A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother by Janny Scott

Author:Janny Scott [Scott, Janny]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Dunham; S. Ann, Presidents & Heads of State, Mothers of Presidents, Political, General, United States, Obama; Barack - Family, Biography & Autobiography, Mothers of Presidents - United States, Biography, Women
ISBN: 9781594487972
Publisher: Penguin Group USA
Published: 2011-05-03T05:00:00+00:00

Seven

Community Organizing

The village of Ungaran was a speck in the mountains above the port of Semarang on the north coast of Central Java. A two-lane road between Semarang and Yogyakarta wound steeply through terraced rice fields and past the village. Trucks broke down or crashed so often that the road was said to be inhabited by spirits. There was a village square, some food stalls, a market, and a movie house that screened second-rate Hollywood movies. Ann Hawkins, a young American, was living outside Ungaran, working with an Indonesian organization, training village people in organic farming. To reach the training center from the road, one walked a mile along a footpath through paddy fields. One day in late 1979 or early 1980, Hawkins looked up from the ditch in which she was mixing compost and dirt, and was startled to see a Western man and woman watching. The woman, porcelain-skinned and smiling, sunglasses parked on the top of her head, was Ann Soetoro. The man was an official of an international development organization. “What are you doing?” one of them asked Hawkins. She was wondering the same thing. White people never came to Ungaran, she was thinking. Especially white women.

In early 1979, Ann had moved from Yogyakarta to Semarang, the ancient trading port that is the capital of Central Java. She had completed her fieldwork, for the time being, and had drained the last of her East-West Center grant. Barry, in his final year at Punahou, would be applying to colleges; Maya, still being educated at home, would soon need to be enrolled in a school. Even with Madelyn Dunham’s bank salary subsidizing Barry’s education, Ann needed money. “Please don’t forget to put me down for assistanting spring term,” she wrote to Alice Dewey from Java in the summer of 1978, announcing her intention to return to Honolulu in time for her favorite holiday, Halloween. “I’m going to be really broke when I get back.” But rather than settle down as a teaching assistant at the university, she returned to Java in January. “Although I finished fieldwork at the end of 1978, family finances and the exhaustion of my EWC grant prevented me from returning immediately to Honolulu for write-up and comprehensives,” she explained later in a progress report to the anthropology department. Instead, she accepted a job as a consultant in international development on a project in Central Java funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development. The job came with a salary, a house in Semarang, a car and driver, and home leave. She persuaded the University of Hawai‘i to grant her an initial nine-month leave of absence. “Well, now that I’m working I’m hoping to clear all debts soon,” Ann wrote to Dewey several months into the job.

Her reasons for taking it were not exclusively financial. The project, the first of its kind in Indonesia, was designed to build the capacity of provincial planning offices to do development planning in direct response to the needs of poor communities.

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