Saturday, June 25, 2011
Friday, June 24, 2011
Emergency medicine healthcare delivery
The Hamilton Spectator article on emergency services in the area.
The issues highlighted are common healthcare delivery issues in North America and the UK (I can't comment on elsewhere because I don't know).
ER worst at Jo Brant
Just not enough beds,
Joseph Brant Memorial Hospital is battling the worst emergency room waits in Ontario, two years into a public monitoring program.
Ninety per cent of the sickest patients spent up to 25.2 hours in the Burlington hospital's emergency room in April before being discharged or admitted.
That's the longest total ER wait time for seriously ill patients at any Ontario hospital measured that month. It's virtually identical to the 26-hour statistic Jo Brant reported in 2009, the first year Ontario made wait times public online at the Ministry of Health website.
Emergency room wait times remain a problem for Jo Brant, said Mary MacLeod, vice-president of patient care services. But she said the problem isn't the ER — it's the lack of beds for patients admitted to hospital.
MacLeod pointed out Jo Brant's reported wait time for less serious ER patients, who are often usually treated and discharged, is 4.9 hours.
That's not far off Ontario's target of four hours.
By contrast, the hospital sometimes triples the province's eight-hour wait time target for seriously ill patients.
Like most hospitals, Joe Brant has many acute care beds “clogged” with older patients who no longer need hospital care but must wait for beds to open up in a long-term care facility or nursing home.
About 52 of the hospital's 248 acute care beds, or 21 per cent, are filled with patients in limbo.
MacLeod said the high percentage is due partly to an increasingly elderly population in Burlington. About 15 per cent of city residents are 65 and older, according to census data, but MacLeod said she's noticed a “significant” bump in patients over the age of 80.
The Local Health Integration Network is working with hospitals and associated agencies to help keep more complex-care patients in their homes, rather than in hospital, said Donna Cripps, the executive director for the Hamilton-area LHIN.
For example, the LHIN found one-time funding last year for the Community Care Access Centre to provide more hours of “home care.”
MacLeod said Jo Brant simply needs more beds.
The hospital has pitched a $300-million redevelopment plan to the province that would add at least 70 acute care beds.
“We're hoping for approval … The plan calls for us to add (beds) by 2013 or 2014, but we need them now.”
Burlington isn't alone in its struggle to cut wait times.
In Hamilton, no hospital serving adults came anywhere close to the eight-hour wait time target for seriously ill patients — or even the provincial average in April of 11.4 hours.
April was a “tricky month” for all Hamilton ERs after McMaster converted its emergency room to a children-only operation, said Ida Porteous, administrative director for emergency services at St. Joseph's Healthcare.
Porteous said she's “cautiously optimistic” the hospital's wait times will improve this summer, especially after the addition of several “short-stay” beds funded by the province in May.
Over time, average ER wait times in Ontario are creeping down, said Dr. Chris Simpson, a spokesperson for the Wait Times Alliance that represents more than 14 Canadian medical associations.
The alliance just released a report card on wait times nationally for major medical procedures such as hip replacements, knee replacements, cataract surgery, radiation oncology and cardiac services.
“We have to give credit where it's due: Ontario scored straight As for those indicators,” Simpson said.
Bed shortages are a national problem, so nobody gets good grades for ER wait times.
“But most provinces aren't even making wait times public,” Simpson said. “I give kudos (to Ontario) for being brave enough to report it.”
The issues highlighted are common healthcare delivery issues in North America and the UK (I can't comment on elsewhere because I don't know).
ER worst at Jo Brant
Just not enough beds,
Joseph Brant Memorial Hospital is battling the worst emergency room waits in Ontario, two years into a public monitoring program.
Ninety per cent of the sickest patients spent up to 25.2 hours in the Burlington hospital's emergency room in April before being discharged or admitted.
That's the longest total ER wait time for seriously ill patients at any Ontario hospital measured that month. It's virtually identical to the 26-hour statistic Jo Brant reported in 2009, the first year Ontario made wait times public online at the Ministry of Health website.
Emergency room wait times remain a problem for Jo Brant, said Mary MacLeod, vice-president of patient care services. But she said the problem isn't the ER — it's the lack of beds for patients admitted to hospital.
MacLeod pointed out Jo Brant's reported wait time for less serious ER patients, who are often usually treated and discharged, is 4.9 hours.
That's not far off Ontario's target of four hours.
By contrast, the hospital sometimes triples the province's eight-hour wait time target for seriously ill patients.
Like most hospitals, Joe Brant has many acute care beds “clogged” with older patients who no longer need hospital care but must wait for beds to open up in a long-term care facility or nursing home.
About 52 of the hospital's 248 acute care beds, or 21 per cent, are filled with patients in limbo.
MacLeod said the high percentage is due partly to an increasingly elderly population in Burlington. About 15 per cent of city residents are 65 and older, according to census data, but MacLeod said she's noticed a “significant” bump in patients over the age of 80.
The Local Health Integration Network is working with hospitals and associated agencies to help keep more complex-care patients in their homes, rather than in hospital, said Donna Cripps, the executive director for the Hamilton-area LHIN.
For example, the LHIN found one-time funding last year for the Community Care Access Centre to provide more hours of “home care.”
MacLeod said Jo Brant simply needs more beds.
The hospital has pitched a $300-million redevelopment plan to the province that would add at least 70 acute care beds.
“We're hoping for approval … The plan calls for us to add (beds) by 2013 or 2014, but we need them now.”
Burlington isn't alone in its struggle to cut wait times.
In Hamilton, no hospital serving adults came anywhere close to the eight-hour wait time target for seriously ill patients — or even the provincial average in April of 11.4 hours.
April was a “tricky month” for all Hamilton ERs after McMaster converted its emergency room to a children-only operation, said Ida Porteous, administrative director for emergency services at St. Joseph's Healthcare.
Porteous said she's “cautiously optimistic” the hospital's wait times will improve this summer, especially after the addition of several “short-stay” beds funded by the province in May.
Over time, average ER wait times in Ontario are creeping down, said Dr. Chris Simpson, a spokesperson for the Wait Times Alliance that represents more than 14 Canadian medical associations.
The alliance just released a report card on wait times nationally for major medical procedures such as hip replacements, knee replacements, cataract surgery, radiation oncology and cardiac services.
“We have to give credit where it's due: Ontario scored straight As for those indicators,” Simpson said.
Bed shortages are a national problem, so nobody gets good grades for ER wait times.
“But most provinces aren't even making wait times public,” Simpson said. “I give kudos (to Ontario) for being brave enough to report it.”
Monday, June 20, 2011
More on the protester of Westminister
Brian Haw: The ultimate protester
By Alex Stevenson Talking Politics
The traffic continues to flow around Parliament Square, the tourists continue to bustle. But something is unmistakeably missing.
Early on Saturday Brian Haw died of lung cancer. It was the end of a life whose last ten years had been among the most unusual in modern British history. He had devoted himself to a solitary protest against Britain's foreign policy, earning himself an unusual place in the history books. His dogged unshakeable stubbornness was as British as the red buses constantly passing by.
Haw's message was all the more powerful because, somewhat paradoxically, he shunned attention. "I will not be a media whore," his website declared. His target was MPs, the men and women who had authorised the invasion of Iraq and the suffering it and its aftermath caused. The media, so often viewed as part of the establishment, were invariably treated with suspicion.
I caught a glimpse of this during the heavy snowfalls of early 2009. Central London was brought to a standstill and many MPs were forced to stay away from parliament altogether. But Haw was there, in the midst of the blizzard, and so an obvious candidate for interviewing.
Perhaps it was the suit, or the notebook, or the fact I had clearly emerged from the Palace across the road. Whatever, he didn't answer my first few remarks. He just stood there, glaring contemptuously. "Look," I said desperately, "I just want to know what you think of all the MPs not bothering to come in." Slowly, like an ancient tortoise, he craned his neck towards me. "I'm still here," he growled. And then began showing me, half-covered by snow, pictures of dead babies.
Haw's comment was an appropriate one. He had begun his protest on June 2nd 2001 over the economic sanctions being imposed on Iraq. Doing so was an extraordinary step for anyone to make: after a couple of years sleeping in the square he and his wife divorced, after all. Even before the 2003 invasion an attempt to remove him was made. It was the first of many defeats for those seeking to end his vigil.
Haw was an irritant to many in parliament. So MPs decided they could get rid of him on security grounds in 2003. Their recommendation became part of New Labour legislation two years later, by which time public anger at the Iraq war was at its peak. It was now combined with frustration by civil liberties campaigners. The court of appeal overturned the measures.
The transition from an angry carpenter to a global icon was not quite complete. Even as fresh attempts were begun to oust him, he won an award for being that year's 'most inspiring political figure'. In 2007 a reproduction of one of his protest banners by artist Mark Wallinger won the Turner Prize. He appeared on CNN regularly.
Wallinger has described Haw as a man of "tenacity, integrity and dignity". "Brian showed us what a quiescent and supine country we've become," he wrote in an article for the Independent newspaper. "What Brian was saying was never really reported properly, nor was the depth and heroism of his struggle. People who should know better would describe him as a crank and wouldn't bother to hear what he had to say."
It had looked as if the days of his protest were numbered, for he had lost an appeal in March against eviction from the grassy area of Parliament Square. But in the end, it was to be lung cancer, not politicians or officials, which forced him from Parliament Square.
Haw was never interested in becoming a legend. He was a pain, a thorn in the government's side, nothing more. Those inspired by his example who attempted to join him were often surprised when he turned out to be irascible and grumpy. His purpose was not to charm, like a politician, or tell a story, like a journalist. It was to make a point — an enduring reminder that the decisions made in Westminster have real consequences.
By Alex Stevenson Talking Politics
The traffic continues to flow around Parliament Square, the tourists continue to bustle. But something is unmistakeably missing.
Early on Saturday Brian Haw died of lung cancer. It was the end of a life whose last ten years had been among the most unusual in modern British history. He had devoted himself to a solitary protest against Britain's foreign policy, earning himself an unusual place in the history books. His dogged unshakeable stubbornness was as British as the red buses constantly passing by.
Haw's message was all the more powerful because, somewhat paradoxically, he shunned attention. "I will not be a media whore," his website declared. His target was MPs, the men and women who had authorised the invasion of Iraq and the suffering it and its aftermath caused. The media, so often viewed as part of the establishment, were invariably treated with suspicion.
I caught a glimpse of this during the heavy snowfalls of early 2009. Central London was brought to a standstill and many MPs were forced to stay away from parliament altogether. But Haw was there, in the midst of the blizzard, and so an obvious candidate for interviewing.
Perhaps it was the suit, or the notebook, or the fact I had clearly emerged from the Palace across the road. Whatever, he didn't answer my first few remarks. He just stood there, glaring contemptuously. "Look," I said desperately, "I just want to know what you think of all the MPs not bothering to come in." Slowly, like an ancient tortoise, he craned his neck towards me. "I'm still here," he growled. And then began showing me, half-covered by snow, pictures of dead babies.
Haw's comment was an appropriate one. He had begun his protest on June 2nd 2001 over the economic sanctions being imposed on Iraq. Doing so was an extraordinary step for anyone to make: after a couple of years sleeping in the square he and his wife divorced, after all. Even before the 2003 invasion an attempt to remove him was made. It was the first of many defeats for those seeking to end his vigil.
Haw was an irritant to many in parliament. So MPs decided they could get rid of him on security grounds in 2003. Their recommendation became part of New Labour legislation two years later, by which time public anger at the Iraq war was at its peak. It was now combined with frustration by civil liberties campaigners. The court of appeal overturned the measures.
The transition from an angry carpenter to a global icon was not quite complete. Even as fresh attempts were begun to oust him, he won an award for being that year's 'most inspiring political figure'. In 2007 a reproduction of one of his protest banners by artist Mark Wallinger won the Turner Prize. He appeared on CNN regularly.
Wallinger has described Haw as a man of "tenacity, integrity and dignity". "Brian showed us what a quiescent and supine country we've become," he wrote in an article for the Independent newspaper. "What Brian was saying was never really reported properly, nor was the depth and heroism of his struggle. People who should know better would describe him as a crank and wouldn't bother to hear what he had to say."
It had looked as if the days of his protest were numbered, for he had lost an appeal in March against eviction from the grassy area of Parliament Square. But in the end, it was to be lung cancer, not politicians or officials, which forced him from Parliament Square.
Haw was never interested in becoming a legend. He was a pain, a thorn in the government's side, nothing more. Those inspired by his example who attempted to join him were often surprised when he turned out to be irascible and grumpy. His purpose was not to charm, like a politician, or tell a story, like a journalist. It was to make a point — an enduring reminder that the decisions made in Westminster have real consequences.
Sunday, June 19, 2011
Poem: The Five Stage of Grief
The night I lost you
someone pointed me towards
the Five Stages of Grief
Go that way, they said,
it's easy, like learning to climb
stairs after the amputation.
And so I climbed.
Denial was first.
I sat down at breakfast
carefully setting the table
for two. I passed you the toast---
you sat there. I passed
you the paper---you hid
behind it.
Anger seemed so familiar.
I burned the toast, snatched
the paper and read the headlines myself.
But they mentioned your departure,
and so I moved on to
Bargaining. What could I exchange
for you? The silence
after storms? My typing fingers?
Before I could decide, Depression
came puffing up, a poor relation
its suitcase tied together
with string. In the suitcase
were bandages for the eyes
and bottles sleep. I slid
all the way down the stairs
feeling nothing.
And all the time Hope
flashed on and off
in detective neon.
Hope was a signpost pointing
straight in the air.
Hope was my uncle's middle name,
he died of it.
After a year I am still climbing, though my feet slip
on your stone face.
The treeline
has long since disappeared;
green is a color
I have forgotten.
But now I see what I am climbing
towards: Acceptance
written in capital letters,
a special headline:
Acceptance
its name is in lights.
I struggle on,
waving and shouting.
Below, my whole life spreads its surf,
all the landscapes I've ever known
or dreamed of. Below
a fish jumps: the pulse
in your neck.
Acceptance. I finally
reach it.
But something is wrong.
Grief is a circular staircse.
I have lost you.
Linda Pastan
someone pointed me towards
the Five Stages of Grief
Go that way, they said,
it's easy, like learning to climb
stairs after the amputation.
And so I climbed.
Denial was first.
I sat down at breakfast
carefully setting the table
for two. I passed you the toast---
you sat there. I passed
you the paper---you hid
behind it.
Anger seemed so familiar.
I burned the toast, snatched
the paper and read the headlines myself.
But they mentioned your departure,
and so I moved on to
Bargaining. What could I exchange
for you? The silence
after storms? My typing fingers?
Before I could decide, Depression
came puffing up, a poor relation
its suitcase tied together
with string. In the suitcase
were bandages for the eyes
and bottles sleep. I slid
all the way down the stairs
feeling nothing.
And all the time Hope
flashed on and off
in detective neon.
Hope was a signpost pointing
straight in the air.
Hope was my uncle's middle name,
he died of it.
After a year I am still climbing, though my feet slip
on your stone face.
The treeline
has long since disappeared;
green is a color
I have forgotten.
