Download In US President Barack Obama’s memoirs he wrote what is best in me, I owe to my mother.
Ann Dunham took her son to Indonesia in 1967 – at period of a politically and economically instability.
They first lived in Menteng Dalam a working class neighbourhood of the capital, where half of the houses were built from bamboo and most of the children didn’t have shoes.
There his mom worked as an English teacher and an anthropologist who studied the lives of the working class and promoted micro-credit schemes.
Esther de Jong visits their old neighbourhood to meet with those who knew the now famous mother.
Djumiati was in her mid-twenties when she met Ann Dunham, the only foreigner in the neighbourhood.
Obama’s mother taught her English along with 11 other housewives on the floor of this house.
“Ibu Ann was at ease with the women. Although we were all housewives she wanted us to learn English, the language of the world. She would gather all of us in this house and asked us to speak English. She roll out pieces of paper like an artist and write on them. What I remember was the phrase: How to make a dress, so you must speak in English how to declare to make a dress.”
Helping people was large part of Ibu Ann’s life.
Her research, published after her death by her daughter Maya Soetoro-Ng, helped establish early microcredit schemes in Indonesia.
Ibu Ann was an impressive woman says her former neighbour Coenraad Satjakoesoemah.
“Ann was an educational mother. she raised her child not as a celebrity, not as an elitist. I see that back in how Obama is. Those are his typical characteristics, when he was small he was concerned and he wanted to have an easy-going relationship with everyone. So I am especially impressed by his mother because she was an intellectual, a thinker. It was a pity that her marriages did not work out, but maybe that also has had an influence on Barack Obama.”
While other expats in Indonesia kept their children at home, Barry was allowed to explore.
He kept baby crocodiles and a monkey in the backyard and ate from road side stalls.
“He was like all the other children in the neighbourhood. He played the same games. I really appreciated that Ibu Ann saw all that and did not mind it a bit. She was happy with it; the discipline he got at school and at home. Ann was really conscientious. She took Obama to school in a becak, a bicycle taxi. She was already working at the embassy. The streets where muddy and she had her bag in one hand and her shoes in the other. It was only in the bus that she would put her shoes on.”
Ann Dunham was an economic anthropologist who for 30 years devoted herself to studying rural enterprise in Indonesia.
She took on projects as a development officer with US donor foundations pioneering micro-credit projects that extended small loans to the rural poor.
Indonesia today is a world leader in micro-credit.
She also supported groups opposed to the military dictatorship.
She is remember with respect by her former neighbours in Jakarta ike Djumiati.
“In her heart she was a humanist and thought that everyone was equal, that everyone has potential and that everyone could be good. She would never think of other people being less then she was, no, she would never do that.”
