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

by Janny Scott

  That was not simple. The organizations were not merely competitive, they also differed as to how best to deliver financial services and the type of clients it was most important to reach. Now they were expected to put aside their differences and support a common objective. “It became like an infiltration,” Barry recalled. “If you picture all these regional and global meetings put on by the UN for the year or two in preparation for Beijing—complete chaos, all of these NGO leaders, strident, doing their thing, not at all respectful. If I’m in health, I don’t want microfinance to get primacy. Ann got all these coalition members showing up to these regional meetings around the world and getting the health and education people saying one thing: ‘The poor woman has to have an income. Then she can pay for education.’ So that whole bottom-up approach, getting disparate players to act to common cause? She pulled it off.”

  Ann believed in it, said Lawrence Yanovitch, director of policy and research at FINCA, also known as the Foundation for International Community Assistance, a leader in village banking in Latin America, who served on the executive committee with Ann. That was simply her nature: She had little ego, he said, and she cared about the issues first. Barry told me, “She could be kind of a fat lady with big hair and a bohemian, but she was trying to do the right thing for the right reasons. And she did it with great intelligence and very strong rigor in terms of preparation and methodology and thinking through strategy.”

  At the same time, the secretary general for the Beijing conference asked Women’s World Banking to chair an “expert group” on women and finance, to be made up of forty representatives of microfinance networks, development banks, government leaders, and others. In addition to Barry and Ann, the group included Dick Patten, Ann’s friend and longtime colleague; Ela Bhatt from the Self Employed Women’s Association; Muhammad Yunus, the founder and managing director of Grameen Bank, who would win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006; and Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, who would go on to become president of Liberia. In September 1993, Women’s World Banking sent every member of the group an unusually detailed questionnaire on women and microfinance. The questionnaire bore the unmistakable marks of Ann’s research methodology—a total of ninety-two questions, few of them amenable to short answers. (“I think we even had a conflict over the questionnaire,” Barry told me. “Something I really know how to do super-well is moderate meetings and create a process where you get consensus in a very robust and detailed way out of a messy process. So I’m very results-oriented. My recollection is Ann would have loved to have gotten more stuff from everybody.”) Two hundred pages of responses poured in to the Women’s World Banking office. Ann and Nina Nayar, working with Barry, distilled them into an interim report. That report went out to every member of the expert group, along with profiles of leading microenterprise institutions and an analysis of government budgets and the flow of donor aid. Finally, the expert group met over five days in January 1994 to hash out and endorse a final report and recommendations—a framework for how to build financial systems that work for the poor.

  “That was considered a huge achievement in the world of microfinance,” recalled Niki Armacost. “No one had talked about common standards before. No one had talked about the kinds of criteria that you need to evaluate microfinance organizations, or the policy constraints, or the challenges they would have to deal with, or why it was important to be lending money to women. None of that had been put together before. So it was a seminal document.”

  Outside the office, Ann was increasingly worried about money and her health. When she had moved to New York, she had understood that she would not be able to live as well as she had in Jakarta. But she had hoped to get by, she wrote in a memo to Barry eight months after accepting the job, “modestly but decently, in a manner suitable for a grownup, meet my basic family obligations, and still save a small amount toward Christmas, emergencies or the future.” That had not happened. After less than a year, she was spending more than she was making. She was sinking ever more deeply into debt. After taxes, she expected to take home just $41,000 of her starting salary—a figure she expected to shrink the following year, when she would be eligible to claim fewer exemptions and deductions. The monthly payments on her ballooning credit-card debt had doubled to $600 a month. In her memo to Barry, she had asked for a raise. “To make a long story short, in the seven months I have been at Women’s World Banking, I have been forced to exhaust my savings and I am now going further into credit card debt at the rate of about $500 a month in order to just get by,” she wrote. “There is no possibility of saving even a penny. Clearly I cannot continue this way, no matter how devoted I am to Women’s World Banking or the mission.”

  Money was not Ann’s only worry. She was more overweight than ever, her skin was pale, and her abdomen and lower legs were swollen. When she walked any distance, she would pant and become short of breath. By the summer of 1994, it had become painful to walk. When Maya and others urged her to see a doctor, she seemed to procrastinate and make excuses. She attributed her symptoms to menopause. “You, my in-law, will see when you reach my age,” she said to Wanjiku Kibui, her Kenyan colleague, laughing it off. Though Ann appeared to fear little in life, she was uncomfortable with doctors, especially gynecologists. Once, she had told a friend that she had rejected a physician’s suggestion that she consider a hysterectomy to address a problem of heavy bleeding. “The indignity of it!” the friend remembered her saying. The prospect of the procedure seemed to violate her sense of privacy and self-respect. She was also morbidly afraid of cancer. On at least a dozen occasions, Nayar recalled, Ann brought up the subject. “If you’re going to get it, you’re going to get it,” she would remark at the slightest reminder of cancer—passing a cancer-awareness ribbon or discussing a new health insurance policy requiring Pap smears. “If it gets you, it gets you.”

  “The only thing I’m really afraid of in life is to die of cancer,” she told Nayar.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Well, my father died of cancer.”

