A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [85]
That model embodied a particular attitude toward the poor.
“You know the old adage ‘You give a man a fish . . .’?” Silverman asked me. Here is the adage: Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. The project in Central Java, Silverman said, was about neither. Here is how he explained it. According to one view, the poor are charity cases and we need to give them stuff. (That would be the fish.) According to another view, the poor are not as technically sophisticated as we are, so we need to teach them stuff. (That would be how to fish.) But there is a third possibility. That is, the poor know what they are doing, but circumstances prevent them from escaping poverty. “How do we go in and help them remove an obstacle, reduce a constraint, make a technical connection they didn’t understand?” Silverman said. “It’s not like, ‘We’re smart, they’re dumb. We can tell them how to do it.’ It’s beyond the teach-him-how-to-fish. It’s ‘Understand that he knows how to fish, but maybe what he needs is somebody who will allow him access to fish, or a stronger line so it won’t break.’ That’s a step further.”
When Ann arrived on the north coast of Java in early 1979 at the age of thirty-six, she was one of relatively few Westerners in Semarang. The city, a centuries-old trading port and commercial hub, bore traces of its colorful, cosmopolitan past. There were Chinese temples and shop houses, an Arab quarter, one of the oldest remaining Christian churches in Java. There was a Dutch colonial administration building, which had served as a refuge for Javanese independence fighters during the Japanese occupation. Dilapidated and hot, Old Semarang spilled across the flatlands of the coastal plain. In the hills rising behind the city, expatriates lived in neighborhoods such as Candi Baru, where grander houses and gardens laid out by the Dutch enjoyed panoramic views of the coastline. “They lived in their own expatriate ghetto,” said Clare Blenkinsop, who moved to Semarang with Richard Holloway, her husband and the country director for Oxfam, the international relief and development organization, in 1979. It was possible very quickly to sort “the sheep from the goats, the serious versus the less serious development people,” Holloway told me. You knew by whether or not they learned to speak Indonesian and by whether they felt any empathy toward village people or simply saw them as grist for their projects. There was an active chapter of an expatriate running and beer-drinking club founded in Kuala Lumpur called the Hash House Harriers. “I must say, we had a philosophical objection to wealthy expatriates pouring beer over each other’s heads in the presence of villagers who don’t have threepence ha’penny,” Blenkinsop said.
Ann lived on the Indonesian end of the expatriate spectrum. She spoke the language, ate the food, sat with her legs folded under her on the floor. She accumulated Indonesian friends and ran her household in an informal, open Indonesian style. Blenkinsop was amazed by the sheer numbers of people there often seemed to be in the house. “She had quite a staff because she was such a softie with people who said they had relatives who needed a job,” recalled John Raintree, who lived in the house for a time with his wife, Kadi Warner, and their two-year-old daughter. There were long-term houseguests, friends of Maya’s, the friends’ mothers, young volunteers such as Ann Hawkins, colleagues dropping by. In a letter to Dewey in May 1979, Ann put out the word: “By the way, if anyone should need a stopover in Semarang while I’m gone, feel free to use my house. We have a good old dog named Spot (we inherited him from another family), two rabbits and two absolutely hilarious baby goats born on Easter evening.”
Hawkins rode the bus down from Ungaran on weekends to visit. No matter how early in the morning she got up, she would find Ann seated at a small table with a large cup of coffee, reading or writing in the relative cool before the sun rose and the