A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [90]
But Ann was pragmatic. She was good at recognizing a felicitous convergence of interests. She believed that improvements could be made even if they were not the top priority of the people she had to convince. The game was to enable her Indonesian counterparts to see why it was in their own enlightened self-interest to help the poor. She was an organizer, always with goals of her own. If a colleague had his own view about how things ought to be organized, Raintree said, he had to devote some energy to seeing that they were not done her way instead. In fact, he told me, “I could understand why a young man would need to go off to school in Hawaii.”
On one occasion, Raintree recalled, he challenged a policy of Ann’s—and went so far as to discuss the matter with the team leader. “She gave me a stern lecture about how friends don’t do that,” he remembered. She did not mince words. He saw her angry, too, when she believed others had been treated unfairly. For example, she had a driver in Semarang who doubled as a field assistant. As Raintree put it, “Her driver was much more than a driver.” Occasionally, people unfamiliar with the arrangement had a tendency to treat the man as they might a mere driver. Ann would stand up for him, Raintree recalled, with fire in her eyes and steel in her voice. If the cultural context was such that she could express her views, she did. “Sometimes it would involve a sharp anger but not something lingering or smoldering,” he said. “She spoke her mind, and that was it.”
For village people, one of the biggest barriers to expanding a business, and moving out of poverty, was the lack of affordable credit—the problem Ann had stumbled on while doing the research for her dissertation. The most common source of credit was moneylenders—that is, loan sharks, as Carl Dutto described them. A trader might borrow money at four a.m., walk to the central market, buy whatever she intended to sell, take a becak to the suburbs, sell her product by the side of the road, pay back the moneylender at some exorbitant rate of interest, and keep whatever was left. The lenders made a killing, and their customers barely scraped by. Nearly everyone in the villages seemed to be in debt to moneylenders. Foreign development groups and Indonesian organizations such as the one for which Clare Blenkinsop worked were exploring other ways of offering small amounts of credit. By the time Blenkinsop arrived in Semarang in 1979, there were already eight to ten thousand savers in the program run by her organization, which enabled women to become eligible for a loan by demonstrating that they could save.
The Indonesian government, too, was interested in rural credit. To help diversify the economy, redistribute wealth, and promote rural development, the government had mobilized the banking system. In 1970, the governor of Central Java had used a provincial government loan to launch a system of rural and locally run financial institutions to make small, short-term loans to rural families. The system, known as the Badan Kredit Kecamatan, or the subdistrict credit agency, grew rapidly in Central Java. But when the units were pressed to repay their government loans and support themselves, many suffered high losses. There was also corruption and mismanagement. By the late 1970s, one-third of the 486 units in Central Java were languishing or had closed.
To help tackle the problem of credit, the U.S. Agency for International Development enlisted the help of Richard Patten, a brainy, irascible development veteran from Norman, Oklahoma, who had worked in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, and in Ghana in the 1960s before moving on to Indonesia. In East Pakistan, Patten told me, he had worked with Akhtar Hameed Khan, an Indian-born, Cambridge-educated social scientist and development activist now recognized as a pioneer in what is now known as microcredit—the making of very small, or micro, loans to impoverished entrepreneurs.