A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [95]
“Life in the bubble” is the phrase one longtime Ford employee used to describe life as a Ford program officer in Jakarta. The economy was growing, the oil industry was booming, and Jakarta was becoming a modern city, but Ford families lived in a style that resembled an earlier, colonial-era, expatriate existence. They were housed in Kebayoran Baru, a quiet neighborhood of wide, shaded streets planned by the Dutch, where Ford owned or leased a number of high-ceilinged bungalows with ceiling fans, verandas, and gardens dense with flowering trees. The foundation furnished the houses in teak and rattan or to the tastes of the Ford families. It dispatched its own maintenance crew to fix toilets that ceased to flush. Ann’s house was comfortable, not lavish. (“My oven has collapsed!” she wrote to a Ford support-staff member in April 1981. “I have to wire the door shut and it sprinkles flakes of rust on the food while the food is cooking.” Some months later, she reported a termite infestation: “The wood is riddled with holes already and in the evening hours literally thousands of termites pour out of these holes and fly about, making the room and the back sitting area unusable.”) Ford had a fleet of cars with drivers—though Ann employed her own, a man who had driven her Agency for International Development jeep in Semarang. The foundation ferried expatriate staff members in a carpool back and forth along the twenty-minute drive between Kebayoran Baru and the office. There was annual home leave for the entire family, with travel arrangements made by the foundation. There were provisions for spouse travel and “educational travel for dependent children,” annual physicals and vaccinations. Children of the program staff rode a school bus together to the Jakarta International School, where—along with the offspring of diplomats, oil company executives, and missionaries—they performed in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas and recited the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore in the original Bengali. Ford arranged for enrollment and paid the tuition. “Everything seems set at the school for Maya,” Kessinger, who served on the school’s board, wrote to Ann in December 1980. He had, he said, “personally spoken to the Superintendent and [had] been assured that a place will be saved for her.”
Ann worked three days a week in the Ford offices in a white-washed colonial-style building with a steeply sloping tile roof on Taman Kebon Sirih (Betel Tree Garden) in Central Jakarta. Formerly a private home, the building sat squarely on a low-lying lot next to a canal. In the rainy season, brown water seeped up through the tile floors, swamping the metal file cabinets, saturating paperwork, and staining the walls. The staff fell roughly into two groups: The program staff was transient, white, and mostly male; and the administrative, clerical, and support staff tended to be permanent, Indonesian, and female. A photograph taken during Ann’s tenure shows a dozen Indonesian women, all smiling and many of them dressed in batik, arrayed in front of a half-dozen mostly Caucasian men in neckties and short-sleeved plain white shirts. Floating half hidden in between is the only Western woman, Ann. Kessinger, whose title as the head of the office was country representative, had been a member of the first group of Peace Corps volunteers sent to India in the early sixties. He had worked in community development in the Punjab before returning to the United States to study history and anthropology, writing his dissertation for his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago on the social and economic history of an Indian village. He was a tenured professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, married to an Indian, when Ford hired him in 1977 and sent him first to New Delhi. In the Jakarta office, Kessinger was a jovial presence, inclined toward the informal management style of academia, not the top-down style of the corporate world. The program officers, with Ph.D.’s in fields like comparative world history,