A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [137]
“That was considered a huge achievement in the world of microfinance,” recalled Niki Armacost. “No one had talked about common standards before. No one had talked about the kinds of criteria that you need to evaluate microfinance organizations, or the policy constraints, or the challenges they would have to deal with, or why it was important to be lending money to women. None of that had been put together before. So it was a seminal document.”
Outside the office, Ann was increasingly worried about money and her health. When she had moved to New York, she had understood that she would not be able to live as well as she had in Jakarta. But she had hoped to get by, she wrote in a memo to Barry eight months after accepting the job, “modestly but decently, in a manner suitable for a grownup, meet my basic family obligations, and still save a small amount toward Christmas, emergencies or the future.” That had not happened. After less than a year, she was spending more than she was making. She was sinking ever more deeply into debt. After taxes, she expected to take home just $41,000 of her starting salary—a figure she expected to shrink the following year, when she would be eligible to claim fewer exemptions and deductions. The monthly payments on her ballooning credit-card debt had doubled to $600 a month. In her memo to Barry, she had asked for a raise. “To make a long story short, in the seven months I have been at Women’s World Banking, I have been forced to exhaust my savings and I am now going further into credit card debt at the rate of about $500 a month in order to just get by,” she wrote. “There is no possibility of saving even a penny. Clearly I cannot continue this way, no matter how devoted I am to Women’s World Banking or the mission.”
Money was not Ann’s only worry. She was more overweight than ever, her skin was pale, and her abdomen and lower legs were swollen. When she walked any distance, she would pant and become short of breath. By the summer of 1994, it had become painful to walk. When Maya and others urged her to see a doctor, she seemed to procrastinate and make excuses. She attributed her symptoms to menopause. “You, my in-law, will see when you reach my age,” she said to Wanjiku Kibui, her Kenyan colleague, laughing it off. Though Ann appeared to fear little in life, she was uncomfortable with doctors, especially gynecologists. Once, she had told a friend that she had rejected a physician’s suggestion that she consider a hysterectomy to address a problem of heavy bleeding. “The indignity of it!” the friend remembered her saying. The prospect of the procedure seemed to violate her sense of privacy and self-respect. She was also morbidly afraid of cancer. On at least a dozen occasions, Nayar recalled, Ann brought up the subject. “If you’re going to