  “A lot of people’s parents die of cancer,” Nayar would reassure her. “So you’re in a high-risk category. You have to take precautions.”

  It was as if she did not want to know, Nayar thought, or maybe she thought she knew and did not want to see it in writing. Around the time of a review of the benefits package at Women’s World Banking, Ann became especially agitated. She had no savings, and she was worried about her health. “I think she realized that if she was going to get sick—even if she was going to get old—this was not the job that was going to help her,” Nayar said. “And she would have to think about that rather than depend on her children.”

  In late June 1994, Ann wrote Barry a letter giving notice that she would be resigning. For months, she had been considering leaving. She had a sense, she told Don Johnston, her former colleague in Jakarta, that Women’s World Banking was spinning its wheels—“rushing off to a lot of different places, doing a lot of different things, but not making a really strong impact on women’s access to finance anywhere,” as Johnston put it. Having finally completed her dissertation, she wanted to get it published. She had prepared an application for a postdoctoral grant to cover the cost of three months in Indonesia updating the research and nine months at the East-West Center revising the dissertation for publication. But she had also been contacted by Development Alternatives Inc., the firm in Bethesda, Maryland, that had hired her for her first big job as a development consultant fifteen years earlier. Development Alternatives wanted to bid on a project aimed at strengthening the Indonesian State Ministry for the Role of Women. To have a shot at winning the contract, the firm would need a certain kind of team leader—ideally a woman, fluent in Indonesian, with the combination of authority and sensitivity that it would take to be accepted by the minister and her staff. “It had to be someone who was basically Indonesian—but an American,” said Bruce Harker, who was working for the Bethesda firm, developing technical assistance contracts in Indonesia. He
had known Ann in Java. She seemed to him the only person who could do the job. He knew she was torn about whether to be living, at that period in her life, in Indonesia or the United States. But when the firm contacted her, she seemed excited by the job opportunity and eager to return to Indonesia. The base pay was $82,500, well above the $69,550 she was making, before taxes, after her first year at Women’s World Banking. In addition to health insurance, the benefits included a housing allowance and a car. “After much agonizing, and lengthy discussions with family and friends in the US and Indonesia, I have decided to accept the position,” Ann wrote to Nancy Barry. “I have enjoyed my time in New York, and I have added a lot to my store of professional knowledge, particularly in the areas of policy work and institution building for NGOs. I will leave WWB with great affection for the organization, and all the people working here. I hope there will be opportunities for us to meet and cooperate in the future. (Who knows? Perhaps we will all meet at Beijing.)”

  Ann seemed to have a feeling that she was running out of time, Nayar told me. Ann told her, “I just need to go home.”

  Before she left, Ann made one last trip for Women’s World Banking. In July, she flew to Mexico City for the global meeting of the Women’s World Banking network. She seemed worn out by the travel, but she rallied when she arrived. Nayar was struck by Ann’s ability to connect with people across regional and cultural differences. “It was not just the Asians,” Nayar said. “It was the Africans, because they saw her in her muumuus and her trinkets, and she fit right in to the Mama circle—the West Africans with their scarves and all that.” Nayar was also reminded of Ann’s effect on men. The Mexican organizers had hired “these stunning, drop-dead-gorgeous male models,” as Nayar remembered them, to serve as hosts to the several hundred women. Ann had always been flirtatious, Nayar said. A glimmer in her eye expressed eloquently her interest and delight in men. “These boys were eating out of her hand,” Nayar remembered. “They weren’t looking at us, they were all around Ann. I think she was probably one of the most sensual women I have met in my life. Size didn’t matter, it was what was inside. She just exuded woman.”

  The young male host assigned to Ann’s group turned out to be an anthropology major, fluent in English, who did modeling on the side. Soon, he, Ann, and Nayar were in a taxi, heading to an archaeological dig. Ann took Nayar to the Frida Kahlo Museum at Casa Azul, the house in Coyoacán where Kahlo had grown up and later lived with Diego Rivera. At the National Museum of Anthropology, Niki Armacost recalled, Ann stopped in front of an exhibit illustrating human evolution. “There was an Africa grouping, an Asia grouping,” Armacost told me. “She was talking about the Africa grouping. The image they had up on the wall was this incredibly curvaceous African woman who had this huge, curvy bum. And we’re all so—kind of unshapely. And she said, ‘You know, it’s very interesting, because when the white explorers found these African women and took them back to Europe, that’s when the bustle started!’”

  On an outing to Teotihuacán, the vast archaeological site northeast of Mexico City that was the largest city in the pre-Columbian Americas until it was suddenly and mysteriously abandoned, Ann wanted to climb the Pyramid of the Sun, one of the biggest pyramids in the world. Worried about her stamina, Nayar suggested instead the Pyramid of the Moon because it was smaller but offered dazzling views of the bigger pyramid and the majestic expanse of the Avenue of the Dead. Against the backdrop of a sacred mountain to the north, the two women, a generation apart, ascended together. “It was so hard for her to climb this thing,” Nayar remembered years later. “I really thought she was going to pass out or fall. There was no way I was letting her go up on her own. She was also a little afraid of heights. But she was going to do it. And she did it.”

