A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [91]
Ann, the credit adviser hired by Development Alternatives Inc., worked with Patten, the credit adviser to the Agency for International Development. From her dissertation fieldwork, Ann had found that rural industries were frequently held back by shortages of raw materials—which they often lacked because they did not have the working capital to keep them in stock. Women had an especially hard time getting even government-sponsored loans. In 1979, Ann evaluated a small credit project being carried out in ten villages in industries such as production of roof tiles, cassava chips, and rattan. In most of the villages, women as well as men worked in those industries—but not one of the one hundred twenty-nine loans had gone to a woman. The provincial development project, for which Ann was working, began providing not only capital but training in management and bookkeeping to sixty-five Badan Kredit Kecamatan banking units in Central Java. Those offices became a proving ground for new initiatives. The best of those initiatives eventually spread beyond Central Java. The system became a permanent government-run program in 1981, and the Indonesian Ministry of Finance made a large loan to the provincial government to strengthen and expand it. Looking back on the provincial development project as a whole, Silverman said it resulted in the setting up of planning bodies throughout Indonesia, which took on an important role in the allocation of government resources at the provincial level. But, he said, “the one major success we had was the small-scale credit and institutionalizing it. It was the one thing that got institutionalized in ways that are close to what was intended.”
Ann’s days were long and full. She worked on her dissertation before dawn, managed her household staff, saw to the schooling of her daughter. Every day, she wrote at least a couple of paragraphs to Barry, Kadi Warner remembered: “It was part of her ritual.” Ann attended meetings, went into the field, spent time in the office, escorted visitors. At night, she presided over lively dinners at home. She liked running her own household, being immersed in her work, being accountable largely to herself. In her element, she was developing a big and unmistakable presence. “She was the grand lady when she was in the village, or in her house, or talking with the bupati,” Raintree said, using the Indonesian word for a district head. “She was enormously bright; she was fluent in Indonesian; she always had a sort of twinkle in her eye. I always thought she had just swallowed a canary.” Even in a difficult negotiation, she seemed to be enjoying herself. Decades later, Raintree remembered a certain look on Ann’s face, a trace of which he had begun to notice in her son during the presidential campaign. After making a point, Ann would look down the bridge of her nose, her chin slightly elevated at its usual angle. In Obama, some people had interpreted that look as aloofness, Raintree said, “but when she did it, she had this puckish smile.” In her work, she set goals, met deadlines, was a team player, did not bend rules, Silverman said. “This notion that she was this hippie wanderer floating through foreign things and having an adventure is not the Ann I know,” he said. “In a sense, she was as type A as anybody on the team.”
Ann kept much of her private life private, even with close friends. Glen Williams, who