But now I see what I am climbing
towards: Acceptance
written in capital letters,
a special headline:
Acceptance
its name is in lights.
I struggle on,
waving and shouting.
Below, my whole life spreads its surf,
all the landscapes I've ever known
or dreamed of. Below
a fish jumps: the pulse
in your neck.
Acceptance. I finally
reach it.
But something is wrong.
Grief is a circular staircse.
I have lost you.
Linda Pastan
Literature and medicine
Intenstive Care by Danielle Ofri
Winthrop Cohen - An elderly man is treated by a psychiatrist for depression. But the depression is caused by his reflections on his actions as a young man during the war. The psychiatrist treats him according to the guidelines - on the surface appearing to be successful, the Mr Cohen is able to return to work. However, he does not thank the psychiatrist, instead, a question is asked...
'Winthrop Cohen’s clinical depression responded to a short course of antidepressant medication and psychodynamic psychotherapy focused on clarifying and interpreting his wartime trauma in the context of his biography and intimate relations. After eight weeks, he no longer stared off into space or looked agitated or seriously depressed. He returned to work. His wife and daughter thanked me for treating this ‘breakdown’. But Winthrop Cohen never thanked me. To the contrary, at our last meeting, he implied that I was part of the societal collusion to cover up the threatening implications of war experiences such as his.
"I can put it away again. I don’t feel the same pressure. I can sleep, and eat, and fornicate again. But you know as well as I do that what’s bothering me can’t be treated or cured. Job said: ‘I will maintain my integrity. I will hold on to my righteousness’. I did neither. I soiled myself as I was soiled. I lost my humanity as those around me did the same. You don’t have any answers. Nor do I. Save to live with it. To realize I did the worst is to understand how ordinary men do bad things. How ordinary Americans were so anti-Semitic at that time. How ordinary Germans did what did during the Holocaust. How all of us are capable of murder. In the midst of war when all hell breaks loose and you are empowered to act with impunity, you can do horror and be decorated for it. And you can dine out for decades telling war stories, stories that are untrue. Because who can face up to the reality of the evil we did? Only the patriotic memories last. The killing is forgotten. The suffering remembered, because it is legitimate to speak of it. What can’t be said – I mean in public – is what I did. What dos that tell you about the soul?" '.
The words of Mr Cohen are more reflective than that of the psychiatrist.
Winthrop Cohen - An elderly man is treated by a psychiatrist for depression. But the depression is caused by his reflections on his actions as a young man during the war. The psychiatrist treats him according to the guidelines - on the surface appearing to be successful, the Mr Cohen is able to return to work. However, he does not thank the psychiatrist, instead, a question is asked...
'Winthrop Cohen’s clinical depression responded to a short course of antidepressant medication and psychodynamic psychotherapy focused on clarifying and interpreting his wartime trauma in the context of his biography and intimate relations. After eight weeks, he no longer stared off into space or looked agitated or seriously depressed. He returned to work. His wife and daughter thanked me for treating this ‘breakdown’. But Winthrop Cohen never thanked me. To the contrary, at our last meeting, he implied that I was part of the societal collusion to cover up the threatening implications of war experiences such as his.
"I can put it away again. I don’t feel the same pressure. I can sleep, and eat, and fornicate again. But you know as well as I do that what’s bothering me can’t be treated or cured. Job said: ‘I will maintain my integrity. I will hold on to my righteousness’. I did neither. I soiled myself as I was soiled. I lost my humanity as those around me did the same. You don’t have any answers. Nor do I. Save to live with it. To realize I did the worst is to understand how ordinary men do bad things. How ordinary Americans were so anti-Semitic at that time. How ordinary Germans did what did during the Holocaust. How all of us are capable of murder. In the midst of war when all hell breaks loose and you are empowered to act with impunity, you can do horror and be decorated for it. And you can dine out for decades telling war stories, stories that are untrue. Because who can face up to the reality of the evil we did? Only the patriotic memories last. The killing is forgotten. The suffering remembered, because it is legitimate to speak of it. What can’t be said – I mean in public – is what I did. What dos that tell you about the soul?" '.
The words of Mr Cohen are more reflective than that of the psychiatrist.
'Doctor Talk to Me'
Doctor Talk to Me - An article from the New York Times from just over 20 years ago. An editor, turned patient, gives his viewpoints and experiences. He lays out his prejudices, reflects on them, and what he would have wished to have and see in an 'ideal doctor'. This is very much one man's perspective, and obviously not reflective of all people. He makes some interesting points, made me notice some aspects that I previously did not think particularly important (e.g. having 'style'), although there are some points that I completely disagree with. But, overall it does make for a reflective and thought provoking read, and it was very brave, and even honourable, of him to write and share such an honest piece of his personal experiences and musings.
The bits I've put in bold are pretty much parts I would have highlighted or underlined if this were in a book.
pdf
By Anatole Broyard; Anatole Broyard is a former editor of The New York Times Book Review
Published: August 26, 1990
When, in the Summer of 1989, I moved from Connecticut to Cambridge, Mass., I found that I had difficulty urinating. I was like Portnoy, in ''Portnoy's Complaint,'' who couldn't fornicate in Israel. I had always wanted to live in Cambridge, and the thought passed through my mind that I couldn't urinate because - like Israel for Portnoy - Cambridge was a transcendent place for me.
When my inhibition persisted, I began to think about a doctor, and I set about finding one in the superstitious manner most of us fall back on: I asked a couple I knew for a recommendation. To be recommended, for whatever unreasonable reasons, gives a doctor an aura, a history, a shred of magic. Though I thought of my disorder as a simple matter - prostatitis is common in men of my age - I still wanted a potent doctor.
I applied to this particular couple for a recommendation because they are the two most critical people I know: critics of philosophy, politics, history, literature, drama, music. They are the sort of people for whom information is a religion, and the rigor of their conversation is legendary. To talk with them is an ordeal, a fatigue of fine distinctions, and I wanted a doctor who had survived such a scrutiny.
They could only give me the name of their internist, who referred me to a urologist. The recommendation was diluted, but it was better than none, so I made an appointment to see the urologist in a local hospital. The visit began well. The secretary was attractive, efficient and alert. She remembered my name. I was shown into a pleasant office and told that the doctor would be with me in a few minutes.
While I waited, I subjected the doctor to a preliminary semiotic scrutiny. Sitting in his office, I read his signs. The diplomas I took for granted; what interested me was the fact that the room was furnished with taste. There were well-made, well-filled bookcases, an antique desk and chairs, a reasonable Oriental rug on the floor. A large window opened one wall of the office to the panorama of Boston, and this suggested status, an earned respect. I imagined the doctor taking the long view out of his window.
On the walls and desk were pictures of three healthy-looking, conspicuously happy children, photographed in a prosperous outdoor setting of lawn, flowers and trees. As I remember, one of the photographs showed a sailboat. From the evidence, their father knew how to live - and by extension, how to look after the lives of others.
Soon the doctor came in and introduced himself. ''Let's go into my office,'' he said, and I realized that I had been waiting among someone else's effects. I felt that I had been tricked. Having already warmed myself to the first doctor, I was obliged to follow this second man, this impostor, into another office, which turned out to be modern and anonymous. There were no antiques, no Oriental rug and no pictures that I could see.
From the beginning, I had a negative feeling about this doctor. He didn't seem intense enough or determined enough to prevail over something powerful and demonic like illness. He had a pink, soft face and blue eyes, and his manner was hearty and vague at the same time, polite where politeness was irrelevant. He reminded me of a salesman with nothing to sell but his inoffensiveness.
I didn't like the way he spoke: it struck me as deliberately deliberate, a man fixed in a pose, playing doctor. There was no sign of a tragic sense of life in him that I could see, no furious desire to oppose himself to fate. I realized, of course, that what I was looking for was extravagant, that I was demanding nothing less than an ideal doctor, yet isn't that what we all want?
In the end, it didn't matter whether my reading of this particular man was just or unjust - I simply couldn't warm up to him. Choosing a doctor is difficult because it is our first explicit confrontation of our illness. ''How good is this man?'' is simply the reverse of ''How bad am I?'' To be sick brings out all our prejudices and primitive feelings. Like fear, or love, it makes us a little crazy. Yet the craziness of the patient is part of his condition. I was also aware of a certain predisposition in myself in favor of Jewish doctors. I thought of them as the trouble-shooters -the physicians, lawyers, brokers, arbiters and artists - of contemporary life. History had convinced them that life was a disease. My father, who was an old-fashioned Southern anti-Semite, insisted on a Jewish doctor when he developed cancer of the bladder. A Jewish doctor, he argued, had been bred to medicine. In my father's Biblical conception, a Jew's life was a story of study, repair and reform. A Jewish doctor knew what survival was worth, because he had had to fight for his. Obliged to treat life as a business as well as a pleasure, Jews drove hard bargains. To lose a patient was bad business. In his heart, I think my father believed that a Jewish doctor was closer to God and could use that connection to ''Jew down'' death.
This other, all-too-human doctor took me into an examining room and felt my prostate. It appeared to me that he had not yet overcome his self-consciousness about this procedure. Back in his office, he summed up his findings. There were hard lumps in my prostate, he said, which suggested tumors, and these ''mandated'' further investigation. He used the word ''mandate'' twice in his summary, as well as the word ''significantly.''
But he was the only urologist I knew in Cambridge, and so, a few days later, I allowed him to perform a cystoscopy, a procedure in which a small scope was inserted through my urethra up to my prostate and bladder. During surgical procedures, doctors wear a tightfitting white cap, a sort of skullcap like the one Alan Alda wears in ''M*A*S*H*.'' To this, my doctor had added what looked like a clear plastic shower cap, and the moment I saw him in these two caps, I turned irrevocably against him. He wore them absolutely without inflection or style, with none of the jauntiness that usually comes with long practice. He wore them like an American in France who affects a beret without understanding how to shape or cock it. To my eyes, this doctor simply didn't have the charisma to overcome or assimilate those caps, and that finished him off for me.
I want to point out that this man is in all likelihood an able, even a talented doctor. Certainly, I'm no judge of his medical competence, nor do I mean to criticize it. What turned me against him was what I saw as a lack of style. I realized that I wanted my doctor to have style - which I think of as a dash of magic - as well as medical ability. It was like having a lucky doctor. I've described all this - a patient's madness - to show how irrational such transactions are, how far removed from any notion of dispassionate objectivity. To be sick is already to be disordered in your mind as well. Still, this does not necessarily mean that I was wrong to want to change doctors: I was simply listening to my unconscious telling me what I needed.
Now that I know I have cancer of the prostate, the lymph nodes and part of my skeleton, what do I want in a doctor? I would say that I want one who is a close reader of illness and a good critic of medicine. I secretly believe that criticism can wither cancer. Also, I would like a doctor who is not only a talented physician but a bit of a metaphysician too, someone who can treat body and soul. I used to get restless when people talked about soul, but now I know better. Soul is the part of you that you summon up in emergencies. You don't need to be religious to believe in the soul or to have one.
My ideal doctor would be my Virgil, leading me through my purgatory or inferno, pointing out the sights as we go. He would resemble Oliver Sacks, the neurologist who wrote ''Awakenings'' and ''The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.'' I can imagine Dr. Sacks entering my condition, looking around at it from the inside like a benevolent landlord with a tenant, trying to see how he could make the premises more livable for me. He would see the genius of my illness. He would mingle his daemon with mine; we would wrestle with my fate together. Inside every patient, there's a poet trying to get out. My ideal doctor would ''read'' my poetry, my literature. He would see that my sickness has purified me, weakening my worst parts and strengthening the best.
To most physicians, my illness is a routine incident in their rounds, while for me it's the crisis of my life. I would feel better if I had a doctor who, at least, perceived this incongruity. I don't ask him to love me - in fact, I think the role of love is greatly exaggerated by many writers on illness. Of course you want your family and close friends to love you, but the situation shouldn't become a hunting season for love, or a competition, a desperate kiss before dying. To a critically ill person, love may begin to resemble an anesthetic. In a novel by Joy Williams called ''State of Grace,'' a character asks, ''What can be beyond love? I want to get there.'' The sick man has got there: he's at a point where what he wants from most people is not love but a spacious, flaring grasp of his situation, what is known now in the literature of illness as ''empathetic witnessing.'' The patient is always on the brink of revelation, and he needs someone who can recognize it when it comes.
Just as I see no reason for my physician to love me, I would not expect him to suffer with me either. On the contrary, what would please me most would be a doctor who enjoyed me. I want to be a good story for him, to give him some of my art in exchange for his. If a patient expects a doctor to be interested in him, he ought to try to be interesting. When he shows nothing but a greediness for care, nothing but the coarser forms of anxiety, it's only natural for the physician to feel an aversion. There is an etiquette to being sick.
I wouldn't demand a lot of my doctor's time; I just wish he would brood on my situation for perhaps five minutes, that he would give me his whole mind just once. I would like to think of him as going through my character, as he goes through my flesh, to get at my illness, for each man is ill in his own way. Proust complained that his physician did not allow for his having read Shakespeare. I have a wistful desire for my relation to my doctor to be beautiful - but I don't know how this can be brought about. Though I see us framed in an epiphany, I can't make out the content.
Just as he orders blood tests and bone scans of my body, I'd like my doctor to scan me, to grope for my spirit as well as my prostate. While he inevitably feels superior to me because he is the doctor and I am the patient, I'd like him to know that I feel superior to him too, that he is my patient also and I have my diagnosis of him. There should be a place where our respective superiorities could meet and frolic together.
Since technology deprives me of the intimacy of my illness, makes it not mine but something that belongs to science, I wish my doctor could somehow restore it to me and make it personal again. When my father's father died in the French Quarter of New Orleans 60 years ago, the popularly accepted story was that on a humid night in mid-August, he had eaten a dozen bananas and then taken a cold bath. He was a man of 87 whose life had been a strenuous assertion of his appetites, and this explanation suited him, just as it suited his friends in the French Quarter. It would be more satisfying to me, it would allow me to feel that I owned my illness, if my urologist were to say, ''You know, you've beat the hell out of this prostate of yours. It looks like a worn-out baseball.'' Nobody wants an anonymous illness. I'd much rather think that I brought it on myself than that it was a mere accident of nature.
It is only natural for a patient to feel some dismay at the changes brought about in his body by illness, and I wonder whether an innovative doctor - again, like Oliver Sacks - couldn't find a way to reconceptualize this situation. If only the patient could be allowed to see his illness not so much as a failure of his body as a natural consumption of it. Any reconciling idea would do. The doctor could say, ''You've spent your self unselfishly, like a philanthropist who gives all his money away.'' If the patient could feel that he has earned his illness, that his sickness represents the decadence that follows a great flowering, he might look upon the ruin of his body as tourists look upon the ruins of antiquity. (Of course I'm offering these suggestions playfully, as experiments in thinking about medicine.) Physicians have been taught in medical school that they must keep the patient at a distance because there isn't time to accommodate his personality, or because if the doctor becomes ''involved'' in the patient's predicament, the emotional burden will be too great. As I've suggested, it doesn't take much time to make good contact, but beyond that, the emotional burden of avoiding the patient may be much harder on the doctor than he imagines. It may be this that sometimes makes him complain of feeling harassed. The patient's unanswered questions will always thunder in his stethoscope. A doctor's job would be so much more interesting and satisfying if he would occasionally let himself plunge into the patient, if he could lose his own fear of falling.
