A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [122]
She had an unusual ability to adapt. With bankers, she came across as professional, methodical, and not the least bit eccentric. With older Indonesians, her accent and diction took on a precision that Don Johnston thought sounded faintly Dutch. Arriving in a village for the first time, she transformed herself into the beloved visiting dignitary—her bearing regal, her silver jewelry flashing, her retinue in tow. “She was clearly the queen bee of the entourage,” recalled Johnston. “Then she gets there and they realize, ‘Oh, this is not just a foreigner but this is a foreigner who can speak Bahasa Indonesia, and who knows a lot about what we’re doing and who wants to talk to us about this stuff. And she has some connection to this big bank, BRI, but she’s not a banker, so I don’t need to be scared of her.’” She was even deft in her dispensing with inevitable Indonesian comments about her physical dimensions. When a boatman professed trepidation about whether the personage boarding his boat was going to sink it, Ann switched, humorously, to the role of the grand lady: How dare you! There was showmanship involved, but she was never inauthentic. “Ann was a genuinely complex person who had a really varied background,” Johnston said. “So she could legitimately tap those different experiences to build empathy with different people.” It made them want to line up and tell her their life stories.
Interviewing bank customers, with colleagues, about 1989
On a field visit to village banks in the district of Sleman in 1988, Ann proposed a short detour to the village of Jitar, the home of a respected kris smith whom she knew. According to Ann’s account, she was traveling with three carloads of bank colleagues and local government officials. At the smith’s house, he invited the group inside for tea. Members of the group, laughing loudly and making raucous jokes minutes before, fell silent, sat formally, and then addressed the smith, Pak Djeno, with deep respect and deference. When Ann said she wanted to buy a small kris, the smith brought out four blades. “A deadly hush came over the room, and even whispering ceased,” Ann wrote later. For days afterward, her colleagues discussed the encounter. “The very fact that I had known a keris smith and had purchased a keris also caused a change in their behavior toward me. They began to show me some of the deference they had shown to Pak Djeno, speaking with greater respect and formality. Somehow, a little of his magical power had managed to rub off on me.”
Ann combined the discipline of a workaholic with a personal warmth that her Indonesian colleagues and subordinates described to me as maternal. She was not a practitioner of “rubber time”: If she had an appointment, she was never late. In the field, she might start work at nine a.m. and not wrap up until thirteen hours later. She would stay with an interview long after colleagues were ready to move on. She traveled with a Thermos and took her coffee black, no sugar. “Coffee is my blood,” she said; if she ever got sick, she said, she wanted intravenous coffee. She rarely seemed to get enough sleep. She tested survey questions on herself first, to feel what a respondent might feel. She would never risk insulting her host by declining food. When the manager of a bank branch in South Sulawesi threw her a surprise birthday party, including karaoke, she launched gamely into “You Are My Sunshine.” In the town of Garut, she turned her attention to a girl of no more than seventeen who was serving dinner to members of the team at their hotel. Ann asked her about her family, her marriage, her education. How much was she paid? Was it enough? Then, when dinner was over, she slipped the girl money.
On occasion, a misunderstanding across some cultural divide left Ann rattled. On a visit to a village in Sulawesi in 1988, an irate local official pursued Ann and her group, shouting furiously in a local language that none of them understood. He appeared to believe the group had failed to obtain his permission to enter the area. The confrontation