A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [145]
Ann also continued to work. When Alice Dewey dropped by the apartment, she would find Ann at the computer. Gillie Brown sent the progress reports on the project in Jakarta for Ann to edit. Ann dispensed wise advice to Brown. Despite her youth and inexperience, Brown had been thrust by Ann’s departure into the role of team leader. She was ambitious to make headway and impatient with the rigid code of female behavior inculcated by the Suharto government. In her first meeting with the state minister for the role of women, Brown received what she would later remember as a lecture on the importance of lipstick—which she was not wearing. As the daughter of a Welsh farmer, she knew that farmers looked after their cows well for a reason: Cows brought in income. It seemed to Brown that Suharto attended to the welfare of Indonesia’s women like a farmer tended his herd. That was why the health and education statistics for women in Indonesia looked so good. When she would complain to Ann that nothing in Indonesia was changing, Ann would laugh. “If you can see progress on gender issues over a ten-year period, you’re doing well,” Ann would say. Ann’s advice to the younger woman on dealing with people was unfailingly practical. “She’d always laugh first and say, ‘Why don’t you do it this way . . . ?’” Brown recalled. With older Indonesian women of high status, Ann suggested Brown try backing off. She could see, in a way that Brown did not, that change would eventually come. “Don’t just get frustrated and unhappy,” Ann seemed to be saying. Focus on where you can make a difference. Accept that progress takes time.
Quietly, Ann also emboldened Brown to examine the ground rules in her own life. Brown was a married mother of three and the “supplementary income earner” in the family—the role to which married women in Indonesia were consigned by law, Brown told me. Coming from a conservative area in West Wales, Brown felt she had pushed the barriers to their limits. To have claimed even more independence—to have wanted things for herself, such as a career and an identity independent of that of her family—would have felt selfish. Ann inspired Brown, through their telephone and e-mail discussions of the limits on the lives of Indonesian women and through her comments on Brown’s reports, to reconsider her own life. “I think Ann was, in the subtlest of ways, trying to say, ‘Well, actually, you have these constraints in your own life . . .’” Brown told me. “I think there was a mutual respect in trying to live our lives differently. She was sort of saying, ‘There’s more: There’s you.’”
Ann’s compensation for her job in Jakarta had included health insurance, which covered most of the costs of her medical treatment. She had even had a physical in order to qualify—an examination she said had required six separate office visits in Jakarta. Once she was back in Hawaii, the hospital billed her insurance company directly, leaving Ann to pay only the deductible and any uncovered expenses, which, she said, came to several hundred dollars a month. To cover those charges as well as living expenses, she filed a separate claim under her employer’s disability insurance policy. That policy, however, contained a clause allowing the company to deny any claim related to a preexisting medical condition.