just worry about the masseur.”

Ann’s methodology in the field was meticulous. She designed novella-length questionnaires to be used as a guide for interviewing potential customers about matters ranging from working-capital turnover periods to the number of relatives employed without pay. For inexperienced research assistants, she appended handy tips. “Has the Respondent ever been inside a bank before?” one question asked. If not, why not? If the respondent answered that he or she was afraid of banks, the interviewer was to find out why. “This is an important question, so take whatever time is necessary to discuss it with the Respondent,” Ann wrote. Another question required that the interviewer fill out a chart with ten vertical columns under headings such as “type of account,” “maximum amount of savings,” and “use of withdrawals.” The interviewer was to list every savings account the respondent had had in the previous seven years, as well as other deposits through savings-and-loan societies, credit unions, and other organizations. “If the Respondent has any savings in kind, for example in a rice bank, list this also, but give a rupiah value underneath,” Ann’s instructions