A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [140]
Eleven
Coming Home
In late November 1994, Ann’s driver, Sabaruddin, picked her up from the modest little house on a narrow street in Jakarta where she had been living since returning to Indonesia. In the used car she had bought with the transportation allowance from her new employer, they rumbled south toward Ciloto, a resort town in the highlands an hour and a half outside the city. For three months, Ann and her team of consultants had been preparing for a three-day retreat at which the staff of the State Ministry for the Role of Women was to come to grips with its mission—embedding a commitment to gender equality deep in the government of the fourth most populous country in the world. To some friends, Ann had described her new assignment as a dream job. But it had quickly proved far more frustrating than she had chosen to dwell on in advance. The bureaucracy was sluggish and resistant to change. There was not enough money in the consulting contract to cover all the work Ann felt was needed to do the job properly. Within a month or two, she was exhausted, overworked, and not feeling well. Bruce Harker, who was overseeing the project from the office of Development Alternatives Inc. in Bethesda, had been taken aback, during a visit to Jakarta, when Ann, appealing to him for more money for the project, had broken down in tears. Yet there she was on the first afternoon of the workshop in Ciloto, delivering a paper on international trends in gender and development. Attendance at the workshop was slightly lower than hoped: Even the minister had begged off, sending word that she had been called to the palace for a meeting with President Suharto’s wife. By the time Ann left Ciloto a day or two later, her vague feeling of unease about her health had been superseded by a sharp pain in her abdomen, which she was no longer able to push from her mind.
The job in Jakarta had sounded promising enough in New York City the previous spring. With the approach of the United Nations conference in Beijing, the Asian Development Bank, an international development bank with its headquarters in the Philippines, had decided to make a grant to the Indonesian government for the purpose of strengthening and increasing the influence of the State Ministry for the Role of Women. The bank had invited consulting companies to bid on a contract to provide technical assistance—advice on shaping a strategy, training the staff, and setting up databases to measure the ministry’s impact. In a joint venture with an Indonesian firm with connections to the Suharto family, Development Alternatives Inc. had bid and won. But in last-minute negotiations, the amount of money available to the team leader for work activities had been reduced, Harker told me. His company had become, in effect, the subcontractor, leaving Ann, the team leader, working for a firm that did not have control over the budget. From the beginning, the going was rocky. In Jakarta, Ann found herself working out of a dark, dingy office in the Ministry of the Environment without easy access to the ministry she was advising. There were the usual technological aggravations, including cell phone service that seemed not to cover the office where she worked. The ministry staff was inexperienced—and in some cases uninterested—in complex questions involving gender. Recruited from other agencies, many of the staff members needed training—and might move abruptly, without warning, to another ministry at any time. “We found it very frustrating, because there was no interest,” Mayling Oey-Gardiner, a demographer who was also a consultant to the ministry, told me. Without a critical mass of support, she said, little could be done. Furthermore, the task was huge. Ann’s responsibilities ranged from preparing an assessment of the ministry to working with other ministries on a program to “mainstream” a concern about gender equality into everything from planning and