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By Root 981 0

Nancy Barry, in a French restaurant near the organization’s offices in Midtown Manhattan. Barry, a Harvard Business School graduate in her early forties, had worked at the World Bank for fifteen years before becoming president of Women’s World Banking. Smart, charismatic, and driven, she was a product, she liked to say, of both the decentralized culture of Women’s World Banking and the command-and-control ethos of “the World Bank of Men.” At Women’s World Banking, she wanted to influence the policies of banks around the world to better serve the poor. Ann had more experience with poor women than anyone in the Women’s World Banking office, Barry could see. She had also influenced the design of the services offered by Bank Rakyat Indonesia, which ran the largest self-sustaining microfinance program in the world. At their first meeting, Barry found Ann’s size jarring, she told me. The staff of “Wild Women’s Banking,” as it had occasionally been called, was so young and attractive that it had been suggested Barry had a “looks problem.” But she was impressed by Ann’s intelligence, experience, and independence of mind. She could see that Ann had a sense of humor, the ability to laugh at herself, and the charm to win people over. So Barry offered her a job that had not previously existed: coordinator for policy and research. In many countries, government and bank policies favored big over small businesses, the formal over the informal sector. They favored male clients, who owned property, over women, who did not. Governments also placed restrictions on the activities of independent-sector organizations in ways that held back microlending, limiting loan sizes, rates of interest, and the outside funding those organizations could receive. Ann’s job would be to help Women’s World Banking and its affiliates persuade policy-makers to change all that. “This was not like we had a position for a policy coordinator,” Barry told me. “But in my mind we had a whole agenda waiting to happen if we had the right person.”

Moving to New York City for the first time was not easy at age fifty. Ann arrived in Manhattan in late January 1993 during a cold snap so bitter that her lungs ached when she breathed. Three weeks into her stay, a truck bomb detonated in the underground garage beneath the World Trade Center, injuring a thousand people and killing six. Ann, with a starting salary of $65,000 a year, had expected to be able to find a two-bedroom apartment for about $1,500 a month within walking distance of the offices on West Fortieth Street. But because two-bedroom apartments were renting for more than $2,000, she was forced to settle for an antiseptic one-bedroom in a forty-story tower near the United Nations for $1,550. She parked most of her books and belongings in storage in Hawaii, for which she paid another $250 a month. (A “wardrobe inventory” she put together around that time listed a remarkable forty-eight skirts, half of them marked “sm” and apparently not in use.) Women’s World Banking paid for two weeks in a hotel near the office while Ann looked for an apartment, but she got stuck there for ten extra days, at her expense, waiting for the credit clearance needed to sign a lease. She spent $8,000 on housewares and furniture from Pier 1 Imports, and another $1,500 on winter clothes. She had never worn panty hose in her life, she told friends. The small amount of savings she had accumulated dwindled, and her credit card debt rose. Afraid of the subway system, she spent money on cabs. “Aduh! Aduh! Aduh!” she would say, falling back on an Indonesian expression of pain in the face of the rushing crowds. Ann missed Indonesia. The best Indonesian restaurant in New York seemed no better than the lowliest warung. From her room on the twenty-sixth floor of the hotel, she gazed at the sky, remembering the full moon in Bali and wondering why she had traveled so far from Made Suarjana. She told herself she would stay in New York for two or three years, then move to Bali. Suarjana could start a civil-society organization or a publishing house, and