  Two months earlier, Ann had gone to see a physician with a private practice in obstetrics, gynecology, and infertility on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She had been given the doctor’s name by another physician, who had retired, and had made an appointment for a gynecological checkup. She told the doctor, Barbara Shortle, that she had a five-year history of heavy and irregular periods, for which previous doctors had put her on hormone-replacement therapy. Twice, she said, she had received a dilation and curettage, a procedure commonly done to diagnose the causes of abnormal bleeding. Each time, she said, the test had turned up nothing. Shortle, who had a particular affection for Hawaii, took a liking to Ann, but she also suspected Ann was seriously ill. From the extent of the bleeding, Shortle thought she might have uterine cancer, a rarity in Shortle’s practice, which could in many cases be treated successfully with surgery and radiation, depending on the grade of the tumor. Shortle jotted her hypothesis in her notes. She recommended a physical exam, a Pap smear, a pelvic ultrasound, a mammogram, and, most important for a diagnosis, another dilation and curettage, which could be used to rule out uterine cancer. The D&C would have to be done in a hospital, and would for that reason take up the better part of a day at a critical time when the staff at Women’s World Banking was especially busy. Ann went ahead and had the physical, the Pap smear, the pelvic ultrasound, and the mammogram, as well as a breast ultrasound, at the radiologist’s suggestion.

  “I completed all of those tests,” Ann would write to Shortle a year later in connection with an insurance claim, having never seen her again, “except the D and C, which I postponed for work-related reasons.”

  Eleven

  Coming Home

  In late November 1994, Ann’s driver, Sabaruddin, picked her up from the modest little house on a narrow street in Jakarta where she had been living since returning to Indonesia. In the used car she had bought with the transportation allowance from her new employer, they rumbled south toward Ciloto, a resort town in the highlands an hour and a half outside the city. For three months, Ann and her team of consultants had been preparing for a three-day retreat at which the staff of the State Ministry for the Role of Women was to come to grips with its mission—embedding a commitment to gender equality deep in the government of the fourth most populous country in the world. To some friends, Ann had described her new assignment as a dream job. But it had quickly proved far more frustrating than she had chosen to dwell on in advance. The bureaucracy was sluggish and resistant to change. There was not enough money in the consulting contract to cover all the work Ann felt was needed to do the job properly. Within a month or two, she was exhausted, overworked, and not feeling well. Bruce Harker, who was overseeing the project from the office of Development Alternatives Inc. in Bethesda, had been taken aback, during a visit to Jakarta, when Ann, appealing to him for more money for the project, had broken down in tears. Yet there she was on the first afternoon of the workshop in Ciloto, delivering a paper on international trends in gender and development. Attendance at the workshop was slightly lower than hoped: Even the minister had begged off, sending word that she had been called to the palace for a meeting with President Suharto’s wife. By the time Ann left Ciloto a day or two later, her vague feeling of unease about her health had been superseded by a sharp pain in her abdomen, which she was no longer able to push from her mind.

  The job in Jakarta had sounded promising enough in New York City the previous spring. With the approach of the United Nations conference in Beijing, the Asian Development Bank, an international development bank with its headquarters in the Philippines, had decided to make a grant to the Indonesian government for the purpose of strengthening and increasing the influence of the State Ministry for the Role of Women. The bank had invited consulting companies to bid on a contract to provide technical assistance—advice on shaping a strategy, training the staff, and setting up databases to measure the ministry’s impact. In a joint venture with an Indonesian firm with connections to the Suharto family, Development Alternatives Inc. had bid and won. But in last-minute negotiations, the amount of money available to the team leader for work activities had been reduced, Harker told me. His company had become, in effect, the subcontractor, leaving Ann, the team leader, workin
g for a firm that did not have control over the budget. From the beginning, the going was rocky. In Jakarta, Ann found herself working out of a dark, dingy office in the Ministry of the Environment without easy access to the ministry she was advising. There were the usual technological aggravations, including cell phone service that seemed not to cover the office where she worked. The ministry staff was inexperienced—and in some cases uninterested—in complex questions involving gender. Recruited from other agencies, many of the staff members needed training—and might move abruptly, without warning, to another ministry at any time. “We found it very frustrating, because there was no interest,” Mayling Oey-Gardiner, a demographer who was also a consultant to the ministry, told me. Without a critical mass of support, she said, little could be done. Furthermore, the task was huge. Ann’s responsibilities ranged from preparing an assessment of the ministry to working with other ministries on a program to “mainstream” a concern about gender equality into everything from planning and budgeting to evaluation. She was expected to work with local governments on a plan for improving their cooperation with the women’s ministry, and she was responsible for preparing a series of reports, including a final one that would give future direction to the ministry and suggest additional projects for the development bank. In Ann’s previous jobs, when money had been needed for work activities, it had been found. But this time around, that was not the case. So when Harker arrived in Jakarta a few months into the contract to conduct an interim review, Ann turned to him, in desperation, for help.