A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [138]
“The only thing I’m really afraid of in life is to die of cancer,” she told Nayar.
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, my father died of cancer.”
“A lot of people’s parents die of cancer,” Nayar would reassure her. “So you’re in a high-risk category. You have to take precautions.”
It was as if she did not want to know, Nayar thought, or maybe she thought she knew and did not want to see it in writing. Around the time of a review of the benefits package at Women’s World Banking, Ann became especially agitated. She had no savings, and she was worried about her health. “I think she realized that if she was going to get sick—even if she was going to get old—this was not the job that was going to help her,” Nayar said. “And she would have to think about that rather than depend on her children.”
In late June 1994, Ann wrote Barry a letter giving notice that she would be resigning. For months, she had been considering leaving. She had a sense, she told Don Johnston, her former colleague in Jakarta, that Women’s World Banking was spinning its wheels—“rushing off to a lot of different places, doing a lot of different things, but not making a really strong impact on women’s access to finance anywhere,” as Johnston put it. Having finally completed her dissertation, she wanted to get it published. She had prepared an application for a postdoctoral grant to cover the cost of three months in Indonesia updating the research and nine months at the East-West Center revising the dissertation for publication. But she had also been contacted by Development Alternatives Inc., the firm in Bethesda, Maryland, that had hired her for her first big job as a development consultant fifteen years earlier. Development Alternatives wanted to bid on a project aimed at strengthening the Indonesian State Ministry for the Role of Women. To have a shot at winning the contract, the firm would need a certain kind of team leader—ideally a woman, fluent in Indonesian, with the combination of authority and sensitivity that it would take to be accepted by the minister and her staff. “It had to be someone who was basically Indonesian—but an American,” said Bruce Harker, who was working for the Bethesda firm, developing technical assistance contracts in Indonesia. He had known Ann in Java. She seemed to him the only person who could do the job. He knew she was torn about whether to be living, at that period in her life, in Indonesia or the United States. But when the firm contacted her, she seemed excited by the job opportunity and eager to return to Indonesia. The base pay was $82,500, well above the $69,550 she was making, before taxes, after her first year at Women’s World Banking. In addition to health insurance, the benefits included a housing allowance and a car. “After much agonizing, and lengthy discussions with family and friends in the US and Indonesia, I have decided to accept the position,” Ann wrote to Nancy Barry. “I have enjoyed my time in New York, and I have added a lot to my store of professional knowledge, particularly in the areas of policy work and institution building for NGOs. I will leave WWB with great affection for the organization, and all the people working here. I hope there will be opportunities for us to meet and cooperate in the future. (Who knows? Perhaps we will all meet at Beijing.)”
Ann seemed to have a feeling that she was running out of time, Nayar told me. Ann told her, “I just need to go home.”
Before she left, Ann made one last trip for Women’s World Banking. In July, she flew to Mexico City for the global meeting of the Women’s World Banking network. She seemed worn out by the travel, but she rallied when she arrived. Nayar was struck by Ann’s ability to connect with people across regional and cultural differences. “It was not just the Asians,” Nayar said. “It was the Africans, because they saw her in her muumuus