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By Root 955 0

both an Indonesian organization and the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, was often asked in villages why her husband was not with her. But she had access to women that men in the field did not. In fishing villages on the east coast of Sumatra, where the infant mortality rate was astronomical, women flocked to speak to her—especially when they had seen her before and after giving birth to her own child. Ann Hawkins, on trips to villages, found herself invariably seated, during welcoming ceremonies, up front with the men. The other women would be off to the side, passing out fried bananas and tea. Jerry Silverman, Ann’s colleague, worried initially that having a woman in Ann’s job might be a problem in a Muslim country with what he described as a largely patriarchal family structure and male power structure. But he found he need not have worried. She had an entrée with women that Western men in her position did not have, Silverman came to realize; and because she was a foreigner, Indonesian men saw her as gender-neutral. If Ann had “gone native,” that would not have been the case, Silverman told me. “There are people who think the way you work effectively in other cultures is to try to deny your own and become them,” he said. “Ann never did that. She understood the differences, she was respectful, she was knowledgeable, but she was ‘us’ and not ‘them.’ I think that’s a point that a lot of people looking at her miss: It wasn’t that she got inside so well, it was that she was outside but appreciative.” Silverman, who went on to live half of his life outside the United States, said that was a lesson he learned from Ann. It made him more comfortable in his own skin.

Being a foreigner could be liberating. “It kind of doesn’t matter what I do, because I’m from Mars,” Ann used to say to John Raintree. The impossibility of fitting in, in any conventional sense, seemed to make it possible to find a place of a different sort. Ann Hawkins had been shy, bookish, and tongue-tied as a child. After graduating from college, an organization called Volunteers in Asia sent her to teach English in South Sulawesi. “If one has grown up and always thought to oneself, ‘I don’t know quite what it is, I don’t seem to fit, people don’t quite seem to get me,’” she told me, “then you go to someplace like Indonesia and you think, ‘It’s true, they don’t get me, and it doesn’t matter, it’s a given.’ Just walking off the plane and having that sheer wall of heat and humidity in your face, your body, your bones—you’re not sure you will survive. Then you realize, ‘That’s right. I’m a foot taller than everybody else, I’m white, I have blue eyes, I totally stand out, and I can barely say hello. I am back to essentials.’ In a very funny way, through having to learn another language, I became verbal and social in a completely different way.”

Javanese manners and behavior were so appealing that some Westerners found themselves dressing differently, pointing with their thumb instead of their index finger and being careful how they crossed their legs. The Javanese temperament seemed well suited to Ann. Her personality, Richard Holloway told me, was “ameliorative.” From time to time, she would be called on to take visiting representatives from the aid agencies into the field. They might not speak the language, know the country, or know how to behave. They would insist on visiting villages, eyeballing projects, and seeing results, whether it was convenient or not. Some were aggressive or arrogant or unaware, say, that it was rude to plant your hands on your hips. In her now flawless Indonesian, Ann would soothe any hard feelings. “All he was trying to do was cool his armpits down,” Holloway remembered her once explaining to some Indonesians. Several years later, when she was living in Jakarta, Holloway recalled a rash of kidnappings of dogs from expatriate-dense neighborhoods, to be sold for eating. Because Ann owned a dog, her driver became alarmed at the sight of a stranger in her garden, grabbed a cable, and began beating the interloper to a pulp.