Ann Dunham

Ann was conceived (as I was) in the first few months after Pearl Harbor. Her father joined the Army (mine joined the Navy). Ann's father gave her the name "Stanley" (my parents gave me a solid gender appropriate name). She was raised in Kansas (I was raised in Wisconsin). Her parents moved, Ann attended Mercer Island  High School in Washington State under the tutelage of intellectually sophisticated teachers (mine were depression era populists).

Ann attended the University of Hawaii (I attended the University of Wisconsin). Ann married young (me too). She married a fellow student from Kenya (I married a girl from the town next door). Ann's husband left her and their young son to attend Harvard and they divorced a few years later. Ann met her second husband at the East West Institute (part of the University of Hawaii - I had minor dealings with the East West Institute on demographic matters in Bangladesh years later).

Ann and her second husband (an Indonesian) moved to Jakarta, that marriage also ended. Ann returned to Hawaii for graduate school but returned to Indonesia for field work in 1977. Two of my friends also did extended tours in Indonesia and one of them Rob Varley, worked with Ann as consultants with the Harvard Institute for International Development. Ann took over one of Rob's apartments in Jakarta. (I worked on one HIID project - Data for Decision Making).

Ann worked with the Bank Rakyat Indonesia, a "people's bank" that accepted deposits from and made loans to working class people (Yunus must have been aware of the bank as he worked on development of the Grameen Bank). Ann championed that most seditious theory that ordinary people have the power to determine their own lives. She wrote her doctoral thesis on "Peasant Blacksmithing".

Ann died young (52) of ovarian cancer.