Applying to other friends, following new recommendations, I found another urologist. He's highly regarded in his field, and he inspired such confidence in me that my cancer immediately went into remission. My only regret is that he doesn't talk very much - and when he does, he sounds like everybody else. His brilliance has no voice - at least not when he's with me. There's a paradox here at the heart of medicine, because a doctor, like a writer, must have a voice of his own, something that conveys the timbre, the rhythm, the diction and the music of his humanity, that compensates us for all the speechless machines. When a doctor makes a difficult diagnosis, it is not his medical knowledge only that determines it, but a voice in his head. Such a diagnosis depends as much on inspiration as art does. Whether he wants to be or not, the doctor is a storyteller, and he can turn our lives into good or bad stories, regardless of the diagnosis. If my doctor would allow me, I would be glad to help him here, to take him on as my patient.
Although I hope to live for a while, my urologist is young, and I see us as joined till death do us part. Perhaps later, when he is older, he'll have learned how to converse. Astute as he is, he doesn't yet understand that all cures are partly ''talking cures.'' Every patient needs mouth-to-mouth resusitation, for talk is the kiss of life.
Yet it's too easy to accuse the doctor, to blame the absence of natural talk on him. It's also true that some of what the patient asks is ineffable. Even a doctor like Chekhov would be hard put to answer him. For example, I would like to discuss my prostate with my urologist not as a diseased organ but as a philosopher's stone. Every patient invites the doctor to combine the role of the priest, the philosopher, the poet, the scholar. He expects the doctor to evaluate his entire life, like a biographer.
Of course, a physician may reasonably ask: ''But what am I supposed to say? All I can tell the patient is the facts, if there are any facts.'' But this is not quite true. The doctor's answer to his patient is yet to be born. It will come naturally - or at first unnaturally - from the intersecting of the patient's needs with the physician's as yet untried imagination. Just as a mother ushers her child into the world, so the doctor must usher the patient out of the ordinary world into whatever place awaits him. The physician is the patient's only familiar in a foreign country.
To help the doctor reach the patient, and the patient to reach the doctor, the mood of the hospital might have to be modified. It might be less like a laboratory and more like a theater, which would be only fitting, since no place contains more drama. The laboratory atmosphere can probably be traced back to the idea of asepsis, to the avoidance of contagion. Originally, the patient was protected by the sterility of the hospital. Only the sterility went too far: It sterilized the doctor's thinking. It sterilized the patient's entire experience in the hospital. It sterilized the very notion of illness to the point where we can't bring our soiled thoughts to bear on it. But the sick man needs the contagion of life.
Not every patient can be saved, but his illness may be eased by the way the doctor responds to him - and in responding to him, the doctor may save himself. But first he must become a student again; he has to dissect the cadaver of his professional persona; he must see that his silence and neutrality are unnatural. It may be necessary to give up some of his authority in exchange for his humanity, but as the old family doctors knew, this is not a bad bargain. In learning to talk to his patients, the doctor may talk himself back into loving his work. He has little to lose and much to gain by letting the sick man into his heart. If he does, they can share, as few others can, the wonder, terror and exaltation of being on the edge of being, between the natural and the supernatural.
The bits I've put in bold are pretty much parts I would have highlighted or underlined if this were in a book.
By Anatole Broyard; Anatole Broyard is a former editor of The New York Times Book Review
Published: August 26, 1990
When, in the Summer of 1989, I moved from Connecticut to Cambridge, Mass., I found that I had difficulty urinating. I was like Portnoy, in ''Portnoy's Complaint,'' who couldn't fornicate in Israel. I had always wanted to live in Cambridge, and the thought passed through my mind that I couldn't urinate because - like Israel for Portnoy - Cambridge was a transcendent place for me.
When my inhibition persisted, I began to think about a doctor, and I set about finding one in the superstitious manner most of us fall back on: I asked a couple I knew for a recommendation. To be recommended, for whatever unreasonable reasons, gives a doctor an aura, a history, a shred of magic. Though I thought of my disorder as a simple matter - prostatitis is common in men of my age - I still wanted a potent doctor.
I applied to this particular couple for a recommendation because they are the two most critical people I know: critics of philosophy, politics, history, literature, drama, music. They are the sort of people for whom information is a religion, and the rigor of their conversation is legendary. To talk with them is an ordeal, a fatigue of fine distinctions, and I wanted a doctor who had survived such a scrutiny.
They could only give me the name of their internist, who referred me to a urologist. The recommendation was diluted, but it was better than none, so I made an appointment to see the urologist in a local hospital. The visit began well. The secretary was attractive, efficient and alert. She remembered my name. I was shown into a pleasant office and told that the doctor would be with me in a few minutes.
While I waited, I subjected the doctor to a preliminary semiotic scrutiny. Sitting in his office, I read his signs. The diplomas I took for granted; what interested me was the fact that the room was furnished with taste. There were well-made, well-filled bookcases, an antique desk and chairs, a reasonable Oriental rug on the floor. A large window opened one wall of the office to the panorama of Boston, and this suggested status, an earned respect. I imagined the doctor taking the long view out of his window.
On the walls and desk were pictures of three healthy-looking, conspicuously happy children, photographed in a prosperous outdoor setting of lawn, flowers and trees. As I remember, one of the photographs showed a sailboat. From the evidence, their father knew how to live - and by extension, how to look after the lives of others.
Soon the doctor came in and introduced himself. ''Let's go into my office,'' he said, and I realized that I had been waiting among someone else's effects. I felt that I had been tricked. Having already warmed myself to the first doctor, I was obliged to follow this second man, this impostor, into another office, which turned out to be modern and anonymous. There were no antiques, no Oriental rug and no pictures that I could see.
From the beginning, I had a negative feeling about this doctor. He didn't seem intense enough or determined enough to prevail over something powerful and demonic like illness. He had a pink, soft face and blue eyes, and his manner was hearty and vague at the same time, polite where politeness was irrelevant. He reminded me of a salesman with nothing to sell but his inoffensiveness.
I didn't like the way he spoke: it struck me as deliberately deliberate, a man fixed in a pose, playing doctor. There was no sign of a tragic sense of life in him that I could see, no furious desire to oppose himself to fate. I realized, of course, that what I was looking for was extravagant, that I was demanding nothing less than an ideal doctor, yet isn't that what we all want?
In the end, it didn't matter whether my reading of this particular man was just or unjust - I simply couldn't warm up to him. Choosing a doctor is difficult because it is our first explicit confrontation of our illness. ''How good is this man?'' is simply the reverse of ''How bad am I?'' To be sick brings out all our prejudices and primitive feelings. Like fear, or love, it makes us a little crazy. Yet the craziness of the patient is part of his condition. I was also aware of a certain predisposition in myself in favor of Jewish doctors. I thought of them as the trouble-shooters -the physicians, lawyers, brokers, arbiters and artists - of contemporary life. History had convinced them that life was a disease. My father, who was an old-fashioned Southern anti-Semite, insisted on a Jewish doctor when he developed cancer of the bladder. A Jewish doctor, he argued, had been bred to medicine. In my father's Biblical conception, a Jew's life was a story of study, repair and reform. A Jewish doctor knew what survival was worth, because he had had to fight for his. Obliged to treat life as a business as well as a pleasure, Jews drove hard bargains. To lose a patient was bad business. In his heart, I think my father believed that a Jewish doctor was closer to God and could use that connection to ''Jew down'' death.
This other, all-too-human doctor took me into an examining room and felt my prostate. It appeared to me that he had not yet overcome his self-consciousness about this procedure. Back in his office, he summed up his findings. There were hard lumps in my prostate, he said, which suggested tumors, and these ''mandated'' further investigation. He used the word ''mandate'' twice in his summary, as well as the word ''significantly.''
But he was the only urologist I knew in Cambridge, and so, a few days later, I allowed him to perform a cystoscopy, a procedure in which a small scope was inserted through my urethra up to my prostate and bladder. During surgical procedures, doctors wear a tightfitting white cap, a sort of skullcap like the one Alan Alda wears in ''M*A*S*H*.'' To this, my doctor had added what looked like a clear plastic shower cap, and the moment I saw him in these two caps, I turned irrevocably against him. He wore them absolutely without inflection or style, with none of the jauntiness that usually comes with long practice. He wore them like an American in France who affects a beret without understanding how to shape or cock it. To my eyes, this doctor simply didn't have the charisma to overcome or assimilate those caps, and that finished him off for me.
I want to point out that this man is in all likelihood an able, even a talented doctor. Certainly, I'm no judge of his medical competence, nor do I mean to criticize it. What turned me against him was what I saw as a lack of style. I realized that I wanted my doctor to have style - which I think of as a dash of magic - as well as medical ability. It was like having a lucky doctor. I've described all this - a patient's madness - to show how irrational such transactions are, how far removed from any notion of dispassionate objectivity. To be sick is already to be disordered in your mind as well. Still, this does not necessarily mean that I was wrong to want to change doctors: I was simply listening to my unconscious telling me what I needed.
Now that I know I have cancer of the prostate, the lymph nodes and part of my skeleton, what do I want in a doctor? I would say that I want one who is a close reader of illness and a good critic of medicine. I secretly believe that criticism can wither cancer. Also, I would like a doctor who is not only a talented physician but a bit of a metaphysician too, someone who can treat body and soul. I used to get restless when people talked about soul, but now I know better. Soul is the part of you that you summon up in emergencies. You don't need to be religious to believe in the soul or to have one.
My ideal doctor would be my Virgil, leading me through my purgatory or inferno, pointing out the sights as we go. He would resemble Oliver Sacks, the neurologist who wrote ''Awakenings'' and ''The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.'' I can imagine Dr. Sacks entering my condition, looking around at it from the inside like a benevolent landlord with a tenant, trying to see how he could make the premises more livable for me. He would see the genius of my illness. He would mingle his daemon with mine; we would wrestle with my fate together. Inside every patient, there's a poet trying to get out. My ideal doctor would ''read'' my poetry, my literature. He would see that my sickness has purified me, weakening my worst parts and strengthening the best.
To most physicians, my illness is a routine incident in their rounds, while for me it's the crisis of my life. I would feel better if I had a doctor who, at least, perceived this incongruity. I don't ask him to love me - in fact, I think the role of love is greatly exaggerated by many writers on illness. Of course you want your family and close friends to love you, but the situation shouldn't become a hunting season for love, or a competition, a desperate kiss before dying. To a critically ill person, love may begin to resemble an anesthetic. In a novel by Joy Williams called ''State of Grace,'' a character asks, ''What can be beyond love? I want to get there.'' The sick man has got there: he's at a point where what he wants from most people is not love but a spacious, flaring grasp of his situation, what is known now in the literature of illness as ''empathetic witnessing.'' The patient is always on the brink of revelation, and he needs someone who can recognize it when it comes.
Just as I see no reason for my physician to love me, I would not expect him to suffer with me either. On the contrary, what would please me most would be a doctor who enjoyed me. I want to be a good story for him, to give him some of my art in exchange for his. If a patient expects a doctor to be interested in him, he ought to try to be interesting. When he shows nothing but a greediness for care, nothing but the coarser forms of anxiety, it's only natural for the physician to feel an aversion. There is an etiquette to being sick.
I wouldn't demand a lot of my doctor's time; I just wish he would brood on my situation for perhaps five minutes, that he would give me his whole mind just once. I would like to think of him as going through my character, as he goes through my flesh, to get at my illness, for each man is ill in his own way. Proust complained that his physician did not allow for his having read Shakespeare. I have a wistful desire for my relation to my doctor to be beautiful - but I don't know how this can be brought about. Though I see us framed in an epiphany, I can't make out the content.
Just as he orders blood tests and bone scans of my body, I'd like my doctor to scan me, to grope for my spirit as well as my prostate. While he inevitably feels superior to me because he is the doctor and I am the patient, I'd like him to know that I feel superior to him too, that he is my patient also and I have my diagnosis of him. There should be a place where our respective superiorities could meet and frolic together.
Since technology deprives me of the intimacy of my illness, makes it not mine but something that belongs to science, I wish my doctor could somehow restore it to me and make it personal again. When my father's father died in the French Quarter of New Orleans 60 years ago, the popularly accepted story was that on a humid night in mid-August, he had eaten a dozen bananas and then taken a cold bath. He was a man of 87 whose life had been a strenuous assertion of his appetites, and this explanation suited him, just as it suited his friends in the French Quarter. It would be more satisfying to me, it would allow me to feel that I owned my illness, if my urologist were to say, ''You know, you've beat the hell out of this prostate of yours. It looks like a worn-out baseball.'' Nobody wants an anonymous illness. I'd much rather think that I brought it on myself than that it was a mere accident of nature.
It is only natural for a patient to feel some dismay at the changes brought about in his body by illness, and I wonder whether an innovative doctor - again, like Oliver Sacks - couldn't find a way to reconceptualize this situation. If only the patient could be allowed to see his illness not so much as a failure of his body as a natural consumption of it. Any reconciling idea would do. The doctor could say, ''You've spent your self unselfishly, like a philanthropist who gives all his money away.'' If the patient could feel that he has earned his illness, that his sickness represents the decadence that follows a great flowering, he might look upon the ruin of his body as tourists look upon the ruins of antiquity. (Of course I'm offering these suggestions playfully, as experiments in thinking about medicine.) Physicians have been taught in medical school that they must keep the patient at a distance because there isn't time to accommodate his personality, or because if the doctor becomes ''involved'' in the patient's predicament, the emotional burden will be too great. As I've suggested, it doesn't take much time to make good contact, but beyond that, the emotional burden of avoiding the patient may be much harder on the doctor than he imagines. It may be this that sometimes makes him complain of feeling harassed. The patient's unanswered questions will always thunder in his stethoscope. A doctor's job would be so much more interesting and satisfying if he would occasionally let himself plunge into the patient, if he could lose his own fear of falling.
Applying to other friends, following new recommendations, I found another urologist. He's highly regarded in his field, and he inspired such confidence in me that my cancer immediately went into remission. My only regret is that he doesn't talk very much - and when he does, he sounds like everybody else. His brilliance has no voice - at least not when he's with me. There's a paradox here at the heart of medicine, because a doctor, like a writer, must have a voice of his own, something that conveys the timbre, the rhythm, the diction and the music of his humanity, that compensates us for all the speechless machines. When a doctor makes a difficult diagnosis, it is not his medical knowledge only that determines it, but a voice in his head. Such a diagnosis depends as much on inspiration as art does. Whether he wants to be or not, the doctor is a storyteller, and he can turn our lives into good or bad stories, regardless of the diagnosis. If my doctor would allow me, I would be glad to help him here, to take him on as my patient.
