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25 May 2008

ME AND OBAMA’S MAMA

The other night I was talking with a friend about what we’d like to do if we weren’t writers. There isn’t much. I love what I do.

But I did mention that I used to know someone in Indonesia who had the greatest job that I ever heard of.

I met *Ann Sutoro* when I was working for Asian Business magazine and interviewing people for a cover story on what the private sector can do to help alleviate poverty.

She was an economic anthropologist working for Bank Rakyat Indonesia, the rural development bank of the country. She was in charge of the bank’s microfinance program.

From her office in Jakarta, Ann would pick out an impoverished village somewhere in the country. She’d travel there, spend several weeks getting to know the place, getting to know the movers and shakers in the village, who had the brightest entrepreneurial spirit, the best ideas. About 95% of the time the people she came up with were women. Then she’d go back to Jakarta and write up a report.

Loaning this woman US$70 would enable her to get a small refrigerator for her food stall, and among other things she could then stock medicine for curing river blindness in kids.

Another woman could use 40 bucks to buy some equipment to better husk rice, so there’d be less waste and she could build up her business.

For 65, yet another woman could get a second loom for weaving cloth and expand her business. It was all little loans, but it meant big improvements in the lives of whole villages. (And the default rates on the loans was much lower than it was on the big loans other banks made to corporations or wealthy individuals.)

Ann would write up her report, get the money from the bank, then return to the village to dispense the loans. She got to play fairy godmother to hundreds, maybe thousands of people. And best of all it wasn’t charity. She was simply helping them to help themselves.

I liked her, a lot, the moment I met her. We became friendly and for several years, whenever I was in Jakarta I’d give her a call.

We’d have a drink, a meal, hang out talking in her beautiful house in Jakarta. She had a great, quirky, sense of humor, was kind and decent to a fault and was just plain whip smart, one of the sharpest people I’ve ever known. I envied her her job, admired her tremendously and always looked forward to seeing her.

She died of cancer in 1995 and it was a tremendous loss. I’ve thought of her often over the years.

Whenever the subject of great things to do with one’s life comes up, I always trot out the story of Ann Sutoro. Because of her, if I ever went back to school, it would be to study economic anthropology. (Easy to say, though, not much real risk of that.)

Today, I was trying to think up a subject for this blog entry and I was thinking about my conversation of the other night. I thought I’d write about a few of the world’s best jobs, so Ann immediately popped into my head.

Just for the hell of it, I googled her, not really expecting to find much, if anything. What I found out is that she was Barack Obama’s mother.

There’s much that I like and admire about Obama. But, as with all politicians, there is also much about him that makes me suspicious and nervous. But I do know one thing for sure. He comes from a very good family. At least on his mother’s side.

posted by Eric at 4:36 PM

http://www.ericstone.com/2008/05/me-and-obamas-mama.html

Truth or fiction ?

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More stuff:

##3

http://odisky.blogspot.com/2008/10/who-is-stanley-ann-dunham-soetoro.html

Snippet:

Years later Obama saw the film with his mother and thought about walking out. But looking at her in the theater, he glimpsed her 16-year-old self.

“I suddenly realized,” he wrote in his memoir, Dreams from My Father, “that the depiction of childlike blacks I was now seeing on the screen ... was what my mother had carried with her to Hawaii all those years before, a reflection of the simple fantasies that had been forbidden to a white middle-class girl from Kansas, the promise of another life, warm, sensual, exotic, different.”

*snip*

She took a big job as the program officer for women and employment at the Ford Foundation, and she spoke up forcefully at staff meetings.

Unlike many other expats, she had spent a lot of time with villagers, learning their priorities and problems, with a special focus on women’s work. “She was influenced by hanging out in the Javanese marketplace,” Zurbuchen says, “where she would see women with heavy baskets on their backs who got up at 3 in the morning to walk to the market and sell their produce.”

Ann thought the Ford Foundation should get closer to the people and further from the government, just as she had.

*snip*

Ann’s most lasting professional legacy was to help build the microfinance program in Indonesia, which she did from 1988 to ‘92—before the practice of granting tiny loans to credit-poor entrepreneurs was an established success story.

Her anthropological research into how real people worked helped inform the policies set by the Bank Rakyat Indonesia, says Patten, an economist who worked there. “I would say her work had a lot to do with the success of the program,” he says.

Today Indonesia’s microfinance program is No. 1 in the world in terms of savers, with 31 million members, according to Microfinance Information eXchange Inc., a microfinance-tracking outfit.