A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [123]
To her younger colleagues, she was Bu Ann—Bu being an affectionate abbreviation of the honorific Ibu, a term of respect for mothers, older women, and women of higher status. She treated them, they felt, as family. If she went out to lunch in Jakarta, she would order an extra meal for her driver, Sabaruddin, and his family. She helped pay for his five-year-old daughter’s surgery and for repairs to the roof and the doors on his house. In the town of Tasik Malaya, she pointed out to her team that the village chief, a successful businessman, had started out as a peddler—evidence that anything was possible. To her young research assistants, she emphasized accuracy, rigor, patience, fairness, and not judging by appearances. “Don’t conclude before you understand,” Retno Wijayanti recalled Ann saying. “After you understand, don’t judge.”
She even tried her hand at matchmaking. In the fall of 1989, the bank hired a willowy twenty-four-year-old woman named Widayanti from Malang in East Java, who was soon assigned to help Ann and Don Johnston with a survey of potential microfinance customers. Ann quickly discovered that Widayanti was a Pentecostal Christian. Johnston, the son of a church musician in Little Rock, was a Southern Baptist. Widayanti began to notice that whenever she asked Ann a question about the survey, Ann would say, “Oh, just ask Don.” Did Widayanti know that Don had once been a Sunday school teacher? Ann asked her. To Johnston, Ann talked up Widayanti’s intelligence, her command of English, her honesty and strong principles. To Flora Sugondo, the office manager, Ann confided that she wanted to match up Johnston and Widayanti.
With Tomy Sugianto (left) and Slamet Riyadi (right), from Bank Rakyat Indonesia, in Tana Toraja, South Sulawesi, 1989
In October 1993, Ann was a guest in Malang at their wedding.
That Ibu quality was useful, Julia Suryakusuma told me. “Ann was a very intellectual person, but she didn’t come across as being that,” she said. “That whole Ibu quality took away the threat of being a pioneer, a professional, efficient. It took away the edge.” Occasionally, however, Ann found the role of surrogate mother tiring. “I get so tired of having to mother people myself—for example, all my research assistants at BRI—that I actually enjoy being on the receiving end of a little mothering once in a while,” she confessed to Suryakusuma in a letter.
Not long after Ann returned to Indonesia in 1988, Suryakusuma’s husband, Ami Priyono, asked a young Indonesian journalist, whom he knew, to see if he might help out a friend of Priyono’s. A few days later, a secretary in the Bank Rakyat Indonesia office called the journalist, I. Made Suarjana, a reporter in Yogyakarta for Tempo, an independent newsweekly, and set up an appointment for him to meet Ann at the Airlangga Guest House in Yogyakarta, where she would be staying on a trip for the bank. Arriving at the hotel, Suarjana was startled to find that the person he was meeting was Caucasian and a woman. From the name, Sutoro, he had expected an Indonesian man. They got along immediately. Soon, he was driving Ann to Kajar, to update her dissertation research in her spare time. Occasionally, she would ask him to visit other villages for her in her absence. They dined together on her visits to Yogyakarta, eating tempeh and sayur lodeh, an eggplant stew that she loved. They went to batik exhibitions and visited the ninth-century Hindu temples at Prambanan, northeast of Yogyakarta.