Although I hope to live for a while, my urologist is young, and I see us as joined till death do us part. Perhaps later, when he is older, he'll have learned how to converse. Astute as he is, he doesn't yet understand that all cures are partly ''talking cures.'' Every patient needs mouth-to-mouth resusitation, for talk is the kiss of life.
Yet it's too easy to accuse the doctor, to blame the absence of natural talk on him. It's also true that some of what the patient asks is ineffable. Even a doctor like Chekhov would be hard put to answer him. For example, I would like to discuss my prostate with my urologist not as a diseased organ but as a philosopher's stone. Every patient invites the doctor to combine the role of the priest, the philosopher, the poet, the scholar. He expects the doctor to evaluate his entire life, like a biographer.
Of course, a physician may reasonably ask: ''But what am I supposed to say? All I can tell the patient is the facts, if there are any facts.'' But this is not quite true. The doctor's answer to his patient is yet to be born. It will come naturally - or at first unnaturally - from the intersecting of the patient's needs with the physician's as yet untried imagination. Just as a mother ushers her child into the world, so the doctor must usher the patient out of the ordinary world into whatever place awaits him. The physician is the patient's only familiar in a foreign country.
To help the doctor reach the patient, and the patient to reach the doctor, the mood of the hospital might have to be modified. It might be less like a laboratory and more like a theater, which would be only fitting, since no place contains more drama. The laboratory atmosphere can probably be traced back to the idea of asepsis, to the avoidance of contagion. Originally, the patient was protected by the sterility of the hospital. Only the sterility went too far: It sterilized the doctor's thinking. It sterilized the patient's entire experience in the hospital. It sterilized the very notion of illness to the point where we can't bring our soiled thoughts to bear on it. But the sick man needs the contagion of life.
Not every patient can be saved, but his illness may be eased by the way the doctor responds to him - and in responding to him, the doctor may save himself. But first he must become a student again; he has to dissect the cadaver of his professional persona; he must see that his silence and neutrality are unnatural. It may be necessary to give up some of his authority in exchange for his humanity, but as the old family doctors knew, this is not a bad bargain. In learning to talk to his patients, the doctor may talk himself back into loving his work. He has little to lose and much to gain by letting the sick man into his heart. If he does, they can share, as few others can, the wonder, terror and exaltation of being on the edge of being, between the natural and the supernatural.
Westminister peace protester dies - RIP
Anti-War Campaigner Haw Loses Cancer Battle
.Veteran anti-war campaigner Brian Haw - who spent years living in a tent opposite the Houses of Parliament - has died after a long battle against cancer.
A statement by his family on brianhaw.tv, said: "It is with deepest regret that I inform you that our father, Brian, passed away this morning.
"As you know he was battling lung cancer, and was having treatment in Germany.
"He left us in his sleep and in no pain, after a long, hard fight."
Mr Haw, who was 62, had been battling for his right to remain living in a tent in Parliament Square.
He had been stationed in the square for 10 years, and had fought off a series of legal objections to his presence there.
The latest saw the Greater London Authority get him and his supporters thrown off the grass area at the centre of the square.
Later this year Westminster Council will attempt to get the camp moved off the pavement, which could see it removed permanently.
Mr Haw, began his round-the-clock protest opposite the Houses of Parliament against the UK's policy in Iraq and elsewhere on June 2, 2001.
It began as an angry response to economic sanctions and British and American bombing raids on Iraq.
But the scope widened after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington DC, and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that followed.
Mr Haw's tent and ragtag collection of horrific pictures of war victims and hand-written posters with slogans like "baby killers" was a familiar sight in the square.
Civil rights campaigners got behind him as he saw off various attempts to force him to move.
In November 2004, ministers announced provisions in the Serious Organised Crime and Police Bill that could have seen him removed from Parliament Square.
Initially, the High Court ruled Mr Haw's protest was not covered by the Act because it started before the new law came into effect.
But the case was taken to the Court of Appeal which, in May 2006, ruled he would have to apply to the police under the Act for permission to continue his protest.
Fellow members of the Parliament Square Peace Campaign said the authorities "should forever be ashamed of their disgraceful behaviour towards Brian".
.
.Veteran anti-war campaigner Brian Haw - who spent years living in a tent opposite the Houses of Parliament - has died after a long battle against cancer.
A statement by his family on brianhaw.tv, said: "It is with deepest regret that I inform you that our father, Brian, passed away this morning.
"As you know he was battling lung cancer, and was having treatment in Germany.
"He left us in his sleep and in no pain, after a long, hard fight."
Mr Haw, who was 62, had been battling for his right to remain living in a tent in Parliament Square.
He had been stationed in the square for 10 years, and had fought off a series of legal objections to his presence there.
The latest saw the Greater London Authority get him and his supporters thrown off the grass area at the centre of the square.
Later this year Westminster Council will attempt to get the camp moved off the pavement, which could see it removed permanently.
Mr Haw, began his round-the-clock protest opposite the Houses of Parliament against the UK's policy in Iraq and elsewhere on June 2, 2001.
It began as an angry response to economic sanctions and British and American bombing raids on Iraq.
But the scope widened after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington DC, and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that followed.
Mr Haw's tent and ragtag collection of horrific pictures of war victims and hand-written posters with slogans like "baby killers" was a familiar sight in the square.
Civil rights campaigners got behind him as he saw off various attempts to force him to move.
In November 2004, ministers announced provisions in the Serious Organised Crime and Police Bill that could have seen him removed from Parliament Square.
Initially, the High Court ruled Mr Haw's protest was not covered by the Act because it started before the new law came into effect.
But the case was taken to the Court of Appeal which, in May 2006, ruled he would have to apply to the police under the Act for permission to continue his protest.
Fellow members of the Parliament Square Peace Campaign said the authorities "should forever be ashamed of their disgraceful behaviour towards Brian".
.
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Film: Koudak va fereshteh (Child and Angel)
2009, 95 mins, Iranian feature.
Director : Masoud Naghashzadeh.
Producer : Hassan Kalami.
Set in a town in southern Iran in the summer of 1980, the film follows the experiences of a school girl as was descends, and sets in. A carefully and sensitively told story.
16th International Children's Film Festival India page 3 of the document
SCHLINGEL International Film Festival - 2009 Cinestar Youth Film Award
Profile from the Schlingel archive - in German
... and translated into english, courtesy of google translate. Somewhat cumbersome translation unfortunately.
Nominated for best film editing in 27th Fajr International Film Festival
Director : Masoud Naghashzadeh.
Producer : Hassan Kalami.
Set in a town in southern Iran in the summer of 1980, the film follows the experiences of a school girl as was descends, and sets in. A carefully and sensitively told story.
16th International Children's Film Festival India page 3 of the document
SCHLINGEL International Film Festival - 2009 Cinestar Youth Film Award
Profile from the Schlingel archive - in German
... and translated into english, courtesy of google translate. Somewhat cumbersome translation unfortunately.
Nominated for best film editing in 27th Fajr International Film Festival
Friday, June 03, 2011
Poet arrested
The Independant
Locked up for reading a poem
Ayat al-Gormezi, the woman who symbolises Bahrain's fight for freedom
By Patrick Cockburn
Thursday, 2 June 2011
Bahrain's security forces are increasingly targeting women in their campaign against pro-democracy protesters despite yesterday lifting martial law in the island kingdom.
Ayat al-Gormezi, 20, a poet and student arrested two months ago after reading out a poem at a pro-democracy rally, is due to go on trial today before a military tribunal, her mother said. Ayat was forced to turn herself in when masked policemen threatened to kill her brothers unless she did so.
She has not been seen since her arrest, though her mother did talk to her once by phone and Ayat said that she had been forced to sign a false confession. Her mother has since been told that her daughter has been in a military hospital after being tortured.
"We are the people who will kill humiliation and assassinate misery," a film captures Ayat telling a cheering crowd of protesters in Pearl Square in February. "We are the people who will destroy the foundation of injustice." She addresses King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa directly and says to him: "Don't you hear their cries, don't you hear their screams?" As she finishes, the crowd shouts: "Down with Hamad."
Ayat's call for change was no more radical than that heard in the streets of Tunis, Cairo and Benghazi at about the same time. But her reference to the king might explain the fury shown by the Bahraini security forces who, going by photographs of the scene, smashed up her bedroom when they raided her house and could not find her.
There are signs that Bahraini police, riot police and special security are detaining and mistreating more and more women. Many are held incommunicado, forced to sign confessions or threatened with rape, according to Bahraini human rights groups.
Bahrain is the first country affected by the Arab Spring where women have been singled out as targets for repression. Human rights groups say that hundreds have been arrested. Many women complain of being severely beaten while in custody. One woman journalist was beaten so badly that she could not walk.
A woman doctor, who was later released but may be charged, says she was threatened with rape. She told Reuters news agency that the police said: "We are 14 guys in this room, do you know what we can do to you? It's the emergency law [martial law] and we are free to do what we want."
The ending of martial law and a call for dialogue from King Hamad appear to be part of a campaign to show that normal life is returning to Bahrain. The Bahraini government is eager to host the Formula One motor race, which was postponed from earlier in the year, but may be rescheduled to take place in Bahrain by the sports governing body meeting in Barcelona tomorrow.
Despite the lifting of martial law, imposed on 15 March, there is no sign of repression easing. Some 600 people are still detained, at least 2,000 have been sacked, and some 27 mosques of the Shia, who make up 70 per cent of the population, have been bulldozed.
The protests started on 14 February in emulation of events in Egypt and Tunisia with a campaign for political reform, a central demand being civil and political equality for the majority Shia. The al-Khalifa royal family and the ruling class in Bahrain are Sunni.
The targeting of women by the security forces may, like the destruction of mosques, have the broader aim of demonstrating to the Shia community that the Sunni elite will show no restraint in preventing the Shia winning political power. Shia leaders complain that the state-controlled media is continuing to pump out sectarian anti-Shia propaganda.
The government is eager to show that Bahrain can return to being an untroubled business and tourist hub for the Gulf. Having the Formula One race rescheduled to take place on the island later this year would be an important success in this direction.
The New York based Human Rights Watch has written to the Federation Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA), saying that the race would take place in an environment of unrelenting "punitive retribution" against pro-democracy protesters.
If the race does go ahead it will be without a quarter of the staff of the Bahrain International Circuit, the host organisation, who have been arrested, including two senior staff. Most have been sacked or suspended, accused of approving of the postponement of the Formula One event earlier in the year.
The government has been detaining and beating local reporters. The one international journalist based permanently in Bahrain was ordered out this month. Even foreign correspondents with entry visas have been denied entry when they arrive in Bahrain.
Profile: Ayat al-Gormezi
Ayat al-Gormezi, a 20-year-old poet and student at the Faculty of Teachers in Bahrain, was arrested on 30 March for reciting a poem critical of the government during the pro-democracy protests in Pearl Square, the main gathering place for demonstrators, in February. She was forced to give herself up after police raided her parents' house and made four of Ayat's brothers lie on the floor at gunpoint. She was not there at the time. One policeman shouted at their father to "tell us where Ayat is or we will kill each of your sons in front of your eyes".
Masked police and special riot police later took Ayat away telling her mother that her daughter would be interrogated. Her mother was told to pick up her daughter from Al-Howra police station, but has not seen her since her arrest. She did speak to her once on the phone when Ayat told her that she had been forced to sign a false confession. Her mother has been told confidentially that Ayat is in a military hospital as a result of injuries inflicted when she was tortured.
Locked up for reading a poem
Ayat al-Gormezi, the woman who symbolises Bahrain's fight for freedom
By Patrick Cockburn
Thursday, 2 June 2011
Bahrain's security forces are increasingly targeting women in their campaign against pro-democracy protesters despite yesterday lifting martial law in the island kingdom.
Ayat al-Gormezi, 20, a poet and student arrested two months ago after reading out a poem at a pro-democracy rally, is due to go on trial today before a military tribunal, her mother said. Ayat was forced to turn herself in when masked policemen threatened to kill her brothers unless she did so.
She has not been seen since her arrest, though her mother did talk to her once by phone and Ayat said that she had been forced to sign a false confession. Her mother has since been told that her daughter has been in a military hospital after being tortured.
"We are the people who will kill humiliation and assassinate misery," a film captures Ayat telling a cheering crowd of protesters in Pearl Square in February. "We are the people who will destroy the foundation of injustice." She addresses King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa directly and says to him: "Don't you hear their cries, don't you hear their screams?" As she finishes, the crowd shouts: "Down with Hamad."
Ayat's call for change was no more radical than that heard in the streets of Tunis, Cairo and Benghazi at about the same time. But her reference to the king might explain the fury shown by the Bahraini security forces who, going by photographs of the scene, smashed up her bedroom when they raided her house and could not find her.
There are signs that Bahraini police, riot police and special security are detaining and mistreating more and more women. Many are held incommunicado, forced to sign confessions or threatened with rape, according to Bahraini human rights groups.
Bahrain is the first country affected by the Arab Spring where women have been singled out as targets for repression. Human rights groups say that hundreds have been arrested. Many women complain of being severely beaten while in custody. One woman journalist was beaten so badly that she could not walk.
A woman doctor, who was later released but may be charged, says she was threatened with rape. She told Reuters news agency that the police said: "We are 14 guys in this room, do you know what we can do to you? It's the emergency law [martial law] and we are free to do what we want."
The ending of martial law and a call for dialogue from King Hamad appear to be part of a campaign to show that normal life is returning to Bahrain. The Bahraini government is eager to host the Formula One motor race, which was postponed from earlier in the year, but may be rescheduled to take place in Bahrain by the sports governing body meeting in Barcelona tomorrow.
Despite the lifting of martial law, imposed on 15 March, there is no sign of repression easing. Some 600 people are still detained, at least 2,000 have been sacked, and some 27 mosques of the Shia, who make up 70 per cent of the population, have been bulldozed.
The protests started on 14 February in emulation of events in Egypt and Tunisia with a campaign for political reform, a central demand being civil and political equality for the majority Shia. The al-Khalifa royal family and the ruling class in Bahrain are Sunni.
The targeting of women by the security forces may, like the destruction of mosques, have the broader aim of demonstrating to the Shia community that the Sunni elite will show no restraint in preventing the Shia winning political power. Shia leaders complain that the state-controlled media is continuing to pump out sectarian anti-Shia propaganda.
The government is eager to show that Bahrain can return to being an untroubled business and tourist hub for the Gulf. Having the Formula One race rescheduled to take place on the island later this year would be an important success in this direction.
The New York based Human Rights Watch has written to the Federation Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA), saying that the race would take place in an environment of unrelenting "punitive retribution" against pro-democracy protesters.
If the race does go ahead it will be without a quarter of the staff of the Bahrain International Circuit, the host organisation, who have been arrested, including two senior staff. Most have been sacked or suspended, accused of approving of the postponement of the Formula One event earlier in the year.
The government has been detaining and beating local reporters. The one international journalist based permanently in Bahrain was ordered out this month. Even foreign correspondents with entry visas have been denied entry when they arrive in Bahrain.
