A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [83]
When I asked President Obama that question, he explained that he had written the scene in the voice of his cynical, sarcastic, teenage self. His mother thought he was special, he believed at the time; she imagined that the values she had inculcated would make him the person she wanted him to be. But he was angry, full of self-doubt, and unconvinced that her efforts were worthwhile.
Who was the person she wanted him to be? I asked him.
“You know, sort of a cross between Einstein, Gandhi, and Belafonte, right?” he said, laughing. “I think she wanted me to be the man that she probably would have liked my grandfather to be, that she would have liked my father to have turned out to be.”
Then he added, “You know, somebody who was strong and honest and doing worthwhile things for the world.”
Seven
Community Organizing
The village of Ungaran was a speck in the mountains above the port of Semarang on the north coast of Central Java. A two-lane road between Semarang and Yogyakarta wound steeply through terraced rice fields and past the village. Trucks broke down or crashed so often that the road was said to be inhabited by spirits. There was a village square, some food stalls, a market, and a movie house that screened second-rate Hollywood movies. Ann Hawkins, a young American, was living outside Ungaran, working with an Indonesian organization, training village people in organic farming. To reach the training center from the road, one walked a mile along a footpath through paddy fields. One day in late 1979 or early 1980, Hawkins looked up from the ditch in which she was mixing compost and dirt, and was startled to see a Western man and woman watching. The woman, porcelain-skinned and smiling, sunglasses parked on the top of her head, was Ann Soetoro. The man was an official of an international development organization. “What are you doing?” one of them asked Hawkins. She was wondering the same thing. White people never came to Ungaran, she was thinking. Especially white women.
In early 1979, Ann had moved from Yogyakarta to Semarang, the ancient trading port that is the capital of Central Java. She had completed her fieldwork, for the time being, and had drained the last of her East-West Center grant. Barry, in his final year at Punahou, would be applying to colleges; Maya, still being educated at home, would soon need to be enrolled in a school. Even with Madelyn Dunham’s bank salary subsidizing Barry’s education, Ann needed money. “Please don’t forget to put me down for assistanting spring term,” she wrote to Alice Dewey from Java in the summer of 1978, announcing her intention to return to Honolulu in time for her favorite holiday, Halloween. “I’m going to be really broke when I get back.” But rather than settle down as a teaching assistant at the university, she returned to Java in January. “Although I finished fieldwork at the end of 1978, family finances and the exhaustion of my EWC grant prevented me from returning immediately to Honolulu for write-up and comprehensives,” she explained later in a progress report to the anthropology department. Instead, she accepted a job as a consultant in international development on a project in Central Java funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development. The job came with a salary, a house in Semarang, a car and driver, and home leave. She persuaded the University of Hawai‘i to grant her an initial nine-month leave of absence. “Well, now that I’m working I’m hoping to clear all debts soon,” Ann wrote to Dewey several months into the job.
Her reasons for taking it were not exclusively financial. The project, the first of its kind in Indonesia, was designed to build the capacity of provincial planning offices to do development planning in direct response to the needs of poor communities. “It was perfect for her,” Ann’s friend Nancy Peluso told me. “To be able to find something where she could directly apply the knowledge that she had been collecting in a very good way, and at the same time get enough of an income