Profile: Ayat al-Gormezi
Ayat al-Gormezi, a 20-year-old poet and student at the Faculty of Teachers in Bahrain, was arrested on 30 March for reciting a poem critical of the government during the pro-democracy protests in Pearl Square, the main gathering place for demonstrators, in February. She was forced to give herself up after police raided her parents' house and made four of Ayat's brothers lie on the floor at gunpoint. She was not there at the time. One policeman shouted at their father to "tell us where Ayat is or we will kill each of your sons in front of your eyes".
Masked police and special riot police later took Ayat away telling her mother that her daughter would be interrogated. Her mother was told to pick up her daughter from Al-Howra police station, but has not seen her since her arrest. She did speak to her once on the phone when Ayat told her that she had been forced to sign a false confession. Her mother has been told confidentially that Ayat is in a military hospital as a result of injuries inflicted when she was tortured.
Sunday, May 01, 2011
An article on an inspirational woman...
From the Guardian
The Guardian Profile: Helen Bamber
Small wonder
As a teenager, she volunteered to help concentration camp survivors and the experience changed her life. Today she works with victims of torture and helps them overcome unimaginable horrors. Simon Hattenstone on the tireless compassion of an 'ordinary woman with extraordinary talents'
Saturday 11 March 2000
In 1945 Helen Bamber made the decision that was to shape her life. She was 19 years old, still a girl, when she told her parents that she was going to Belsen with the Jewish Relief Unit. She didn't quite know why she felt compelled to see, to smell, to understand the dreadful aftermath of Nazism, but she knew she had to. It was in Germany that Bamber decided the world was divided into two camps: bystanders and witnesses. Bystanders see what they want, turn away when it suits them, deny the evidence if necessary. Witnesses have a duty to observe and report truthfully.
Now, 55 years on, Bamber still divides the world into bystanders and witnesses. As founder and director of the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, she has borne witness to myriad horror stories. At the foundation, she works as a psychotherapist, listening to clients for as long as they wish or can bear to talk. And when she's not listening, she is tending the foundation's ever expanding bureaucracy or travelling the world to discover the most repugnant details of the world's most oppressive regimes. The title of Neil Belton's recent biography of her, The Good Listener (Phoenix, £7.99), is a perfect summation of her life and work: understated, to the point, practical - rather like the foundation itself.
"Helen is not an extraordinary person in many respects," says Sherman Carroll, her director of public affairs at the foundation. "She's not an intellectual, she's not terribly well educated with a fancy degree, she's not a lawyer, not a doctor. She's an ordinary woman who has committed her life to good works. So in that sense she's amazing ... but ordinary."
John McCarthy, the broadcaster and former hostage, remembers being as intrigued as he was impressed the first time he met her. "She's tiny. She'll come to slightly above your waist," he says. "Yet as you talk to her you realise there's a great deal of not just energy but power. She is an interesting mix - so caring and compassionate, but also direct and determined."
When you enter the foundation you walk past a room full of disparate people, of all colours and nationalities. Many faces are marked with the lines and scars of struggle. One woman is laughing with a friend; one man holds the weight of his head - the world - in his hands; a couple of children run about the waiting room. You can't help wondering about their history. Where are they from? How did they offend their home state? Were they psychologically tortured, starved, beaten, locked in solitary? Can they ever be happy again?
Helen Bamber, 74, seems even tinier than John McCarthy suggests. She's wearing a glistening white shirt that is buried inside a smart blue cardigan which trails down to her ankles. Her lips are glossed, her nails varnished in a transparent silver. Any number of bracelets dance up her arms. The foundation has just heard that General Pinochet will be returned to Chile, and she can't hide her despondency. She questions the value of the British medical reports and says she would be happy if the Chilean authorities disregarded them .
She speaks softly and slowly, slightly pedantically. It's a lovely voice - ebbing and flowing, massaging. She gestures emphatically as she talks, and when this is pointed out she is a little embarrassed and defensive. "So many of my clients put their hand on their heart when they want to express something. It's a language of the body."
A conversation with Bamber soon turns to Belsen. She talks about how inexperienced she was, how she had to learn quickly. "I realised after a time that I couldn't take away their suffering, or their images or their losses, or their terrible sense of unresolved grief. People would tell you their story and it would spill out like a kind of vomit. They would go on talking, talking, talking ..." You can hear their despair in her voice. "And what they were telling you was sometimes quite dreadful. After a while I began to realise the most important role for me there was to bear witness. Bearing witness to the vulnerability of humanity."
She stops herself. "It sounds a very pompous phrase doesn't it? But the evil that can be done to human beings is something that I suppose has dominated my life."
Did her parents support her when she went to Germany? "My father accepted it, almost with a shrug of resignation. I think it was something about repaying a debt. I was aware that if the Nazis had succceeded in invading England, we would have been the victims."
Bamber grew up with a sense of persecution. Her father, Louis Balmuth, was born in New York, but his family returned to the Poland of the pogroms before emigrating to England in 1895 when he was nine. He was in his late 30s when he married Marie Bader, who had been born in Britain of Polish extraction. Bamber's first memories are of a huge house in north London's Amhurst Park that she shared with her extended family, a "splendid house" with its own billiards room.
Louis was an accountant by day and a philosopher/scribbler/ mathematician by night. Marie was a singer and pianist who hoped that Helen would realise the dreams she had had for herself and become a celebrated performer. The house was owned by the mysterious Uncle Michael, who had made a fortune as a "merchant", though what he sold no one seemed to know. The Balmuths were clever, multilingual and argumentative, and unsympathetic to the ways and needs of children. Before long, the Depression swallowed up Michael's money, and Helen and her parents found themselves relegated to a much smaller home in nearby Stamford Hill.
Fascism and its attendant fears were a backdrop to daily life. An educated pessimist, Louis Balmuth seemed to regard extermination as an inevitability. As the second world war scoured Europe, he listened to broadcasts by Goebbels, read young Helen extracts from Hitler's treatise Mein Kampf, and told her exactly what the Nazi leader was doing and where it would all end. Balmuth lived petrified by the past and in fear of the future.
Bamber had initially been sent to a private Jewish school in London. But when her parents began to struggle financially she was switched to a multi-denominational primary, from where she won a scholarship to high school in Tottenham. This is where a teacher bawled her out for not knowing the second verse of the national anthem and told her that of all parents, the parents of Jewish children had a particular duty to make sure their children knew the anthem.
She says her real education happened at home in early childhood. Bamber was a sick girl who spent much of her childhood bedridden with an illness that was probably TB. Relatives and refugee friends of her parents used to visit her, talk to her as if she were an adult and deliver bedside chats that could go on for days. She recalls a man who sat by her side explaining the first world war, and how the punitive settlement led to the rise of Hitler.
Bamber didn't go to Belsen with a sense of mission, but with foreboding. "I felt I had to face something, the fear in myself. I had to understand other people's fear, and I had to understand something about overcoming fear_ living. How does one live with the knowledge of atrocity?"
Henry Lunzer, her boss in the Jewish Relief Unit, still thinks of her as a "lovely, vivacious little girl". She was also a natural organiser. "Helen just took charge of headquarters, administered the whole thing," says Lunzer. "It was amazing at that age. God only knows what made her so efficient!" When we talk about Lunzer, Bamber smiles abstractedly. He was "quite a guy", she says, "looked very handsome in uniform, but then everyone looked good in uniform". She pulls herself up abruptly: "That's a stupid thing to say."
Bamber founded the the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture in 1985. She had spent three decades campaigning for the human rights organisation Amnesty International, where she had started a group to help torture victims. Amnesty leaders decided that treating torture victims as well as campaigning against the regimes that abused them was too broad a remit, which spurred her to start the foundation. Today there are 85 paid staff and 110 volunteers.
Although never formally trained, Bamber says she has no qualms about calling herself a psychotherapist - she has earned the title, having trained on the job for most of her life. Sheila Melzak, head of child and adolescent psychotherapy, at the foundation says she doesn't know how Bamber does it, but somehow people just open up to her. "She's very moth erly, maternal, but not in a pampering way. All sorts of people feel safe with her, especially those who have missed out on parenting. They'll talk to her about the most private experiences." She says no level of training could equip someone with this skill, and suggests that it is down to Bamber's own childhood experiences.
"I do think it's because of her own lack of parenting in her childhood. Her father was passionate about human rights. Fixated. So she was taught from a very early age about repression and about how other people may challenge that. But as parents they were not particularly good at parenting."
Bamber believes torture is a political act, but she says she must be careful here - the foundation is a charity, and it is important for it not to be perceived as politically motivated. "For me, torture is about total helplessness and total power, the deliberate destruction of people. It often can be at the instigation of the government, carried out by their henchmen. It is about the destruction of human beings, often while keeping them alive. Torture has been described as the attempt to kill a person without their dying."
The foundation exists to help people like Luis Muñoz who was tortured by Pinochet's henchmen. In 1974 his wife, a journalist who had written a book about Chile's ruling class, disappeared and he never saw her again. He was 26, she was 23. Muñoz was then thrown into a torture centre. He was beaten, kicked, forced to hang by his arms. His torturers attached electrodes to his mouth, his ears his eyes, his penis, his anus and his toes. They applied a soldering iron to his testicles. "They thought I was going to die, but they didn't want me dead yet, so they stopped the shock treatment and put me in a wooden box and deprived me of sleep, food and hygiene. There was a little hole for ventilation. They put me in there to drive me mad."
After three months in the torture centre, he was put in solitary confinement for another couple of months before being transferred to a concentration camp. On the way, the guards tormented him with a mock execution. Muñoz pleaded with them to kill him. "I thought I'd be better off dead, I'd given up."
When he arrived in Britain in 1977 he suffered depression, panic attacks and guilt, in addition to considerable physical pain. He first met Bamber when he and fellow Chilean refugees were on a 16-day hunger strike protesting against Pinochet. He discovered that Bamber, like him, lived in London's Muswell Hill, and after that they kept bumping into each other on the 43 bus. "She was very concerned about me. She knew more about my physical and mental health than I did at the time." Bamber told him he looked terrible, broken, that he needed help. "She doesn't let go. You can't evade her. She's very persistent. If you keep stuff from her, she won't give up."
He started going to Bamber for therapy. "For a long time I thought that if you talk about what happened to you, you'll hurt the person; you think it's too much for anyone else to bear. But Helen can contain you. She enables you to cry."
Luis Muñoz is what Bamber would call a creative survivor. She says there is so much rubbish talked about survivors and victims, as if survival itself is enough. But people have to be shown how to live again. She cites the strongest she found at Belsen - those who formed political committees, held religious meetings, started a theatre, forced themselves into being more than helpless victims. In a strange way the culture that grew out of concentration camps like Belsen become a template for the foundation. It is not simply a clinic where victims come to unveil themselves of their histories, but a cultural centre with allotments, holiday clubs, chess groups and drawing classes.
Creative survival is also about allowing people to grieve. Bamber talks about the Jews who came to Britain after the Holocaust and found themselves in a new world where they had to put their past behind them because it was not acknowledged, a world where they had to make do and get on. Many Jewish people did get on, but without an emotional release some imploded.
"That is something I feel so strongly about here. How do you retrieve their memory of somebody so you can bury them in an appropriate way, and not be fixed on their grotesque way of dying? I think many of us have found ways of sitting with people and retrieving that young man or woman by talking about the way they looked, the way they dressed, the way they smoked, and their irritating ways. You can bring the person back as they were in the best of memories, and you then see it's time to bury them." She apologises for her bluntness.
Soon after returning from Belsen she married Rudi Bamberger, who changed his named to the more British Bamber. He had escaped from Germany and the thugs who destroyed his parents' house and beat his father to death with fists and truncheons. There was tenderness and love in their relationship, but it was doomed. Like her father, Rudi was a terminal pessimist. He was drowning in his own darkness, and Bamber couldn't cope. Although her father had been more articulate about his helplessness, they shared the same quietness, the sense of having withdrawn from life. Living with victims is a very different matter to working with them, says Bamber. They divorced after 23 years together.
"It's not that one doesn't have affections or love, but very often somebody who has survived becomes disassociated from themselves as well as other people." She is almost whispering. "That was quite hard to live with - someone who was cut off from communication. You couldn't have spontaneity or celebration."
She says it would have been easier to divorce if they had simply not liked each other. "I was very sad for a long time. I think I'm still very sad." For many years she has lived by herself in Muswell Hill. Life was tough after they split up. She worked as a medical secretary at St George's hospital in east London, but was always broke. Their two sons Jonathan (now a physicist), and David (a sculptor whose work often alludes to the Holocaust), attended separate schools, she didn't have a car, the house they lived in was condemned.
John Rundle, a doctor who has known Bamber for 30 years and now works at the foundation, thinks struggle has made her what she is today. "If you're capable of dealing with the sorts of people we get here I don't think you could come from a jolly-hockey-sticks, wonderfully protective background. Helen has been fighting adversity ever since she was at Belsen. I don't think life has left her much room for personal comforts."
In some ways the breakdown of her marriage was liberating. Because she was short of money she rented rooms to foreign students. Suddenly her morose, dilapidated home was transformed by youth and optimism. "I suppose I began to laugh a lot when they were around. We had fun, we danced, we cooked, I used to book the entire launderette on a Sunday afternoon. There were six or seven students at a time, every nationality under the sun, and there would be great battles or debates about the virtues of eating rhinoceros. There hadn't been much laughter in my parents' home or in my married life."
Bamber has a lovely girlish giggle, and can extract humour from the grimmest situations. She says the ability to laugh is terribly important, especially in someone so prone to crying. Does she cry at work? "No. I can listen to the most appalling stories that people tell me, I can bear it." She says the one thing she can't cope with is hearing people sing. "We used to hold a music group downstairs. And sometimes there would be singing, and this I could hardly bear. We had a terribly sad woman from Iran who used to sit there and do very little, and then she sang, and I had to leave the room. There's something about the human voice; seeing what capacity people have for creativity and what's denied them. Perhaps it's about what people might be if left alone."
Bamber has a famously tough exterior - the woman who gets things done. When asked for five words to describe his mother, Jonathan Bamber chooses: "Driven, focused, dedicated, slightly obsessive . . . She has an unimaginable amount of energy, disappearing off to Uganda, to Kosovo, to the West Bank, all of the most horrible, devastated places in the world. I am exactly half her age and I would struggle to maintain that schedule." Bamber is quietly proud of what she is achieving at her age. She mentions a few times that she will be 75 in May.
Monday to Friday she deals with the bureaucracy, at the weekend she sees clients. Her biographer Neil Belton says: "She works harder than anybody else at the foundation. She is obsessive. It can drive people mad." Sheila Melzak says that she is finally learning to let go a bit, to delegate, though she's still reluctant to cede control. . "But recently, more and more, I've seen she can have fun."
Bamber says she understands why she puts up a tough front, but doesn't like it. She talks about how she felt sorry for her parents, their sense of failure and unhappiness, and how she never wanted anyone to feel sorry for her. "I wanted to see myself as a very strong person not showing vulnerability, and I don't think this is helpful to people. It can be very irritating, to put it mildly. I get irritated with myself, so it's not surprising others do."
John Rundle says she is much more vulnerable than she lets on. "I think there are times when she is very upset by the intolerable experiences people go through." It has been suggested there is a masochistic streak in Bamber that forces her to go on, but Rundle disagrees. "I don't think it's obsessional or pathological. I think it's that she's been challenged. She knows the evil of mankind, and she won't put up with it. It's a crusade if you like. But it's not done as a zealot, it's done as a human being."
While much of Bamber's early middle age was devoted to the domestic, bringing up Jonathan and David, she also managed to hold down a series of demanding jobs - acting almoner (social worker) at Middlesex Hospital, administrator at the Middlesex and personal assistant to the brilliant orthopaedic surgeon Sir Herbert Seddon. For many years she couldn't see a pattern to her life. It's only recently that she has begun to realise it has all been of a piece - from her father; to Belsen; to Rudi, her husband; to Amnesty; to the foundation.
There was also her work with Dr Maurice Pappworth, a much-loved and vilified campaigner against the abuses that go on in the name of medical experimentation. Bamber met Pappworth at St George's where he was a consultant. Bamber would help him with his administration, and they would talk in his rooms for hours about the overuse of drugs, unnecessary surgery, the Nazi doctors' malign experimentation. Bamber says Pappworth educated her about medical ethics. "He was as preoccupied as I was with this question of total power, total helplessness." Together they compiled an archive of abuses. John Rundle, who was taught by Pappworth, describes him as the greatest doctor he met. "Like a lot of very clever people he was succinct and simple because he grasped all the underlying principles, and Helen's very much the same. She tends to be a person of few words, straight to the point."
Bamber is fidgeting again, desperate to get back to work. "It's like sitting here when Rome is burning." The therapists at the foundation see their own therapists, or supervisors, to make sure they are still up to the job. Her supervisor gives her a hard time for over-working. Is she right? "I don't think I'm terribly good at taking care of myself." Perhaps work is her way of looking after herself? "I think it is. I think it gives me a lot of hope, a lot of personal help. I get a lot back from the people we treat in terms of seeing them grow and develop and overcome."
Neil Belton talks about the paradox of the carer. "You can get a lot of satisfaction from being an omnipotent carer. There's a little bit of God that attaches to it, the way people come to rely on her. She is aware of that element."
Does she think there is a danger of playing God? She doesn't answer directly. "You have to be clear that you have tremendous limitations in this work; you know you're going to lose some along the line."
Belton spent three years writing The Good Listener. He says: "Helen remains an enigma to me. Most activists I've known don't retain the humour and human sympathy she brings to her work, the ability to focus on individuals. There's a side that's just the grimly dedicated campaigner, but another that brings a great deal of joy and light."
Earlier this year, the government introduced its immigration and asylum act, which has resulted in asylum seekers living off vouchers instead of real money while being banned from earning their own. Families have been dispersed across the country. "At least when Jewish people came to Britain after the war, they were allowed to live in communities," says Bamber. "I feel so ashamed of the situation."
John McCarthy says: "She starts from the basic premise of right and wrong. You need a fair degree of anger to do her work." Bamber agrees. She says that anger can be a tremendous creative driving force, that without it none of the world's most pernicious regimes would have been defeated.
In an earlier conversation she had talked about her need for openness, the need to challenge her parents' generations who refused to admit to or share what they had been through. Out of nowhere, she says: "I know that my husband and I did pass on something about the secrecy to our children. I know we did try to protect them from the full knowledge of what had happened, and I don't know that I blame myself for that.
"When one of my sons was very young he asked me whether his grandfather had been shot, and I said 'yes', which was a lie, because he was beaten to death in front of his family. At what age do you say that to a child? I suppose I didn't want them to have the same knowledge that I had when I was growing up" - the knowledge she desperately sought out. Bamber never attempts to reconcile her contradictions.
She offers a cigarette from a dusty box. She likes seeing people smoke, she says: it reminds her of the war. She is stroking the hair of a beautifully dressed soft doll that Chilean clients have made to raise money. She is talking about the disappointments in her life; how this fiercely independent woman had always aspired to Sunday-lunch domesticity. "I never quite pulled it off. I didn't achieve the married life that I wanted, so there have been gaps and loneliness as well, yes."
We talk about how important Judaism has been to her. Yes, she says, but that doesn't make her a believer. "It's very curious because I'm always moved by other people's devotion. But I don't have that sense of devotion. I must believe in something." And for once she's struggling to make sense of herself. Slowly, diffidently the words form. "I suspect that it's believing that even though I see a great deal of evil, there's something very good to be retrieved from people."
Life at a glance
Born: London, May 1, 1925.
Education: Down Lanes Central School; part-time social science student, London School of Economics.
Married: 1947 Rudi Bamberger, divorced 1970.
Work: 1945 volunteer on one of first rehabilitation teams to enter Belsen concentration camp; senior case worker, Committee for the care of Children from Concentration Camps (1947-1954); almoner at St George's hospital east London (1956); founder member, National Association for the Welfare of Children in Hospital (1961); joined Amnesty 1961; founded Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture (1985).
Other positions: Advisory board, Gaza Community Mental Health; patron, Women Against Violence, Belfast.
Awards: European Woman of Achievement (1993), in recognition of work with survivors of repression and torture; OBE (1997).
The Guardian Profile: Helen Bamber
Small wonder
As a teenager, she volunteered to help concentration camp survivors and the experience changed her life. Today she works with victims of torture and helps them overcome unimaginable horrors. Simon Hattenstone on the tireless compassion of an 'ordinary woman with extraordinary talents'
Saturday 11 March 2000
In 1945 Helen Bamber made the decision that was to shape her life. She was 19 years old, still a girl, when she told her parents that she was going to Belsen with the Jewish Relief Unit. She didn't quite know why she felt compelled to see, to smell, to understand the dreadful aftermath of Nazism, but she knew she had to. It was in Germany that Bamber decided the world was divided into two camps: bystanders and witnesses. Bystanders see what they want, turn away when it suits them, deny the evidence if necessary. Witnesses have a duty to observe and report truthfully.
Now, 55 years on, Bamber still divides the world into bystanders and witnesses. As founder and director of the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, she has borne witness to myriad horror stories. At the foundation, she works as a psychotherapist, listening to clients for as long as they wish or can bear to talk. And when she's not listening, she is tending the foundation's ever expanding bureaucracy or travelling the world to discover the most repugnant details of the world's most oppressive regimes. The title of Neil Belton's recent biography of her, The Good Listener (Phoenix, £7.99), is a perfect summation of her life and work: understated, to the point, practical - rather like the foundation itself.
"Helen is not an extraordinary person in many respects," says Sherman Carroll, her director of public affairs at the foundation. "She's not an intellectual, she's not terribly well educated with a fancy degree, she's not a lawyer, not a doctor. She's an ordinary woman who has committed her life to good works. So in that sense she's amazing ... but ordinary."
John McCarthy, the broadcaster and former hostage, remembers being as intrigued as he was impressed the first time he met her. "She's tiny. She'll come to slightly above your waist," he says. "Yet as you talk to her you realise there's a great deal of not just energy but power. She is an interesting mix - so caring and compassionate, but also direct and determined."
When you enter the foundation you walk past a room full of disparate people, of all colours and nationalities. Many faces are marked with the lines and scars of struggle. One woman is laughing with a friend; one man holds the weight of his head - the world - in his hands; a couple of children run about the waiting room. You can't help wondering about their history. Where are they from? How did they offend their home state? Were they psychologically tortured, starved, beaten, locked in solitary? Can they ever be happy again?
Helen Bamber, 74, seems even tinier than John McCarthy suggests. She's wearing a glistening white shirt that is buried inside a smart blue cardigan which trails down to her ankles. Her lips are glossed, her nails varnished in a transparent silver. Any number of bracelets dance up her arms. The foundation has just heard that General Pinochet will be returned to Chile, and she can't hide her despondency. She questions the value of the British medical reports and says she would be happy if the Chilean authorities disregarded them .
She speaks softly and slowly, slightly pedantically. It's a lovely voice - ebbing and flowing, massaging. She gestures emphatically as she talks, and when this is pointed out she is a little embarrassed and defensive. "So many of my clients put their hand on their heart when they want to express something. It's a language of the body."
A conversation with Bamber soon turns to Belsen. She talks about how inexperienced she was, how she had to learn quickly. "I realised after a time that I couldn't take away their suffering, or their images or their losses, or their terrible sense of unresolved grief. People would tell you their story and it would spill out like a kind of vomit. They would go on talking, talking, talking ..." You can hear their despair in her voice. "And what they were telling you was sometimes quite dreadful. After a while I began to realise the most important role for me there was to bear witness. Bearing witness to the vulnerability of humanity."
She stops herself. "It sounds a very pompous phrase doesn't it? But the evil that can be done to human beings is something that I suppose has dominated my life."
Did her parents support her when she went to Germany? "My father accepted it, almost with a shrug of resignation. I think it was something about repaying a debt. I was aware that if the Nazis had succceeded in invading England, we would have been the victims."
Bamber grew up with a sense of persecution. Her father, Louis Balmuth, was born in New York, but his family returned to the Poland of the pogroms before emigrating to England in 1895 when he was nine. He was in his late 30s when he married Marie Bader, who had been born in Britain of Polish extraction. Bamber's first memories are of a huge house in north London's Amhurst Park that she shared with her extended family, a "splendid house" with its own billiards room.
Louis was an accountant by day and a philosopher/scribbler/ mathematician by night. Marie was a singer and pianist who hoped that Helen would realise the dreams she had had for herself and become a celebrated performer. The house was owned by the mysterious Uncle Michael, who had made a fortune as a "merchant", though what he sold no one seemed to know. The Balmuths were clever, multilingual and argumentative, and unsympathetic to the ways and needs of children. Before long, the Depression swallowed up Michael's money, and Helen and her parents found themselves relegated to a much smaller home in nearby Stamford Hill.
Fascism and its attendant fears were a backdrop to daily life. An educated pessimist, Louis Balmuth seemed to regard extermination as an inevitability. As the second world war scoured Europe, he listened to broadcasts by Goebbels, read young Helen extracts from Hitler's treatise Mein Kampf, and told her exactly what the Nazi leader was doing and where it would all end. Balmuth lived petrified by the past and in fear of the future.
Bamber had initially been sent to a private Jewish school in London. But when her parents began to struggle financially she was switched to a multi-denominational primary, from where she won a scholarship to high school in Tottenham. This is where a teacher bawled her out for not knowing the second verse of the national anthem and told her that of all parents, the parents of Jewish children had a particular duty to make sure their children knew the anthem.
She says her real education happened at home in early childhood. Bamber was a sick girl who spent much of her childhood bedridden with an illness that was probably TB. Relatives and refugee friends of her parents used to visit her, talk to her as if she were an adult and deliver bedside chats that could go on for days. She recalls a man who sat by her side explaining the first world war, and how the punitive settlement led to the rise of Hitler.
Bamber didn't go to Belsen with a sense of mission, but with foreboding. "I felt I had to face something, the fear in myself. I had to understand other people's fear, and I had to understand something about overcoming fear_ living. How does one live with the knowledge of atrocity?"
Henry Lunzer, her boss in the Jewish Relief Unit, still thinks of her as a "lovely, vivacious little girl". She was also a natural organiser. "Helen just took charge of headquarters, administered the whole thing," says Lunzer. "It was amazing at that age. God only knows what made her so efficient!" When we talk about Lunzer, Bamber smiles abstractedly. He was "quite a guy", she says, "looked very handsome in uniform, but then everyone looked good in uniform". She pulls herself up abruptly: "That's a stupid thing to say."
Bamber founded the the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture in 1985. She had spent three decades campaigning for the human rights organisation Amnesty International, where she had started a group to help torture victims. Amnesty leaders decided that treating torture victims as well as campaigning against the regimes that abused them was too broad a remit, which spurred her to start the foundation. Today there are 85 paid staff and 110 volunteers.
Although never formally trained, Bamber says she has no qualms about calling herself a psychotherapist - she has earned the title, having trained on the job for most of her life. Sheila Melzak, head of child and adolescent psychotherapy, at the foundation says she doesn't know how Bamber does it, but somehow people just open up to her. "She's very moth erly, maternal, but not in a pampering way. All sorts of people feel safe with her, especially those who have missed out on parenting. They'll talk to her about the most private experiences." She says no level of training could equip someone with this skill, and suggests that it is down to Bamber's own childhood experiences.
"I do think it's because of her own lack of parenting in her childhood. Her father was passionate about human rights. Fixated. So she was taught from a very early age about repression and about how other people may challenge that. But as parents they were not particularly good at parenting."
Bamber believes torture is a political act, but she says she must be careful here - the foundation is a charity, and it is important for it not to be perceived as politically motivated. "For me, torture is about total helplessness and total power, the deliberate destruction of people. It often can be at the instigation of the government, carried out by their henchmen. It is about the destruction of human beings, often while keeping them alive. Torture has been described as the attempt to kill a person without their dying."
The foundation exists to help people like Luis Muñoz who was tortured by Pinochet's henchmen. In 1974 his wife, a journalist who had written a book about Chile's ruling class, disappeared and he never saw her again. He was 26, she was 23. Muñoz was then thrown into a torture centre. He was beaten, kicked, forced to hang by his arms. His torturers attached electrodes to his mouth, his ears his eyes, his penis, his anus and his toes. They applied a soldering iron to his testicles. "They thought I was going to die, but they didn't want me dead yet, so they stopped the shock treatment and put me in a wooden box and deprived me of sleep, food and hygiene. There was a little hole for ventilation. They put me in there to drive me mad."
After three months in the torture centre, he was put in solitary confinement for another couple of months before being transferred to a concentration camp. On the way, the guards tormented him with a mock execution. Muñoz pleaded with them to kill him. "I thought I'd be better off dead, I'd given up."
When he arrived in Britain in 1977 he suffered depression, panic attacks and guilt, in addition to considerable physical pain. He first met Bamber when he and fellow Chilean refugees were on a 16-day hunger strike protesting against Pinochet. He discovered that Bamber, like him, lived in London's Muswell Hill, and after that they kept bumping into each other on the 43 bus. "She was very concerned about me. She knew more about my physical and mental health than I did at the time." Bamber told him he looked terrible, broken, that he needed help. "She doesn't let go. You can't evade her. She's very persistent. If you keep stuff from her, she won't give up."
He started going to Bamber for therapy. "For a long time I thought that if you talk about what happened to you, you'll hurt the person; you think it's too much for anyone else to bear. But Helen can contain you. She enables you to cry."
Luis Muñoz is what Bamber would call a creative survivor. She says there is so much rubbish talked about survivors and victims, as if survival itself is enough. But people have to be shown how to live again. She cites the strongest she found at Belsen - those who formed political committees, held religious meetings, started a theatre, forced themselves into being more than helpless victims. In a strange way the culture that grew out of concentration camps like Belsen become a template for the foundation. It is not simply a clinic where victims come to unveil themselves of their histories, but a cultural centre with allotments, holiday clubs, chess groups and drawing classes.
Creative survival is also about allowing people to grieve. Bamber talks about the Jews who came to Britain after the Holocaust and found themselves in a new world where they had to put their past behind them because it was not acknowledged, a world where they had to make do and get on. Many Jewish people did get on, but without an emotional release some imploded.
"That is something I feel so strongly about here. How do you retrieve their memory of somebody so you can bury them in an appropriate way, and not be fixed on their grotesque way of dying? I think many of us have found ways of sitting with people and retrieving that young man or woman by talking about the way they looked, the way they dressed, the way they smoked, and their irritating ways. You can bring the person back as they were in the best of memories, and you then see it's time to bury them." She apologises for her bluntness.
Soon after returning from Belsen she married Rudi Bamberger, who changed his named to the more British Bamber. He had escaped from Germany and the thugs who destroyed his parents' house and beat his father to death with fists and truncheons. There was tenderness and love in their relationship, but it was doomed. Like her father, Rudi was a terminal pessimist. He was drowning in his own darkness, and Bamber couldn't cope. Although her father had been more articulate about his helplessness, they shared the same quietness, the sense of having withdrawn from life. Living with victims is a very different matter to working with them, says Bamber. They divorced after 23 years together.
"It's not that one doesn't have affections or love, but very often somebody who has survived becomes disassociated from themselves as well as other people." She is almost whispering. "That was quite hard to live with - someone who was cut off from communication. You couldn't have spontaneity or celebration."
She says it would have been easier to divorce if they had simply not liked each other. "I was very sad for a long time. I think I'm still very sad." For many years she has lived by herself in Muswell Hill. Life was tough after they split up. She worked as a medical secretary at St George's hospital in east London, but was always broke. Their two sons Jonathan (now a physicist), and David (a sculptor whose work often alludes to the Holocaust), attended separate schools, she didn't have a car, the house they lived in was condemned.
John Rundle, a doctor who has known Bamber for 30 years and now works at the foundation, thinks struggle has made her what she is today. "If you're capable of dealing with the sorts of people we get here I don't think you could come from a jolly-hockey-sticks, wonderfully protective background. Helen has been fighting adversity ever since she was at Belsen. I don't think life has left her much room for personal comforts."
In some ways the breakdown of her marriage was liberating. Because she was short of money she rented rooms to foreign students. Suddenly her morose, dilapidated home was transformed by youth and optimism. "I suppose I began to laugh a lot when they were around. We had fun, we danced, we cooked, I used to book the entire launderette on a Sunday afternoon. There were six or seven students at a time, every nationality under the sun, and there would be great battles or debates about the virtues of eating rhinoceros. There hadn't been much laughter in my parents' home or in my married life."
Bamber has a lovely girlish giggle, and can extract humour from the grimmest situations. She says the ability to laugh is terribly important, especially in someone so prone to crying. Does she cry at work? "No. I can listen to the most appalling stories that people tell me, I can bear it." She says the one thing she can't cope with is hearing people sing. "We used to hold a music group downstairs. And sometimes there would be singing, and this I could hardly bear. We had a terribly sad woman from Iran who used to sit there and do very little, and then she sang, and I had to leave the room. There's something about the human voice; seeing what capacity people have for creativity and what's denied them. Perhaps it's about what people might be if left alone."
Bamber has a famously tough exterior - the woman who gets things done. When asked for five words to describe his mother, Jonathan Bamber chooses: "Driven, focused, dedicated, slightly obsessive . . . She has an unimaginable amount of energy, disappearing off to Uganda, to Kosovo, to the West Bank, all of the most horrible, devastated places in the world. I am exactly half her age and I would struggle to maintain that schedule." Bamber is quietly proud of what she is achieving at her age. She mentions a few times that she will be 75 in May.
Monday to Friday she deals with the bureaucracy, at the weekend she sees clients. Her biographer Neil Belton says: "She works harder than anybody else at the foundation. She is obsessive. It can drive people mad." Sheila Melzak says that she is finally learning to let go a bit, to delegate, though she's still reluctant to cede control. . "But recently, more and more, I've seen she can have fun."
Bamber says she understands why she puts up a tough front, but doesn't like it. She talks about how she felt sorry for her parents, their sense of failure and unhappiness, and how she never wanted anyone to feel sorry for her. "I wanted to see myself as a very strong person not showing vulnerability, and I don't think this is helpful to people. It can be very irritating, to put it mildly. I get irritated with myself, so it's not surprising others do."
John Rundle says she is much more vulnerable than she lets on. "I think there are times when she is very upset by the intolerable experiences people go through." It has been suggested there is a masochistic streak in Bamber that forces her to go on, but Rundle disagrees. "I don't think it's obsessional or pathological. I think it's that she's been challenged. She knows the evil of mankind, and she won't put up with it. It's a crusade if you like. But it's not done as a zealot, it's done as a human being."
While much of Bamber's early middle age was devoted to the domestic, bringing up Jonathan and David, she also managed to hold down a series of demanding jobs - acting almoner (social worker) at Middlesex Hospital, administrator at the Middlesex and personal assistant to the brilliant orthopaedic surgeon Sir Herbert Seddon. For many years she couldn't see a pattern to her life. It's only recently that she has begun to realise it has all been of a piece - from her father; to Belsen; to Rudi, her husband; to Amnesty; to the foundation.
There was also her work with Dr Maurice Pappworth, a much-loved and vilified campaigner against the abuses that go on in the name of medical experimentation. Bamber met Pappworth at St George's where he was a consultant. Bamber would help him with his administration, and they would talk in his rooms for hours about the overuse of drugs, unnecessary surgery, the Nazi doctors' malign experimentation. Bamber says Pappworth educated her about medical ethics. "He was as preoccupied as I was with this question of total power, total helplessness." Together they compiled an archive of abuses. John Rundle, who was taught by Pappworth, describes him as the greatest doctor he met. "Like a lot of very clever people he was succinct and simple because he grasped all the underlying principles, and Helen's very much the same. She tends to be a person of few words, straight to the point."
Bamber is fidgeting again, desperate to get back to work. "It's like sitting here when Rome is burning." The therapists at the foundation see their own therapists, or supervisors, to make sure they are still up to the job. Her supervisor gives her a hard time for over-working. Is she right? "I don't think I'm terribly good at taking care of myself." Perhaps work is her way of looking after herself? "I think it is. I think it gives me a lot of hope, a lot of personal help. I get a lot back from the people we treat in terms of seeing them grow and develop and overcome."
Neil Belton talks about the paradox of the carer. "You can get a lot of satisfaction from being an omnipotent carer. There's a little bit of God that attaches to it, the way people come to rely on her. She is aware of that element."
Does she think there is a danger of playing God? She doesn't answer directly. "You have to be clear that you have tremendous limitations in this work; you know you're going to lose some along the line."
Belton spent three years writing The Good Listener. He says: "Helen remains an enigma to me. Most activists I've known don't retain the humour and human sympathy she brings to her work, the ability to focus on individuals. There's a side that's just the grimly dedicated campaigner, but another that brings a great deal of joy and light."
Earlier this year, the government introduced its immigration and asylum act, which has resulted in asylum seekers living off vouchers instead of real money while being banned from earning their own. Families have been dispersed across the country. "At least when Jewish people came to Britain after the war, they were allowed to live in communities," says Bamber. "I feel so ashamed of the situation."
John McCarthy says: "She starts from the basic premise of right and wrong. You need a fair degree of anger to do her work." Bamber agrees. She says that anger can be a tremendous creative driving force, that without it none of the world's most pernicious regimes would have been defeated.
In an earlier conversation she had talked about her need for openness, the need to challenge her parents' generations who refused to admit to or share what they had been through. Out of nowhere, she says: "I know that my husband and I did pass on something about the secrecy to our children. I know we did try to protect them from the full knowledge of what had happened, and I don't know that I blame myself for that.
"When one of my sons was very young he asked me whether his grandfather had been shot, and I said 'yes', which was a lie, because he was beaten to death in front of his family. At what age do you say that to a child? I suppose I didn't want them to have the same knowledge that I had when I was growing up" - the knowledge she desperately sought out. Bamber never attempts to reconcile her contradictions.
She offers a cigarette from a dusty box. She likes seeing people smoke, she says: it reminds her of the war. She is stroking the hair of a beautifully dressed soft doll that Chilean clients have made to raise money. She is talking about the disappointments in her life; how this fiercely independent woman had always aspired to Sunday-lunch domesticity. "I never quite pulled it off. I didn't achieve the married life that I wanted, so there have been gaps and loneliness as well, yes."
We talk about how important Judaism has been to her. Yes, she says, but that doesn't make her a believer. "It's very curious because I'm always moved by other people's devotion. But I don't have that sense of devotion. I must believe in something." And for once she's struggling to make sense of herself. Slowly, diffidently the words form. "I suspect that it's believing that even though I see a great deal of evil, there's something very good to be retrieved from people."
Life at a glance
Born: London, May 1, 1925.
Education: Down Lanes Central School; part-time social science student, London School of Economics.
Married: 1947 Rudi Bamberger, divorced 1970.
Work: 1945 volunteer on one of first rehabilitation teams to enter Belsen concentration camp; senior case worker, Committee for the care of Children from Concentration Camps (1947-1954); almoner at St George's hospital east London (1956); founder member, National Association for the Welfare of Children in Hospital (1961); joined Amnesty 1961; founded Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture (1985).
Other positions: Advisory board, Gaza Community Mental Health; patron, Women Against Violence, Belfast.
Awards: European Woman of Achievement (1993), in recognition of work with survivors of repression and torture; OBE (1997).
Friday, April 29, 2011
Recipe - elderflower cordial
Make Elderflower Cordial
'Black Elderberry (Sambucus nigra) trees grow throughout Europe and North America, typically in sunny locations. When foraging, pick flower heads that are fully open with sweet smelling white blossoms (yellow or brown ones can have the musky odor of cat urine) and shake off any insects. Once you get home, do another insect inspection and separate the flowers from the stems using your fingers or the tines of a fork.
Making a cordial is relatively easy and involves steeping the flowers plus lemons (some people also add oranges) and citric acid (used as a preservative) in a syrup of sugar and water. Different recipes call for leaving the mixture to sit for one to five days; we usually go for about two. Strain the infused syrup into sterilized jars or bottles. '
Elderflower cordial
Prep time:20 min, plus overnight infusing Cook time:5 min Serves:Makes 1.5 litres
20 heads of elderflower
1.8 kg granulated sugar, or caster sugar
1.2 litres water
2 unwaxed lemons
75 g citric acid
1. Shake the elderflowers to expel any lingering insects, and then place in a large bowl.
2. Put the sugar into a pan with the water and bring up to the boil, stirring until the sugar has completely dissolved.
3. While the sugar syrup is heating, pare the zest of the lemons off in wide strips and toss into the bowl with the elderflowers. Slice the lemons, discard the ends, and add the slices to the bowl. Pour over the boiling syrup, and then stir in the citric acid. Cover with a cloth and then leave at room temperature for 24 hours.
4. Next day, strain the cordial through a sieve lined with muslin (or a new j-cloth rinsed out in boiling water), and pour into thoroughly cleaned glass or plastic bottles. Screw on the lids and pop into the cupboard ready to use.
A bit of history...
'Black Elderberry (Sambucus nigra) trees grow throughout Europe and North America, typically in sunny locations. When foraging, pick flower heads that are fully open with sweet smelling white blossoms (yellow or brown ones can have the musky odor of cat urine) and shake off any insects. Once you get home, do another insect inspection and separate the flowers from the stems using your fingers or the tines of a fork.
Making a cordial is relatively easy and involves steeping the flowers plus lemons (some people also add oranges) and citric acid (used as a preservative) in a syrup of sugar and water. Different recipes call for leaving the mixture to sit for one to five days; we usually go for about two. Strain the infused syrup into sterilized jars or bottles. '
Elderflower cordial
Prep time:20 min, plus overnight infusing Cook time:5 min Serves:Makes 1.5 litres
20 heads of elderflower
1.8 kg granulated sugar, or caster sugar
1.2 litres water
2 unwaxed lemons
75 g citric acid
1. Shake the elderflowers to expel any lingering insects, and then place in a large bowl.
2. Put the sugar into a pan with the water and bring up to the boil, stirring until the sugar has completely dissolved.
3. While the sugar syrup is heating, pare the zest of the lemons off in wide strips and toss into the bowl with the elderflowers. Slice the lemons, discard the ends, and add the slices to the bowl. Pour over the boiling syrup, and then stir in the citric acid. Cover with a cloth and then leave at room temperature for 24 hours.
4. Next day, strain the cordial through a sieve lined with muslin (or a new j-cloth rinsed out in boiling water), and pour into thoroughly cleaned glass or plastic bottles. Screw on the lids and pop into the cupboard ready to use.
A bit of history...
Recipe - refrigerator cake
Chocolate Biscuit Cake
1/2 teaspoon butter, for greasing pan
8 ounces McVities rich tea biscuits
1/2 stick (4 tablespoons) unsalted butter, softened
1/2 cup granulated sugar
4 ounces dark chocolate
1 egg, beaten
8 ounces dark chocolate, for icing
1 ounce white chocolate, for decoration
1. Lightly grease a small (such as 6 x 2 1/2-inch) cake ring with 1/2 teaspoon butter, and place on a parchment-lined tray. Break each of the biscuits into almond-sized pieces by hand and set aside. Cream the butter and sugar in a bowl until the mixture is a light lemon color.
2. Melt the 4 ounces of dark chocolate in a double boiler. Add the butter and sugar mixture to the chocolate, stirring constantly. Add the egg and continue stirring. Fold in the biscuit pieces until they are all coated with the chocolate mixture.
3. Spoon the chocolate biscuit mixture into the prepared cake ring. Try to fill all of the gaps on the bottom of the ring, because this will be the top when it is unmolded. Chill the cake in the refrigerator for at least three hours.
4. Remove the cake from the refrigerator, and let it stand while you melt the 8 ounces of dark chocolate for icing. Slide the ring off the cake and turn the cake upside down onto a cooling rack. Pour 8 ounces of melted dark chocolate over the cake, and smooth the tope and sides using a butter knife or offset spatula. Allow the chocolate icing to set at room temperature. Carefully run a knife around the bottom of the cake where it has stuck to the cooling rack, and transfer the cake to a cake dish. Melt the white chocolate and drizzle on top of the cake in a decorative pattern.
1/2 teaspoon butter, for greasing pan
8 ounces McVities rich tea biscuits
1/2 stick (4 tablespoons) unsalted butter, softened
1/2 cup granulated sugar
4 ounces dark chocolate
1 egg, beaten
8 ounces dark chocolate, for icing
1 ounce white chocolate, for decoration
1. Lightly grease a small (such as 6 x 2 1/2-inch) cake ring with 1/2 teaspoon butter, and place on a parchment-lined tray. Break each of the biscuits into almond-sized pieces by hand and set aside. Cream the butter and sugar in a bowl until the mixture is a light lemon color.
2. Melt the 4 ounces of dark chocolate in a double boiler. Add the butter and sugar mixture to the chocolate, stirring constantly. Add the egg and continue stirring. Fold in the biscuit pieces until they are all coated with the chocolate mixture.
3. Spoon the chocolate biscuit mixture into the prepared cake ring. Try to fill all of the gaps on the bottom of the ring, because this will be the top when it is unmolded. Chill the cake in the refrigerator for at least three hours.
4. Remove the cake from the refrigerator, and let it stand while you melt the 8 ounces of dark chocolate for icing. Slide the ring off the cake and turn the cake upside down onto a cooling rack. Pour 8 ounces of melted dark chocolate over the cake, and smooth the tope and sides using a butter knife or offset spatula. Allow the chocolate icing to set at room temperature. Carefully run a knife around the bottom of the cake where it has stuck to the cooling rack, and transfer the cake to a cake dish. Melt the white chocolate and drizzle on top of the cake in a decorative pattern.
Monday, April 25, 2011
.Obama’s Young Mother Abroad
New York Times
By JANNY SCOTT
Published: April 20, 2011
The photograph showed the son, but my eye gravitated toward the mother. That first glimpse was surprising — the stout, pale-skinned woman in sturdy sandals, standing squarely a half-step ahead of the lithe, darker-skinned figure to her left. His elastic-band body bespoke discipline, even asceticism. Her form was well padded, territory ceded long ago to the pleasures of appetite and the forces of anatomical destiny. He had the studied casualness of a catalog model, in khakis, at home in the viewfinder. She met the camera head-on, dressed in hand-loomed textile dyed indigo, a silver earring half-hidden in the cascading curtain of her dark hair. She carried her chin a few degrees higher than most. His right hand rested on her shoulder, lightly. The photograph, taken on a Manhattan rooftop in August 1987 and e-mailed to me 20 years later, was a revelation and a puzzle. The man was Barack Obama at 26, the community organizer from Chicago on a visit to New York. The woman was Stanley Ann Dunham, his mother. It was impossible not to be struck by the similarities, and the dissimilarities, between them. It was impossible not to question the stereotype to which she had been expediently reduced: the white woman from Kansas.
The president’s mother has served as any of a number of useful oversimplifications. In the capsule version of Obama’s life story, she is the white mother from Kansas coupled alliteratively to the black father from Kenya. She is corn-fed, white-bread, whatever Kenya is not. In “Dreams From My Father,” the memoir that helped power Obama’s political ascent, she is the shy, small-town girl who falls head over heels for the brilliant, charismatic African who steals the show. In the next chapter, she is the naïve idealist, the innocent abroad. In Obama’s presidential campaign, she was the struggling single mother, the food-stamp recipient, the victim of a health care system gone awry, pleading with her insurance company for coverage as her life slipped away. And in the fevered imaginings of supermarket tabloids and the Internet, she is the atheist, the Marxist, the flower child, the mother who abandoned her son or duped the newspapers of Hawaii into printing a birth announcement for her Kenyan-born baby, on the off chance that he might want to be president someday.
The earthy figure in the photograph did not fit any of those, as I learned over the course of two and a half years of research, travel and nearly 200 interviews. To describe Dunham as a white woman from Kansas turns out to be about as illuminating as describing her son as a politician who likes golf. Intentionally or not, the label obscures an extraordinary story — of a girl with a boy’s name who grew up in the years before the women’s movement, the pill and the antiwar movement; who married an African at a time when nearly two dozen states still had laws against interracial marriage; who, at 24, moved to Jakarta with her son in the waning days of an anticommunist bloodbath in which hundreds of thousands of Indonesians were slaughtered; who lived more than half her adult life in a place barely known to most Americans, in the country with the largest Muslim population in the world; who spent years working in villages where a lone Western woman was a rarity; who immersed herself in the study of blacksmithing, a craft long practiced exclusively by men; who, as a working and mostly single mother, brought up two biracial children; who believed her son in particular had the potential to be great; who raised him to be, as he has put it jokingly, a combination of Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi and Harry Belafonte; and then died at 52, never knowing who or what he would become.
Obama placed the ghost of his absent father at the center of his lyrical account of his life. At times, he has seemed to say more about the grandparents who helped raise him than about his mother. Yet she shaped him, to a degree Obama has seemed increasingly to acknowledge. In the preface to the 2004 edition of “Dreams From My Father,” issued nine years after the first edition and nine years after Dunham’s death, Obama folded in a revealing admission: had he known his mother would not survive her illness, he might have written a different book — “less a meditation on the absent parent, more a celebration of the one who was the single constant in my life.”
Dunham, for whom a letter in Jakarta from her son in the United States could raise her spirits for a full day, surely wondered about her place in his life. On rare occasions, she indicated as much — painfully, wistfully — to close friends. But she would not have been inclined to overstate her case. As she told him, with a dry humor that seems downright Kansan, “If nothing else, I gave you an interesting life.”
Ann Dunham, who jettisoned the name Stanley upon emerging from childhood, was just 17 years old in the fall of 1960 when she became pregnant with the child of a charismatic Kenyan named Barack Hussein Obama, a fellow student at the University of Hawaii who was more than six years her senior. She dropped out of school, married him and gave birth shortly before their union ended. In the aftermath, she met Lolo Soetoro, an amiable, easygoing, tennis-playing graduate student from the Indonesian island of Java. They married in 1964, after Ann’s divorce came through, but their early life together was upended by forces beyond their control. On Sept. 30, 1965, six Indonesian army generals and one lieutenant were kidnapped and killed in Jakarta, in what the army characterized as an attempted coup planned by the Communist Party. Students studying abroad, including Lolo, whose studies were sponsored by the government, were soon summoned home. A year later, in 1967, Ann graduated with a degree in anthropology, gathered up her 6-year-old child and moved to Indonesia to join her husband.
The four years that followed were formative for mother and son — and are a subject of curiosity and an object of speculation for many Americans today. These were years in which Ann lived closely with the young Obama, who at the time was called Barry; she impressed upon him her values and, consciously and unconsciously, shaped his emerging understanding of the world. She made choices about her own life too, setting an example that in some ways Obama would eventually embrace, while in other ways intentionally leaving it behind.
The white woman and her half-African son made quite a pair traveling in Indonesia together. Elizabeth Bryant, an American who lived in the city of Yogyakarta at the time, remembers a lunch held at another expatriate’s house that Ann and Barry attended. Ann arrived in a long skirt made of Indonesian fabric — not, Bryant noticed, a look that other American women in Indonesia seemed to favor. Ann instructed Barry to shake hands, then to sit on the sofa and turn his attention to an English-language workbook she brought along. Ann, who had been in Indonesia for nearly four years, talked about whether to go back to Hawaii. “She said, ‘What would you do?’ ” Bryant recalled when I spoke to her nearly 40 years later. “I said, ‘I could live here as long as two years, then would go back to Hawaii.’ She said, ‘Why?’ I said it was hard living, it took a toll on your body, there were no doctors, it was not healthy. She didn’t agree with me.”
Over lunch, Barry, who was 9 at the time, sat at the dining table and listened intently but did not speak. When he asked to be excused, Ann directed him to ask the hostess for permission. Permission granted, he got down on the floor and played with Bryant’s son, who was 13 months old. After lunch, the group took a walk, with Barry running ahead. A flock of Indonesian children began lobbing rocks in his direction. They ducked behind a wall and shouted racial epithets. He seemed unfazed, dancing around as though playing dodge ball “with unseen players,” Bryant said. Ann did not react. Assuming she must not have understood the words, Bryant offered to intervene. “No, he’s O.K.,” Ann said. “He’s used to it.”
“We were floored that she’d bring a half-black child to Indonesia, knowing the disrespect they have for blacks,” Bryant said. At the same time, she admired Ann for teaching her boy to be fearless. A child in Indonesia needed to be raised that way — for self-preservation, Bryant decided. Ann also seemed to be teaching Barry respect. He had all the politeness that Indonesian children displayed toward their parents. He seemed to be learning Indonesian ways.
“I think this is one reason he’s so halus,” Bryant said of the president, using the Indonesian adjective that means “polite, refined, or courteous,” referring to qualities some see as distinctively Javanese. “He has the manners of Asians and the ways of Americans — being halus, being patient, calm, a good listener. If you’re not a good listener in Indonesia, you’d better leave.”
Indonesia was still in a state of shock when Ann arrived in 1967 for the first of three extended periods of residence that would eventually add up to the majority of her adult life. The details of the attempted coup and countercoup remain in dispute even today, as do the particulars of the carnage that followed. But it is known that neighbors turned on neighbors. According to Adrian Vickers, the author of “A History of Modern Indonesia,” militias went door to door in villages, abducting suspects, raping women, even targeting children. “The best way to prove you were not a Communist was to join in the killings,” Vickers writes. Bill Collier, a friend of Ann’s who arrived in Indonesia in 1968 and spent 15 years doing social and economic surveys in villages, told me that researchers were told by people living near brackish waterways that they had been unable to eat the fish because of decaying corpses in the water. Many Indonesians chose never to speak about what had happened.
The Jakarta that greeted Ann Soetoro and her son was a tapestry of villages — low-rise and sprawling — interwoven with wooded areas, paddy fields and marshland. Narrow alleys disappeared into warrens of tile-roofed houses in the rambling urban hamlets called kampungs. Squatter colonies lined the canals, which served as public baths, laundry facilities and sewers, all in one. During the long rainy season from November through March, canals overflowed, saturating cardboard shanties and flooding much of the city. Residents traveled mostly on foot or by bicycle or bicycle-propelled rickshaws called becaks. Power outages were common. There were so few working phones that it was said that half the cars on the streets were ferrying messages from one office to the next. “Secretaries would spend hours just dialing and redialing phone numbers trying to get through,” Halimah Brugger, an American who moved there in 1968, told me. Westerners were rare, black people even rarer. Western women got a lot of attention. “I remember creating quite a sensation just being pedaled down the street in a becak, wearing a short skirt,” Brugger said. Letters from the United States took weeks to reach their destination. Foreigners endured all manner of gastrointestinal upsets. Deworming was de rigueur.
Yet the city had a magical charm. People who were children in Jakarta in that period, including Barack Obama, reminisce about the sound of the Muslim call to prayer in the days before public-address systems, and the signature sounds called out by street vendors wheeling their carts through the kampungs. Tea was still served on the veranda of the old Hotel des Indes. Ceiling fans turned languidly in the midafternoon heat, and kerosene lamps flickered in the houses lining the narrow alleys at night. For anyone of no interest to government security forces, life was simple. For a foreigner, it was possible to arrive in Indonesia in 1967 largely ignorant of the horror of just two years before. “I was quite naïve about the whole thing,” Brugger said. “It was all over then. I never felt the slightest bit endangered.” Years later, many people would look back on the late 1960s and early 1970s as a honeymoon period, Vickers writes. Restrictions on the press eased, a youth culture flowered, literary and cultural life thrived. It was, some later commented, Indonesia’s Prague Spring.
When Ann arrived, Lolo was in the army. His salary was low. On her first night in Indonesia, Ann complained later to a colleague, Lolo served her white rice and dendeng celeng — dried, jerked wild boar, which Indonesians hunted in the forests when food was scarce. But when Lolo completed his military service, his brother-in-law Trisulo used his contacts as a vice president at the Indonesian oil company Pertamina to help Lolo get a job in the Jakarta office of the Union Oil Company of California. By the early 1970s, Lolo and Ann had moved into a rented house in Matraman, a middle-class area of Jakarta. The house was a pavilyun, an annex on the grounds of a bigger main house. It had three bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, a library and a terrace. Like the households of other Indonesians who could afford it, it had a sizable domestic staff. Two female servants shared a bedroom; two men — a cook and a houseboy — slept mostly on the floor of the house or in the garden. The staff freed Ann from domestic obligations to a degree that would have been almost impossible in the United States. There were people to clean the house, prepare meals, buy groceries and look after her children — enabling her to work, pursue her interests and come and go as she wanted. The domestic staff made it possible, too, for Ann and Lolo to cultivate their own professional and social circles, which did not necessarily overlap.
By January 1968, Ann had gone to work as the assistant to the American director of Lembaga Indonesia-Amerika, a binational organization financed by the United States Information Service and housed at the U.S. Agency for International Development. She supervised a small group of Indonesians who taught English classes for Indonesian government employees and businessmen being sent by U.S.A.I.D. to the United States for graduate studies. It would be an understatement to say she disliked the job. “I worked at the U.S. Embassy in Djakarta for 2 horrible years,” she wrote to a friend. As Obama describes the job in his memoir, “The Indonesian businessmen weren’t much interested in the niceties of the English language, and several made passes at her.” Occasionally, she took Barry to work. Joseph Sigit, an Indonesian who worked as the office manager at the time, told me, “Our staff here sometimes made a joke of him because he looked different — the color of his skin.”
Obama’s Young Mother AbroadPublished: April 20, 2011
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By January 1968, Ann had gone to work as the assistant to the American director of Lembaga Indonesia-Amerika, a binational organization financed by the United States Information Service and housed at the U.S. Agency for International Development. She supervised a small group of Indonesians who taught English classes for Indonesian government employees and businessmen being sent by U.S.A.I.D. to the United States for graduate studies. It would be an understatement to say she disliked the job. “I worked at the U.S. Embassy in Djakarta for 2 horrible years,” she wrote to a friend. As Obama describes the job in his memoir, “The Indonesian businessmen weren’t much interested in the niceties of the English language, and several made passes at her.” Occasionally, she took Barry to work. Joseph Sigit, an Indonesian who worked as the office manager at the time, told me, “Our staff here sometimes made a joke of him because he looked different — the color of his skin.”
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HAWAII TIME Barack Obama with his father at the Honolulu airport at Christmas in 1971.
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Joked with him — or about him? I asked.
“With and about him,” Sigit said, with no evident embarrassment.
Two years later, at 27, Ann was hired to start an English-language business-communications department in one of the few private nonprofit management-training schools in the country. The school, called the Institute for Management Education and Development, was started several years earlier by a Dutch Jesuit priest with the intention of helping to build an Indonesian elite. Ann trained the teachers, developed the curriculum and taught top executives. In return, she received not just a paycheck but also a share of the revenue from the program. She also became a popular teacher. Ann’s classes “could be a riot of laughter from beginning to end. She had a great sense of humor,” said Leonard Kibble, who taught part time at the institute in the early 1970s. Some of the laughter involved Ann’s still-incomplete mastery of the Indonesian language. In one slip that Kibble said Ann delighted in recounting, she tried to tell a student that he would “get a promotion” if he learned English. Instead of using the phrase naik pangkat, she said naik pantat. The word naik means to “go up, rise, or mount”; pangkat means “rank” or “position.” Pantat means “buttocks.”
That same year, on Aug. 15, 1970, shortly after Barry’s ninth birthday and during what would turn out to be the only visit by her mother, Madelyn Dunham, to Indonesia, Ann gave birth to Maya Kassandra Soetoro at Saint Carolus Hospital, a Catholic hospital thought by Westerners at that time to be the best in Jakarta. When Halimah Brugger gave birth in the same hospital two years later, she told me, the doctor delivered her baby without the luxury of a stethoscope, gloves or gown. “When the baby was born, the doctor asked my husband for his handkerchief,” Brugger said. “Then she stuffed it in my mouth and gave me 11 stitches without any anesthesia.” Ann tried out three different names for her new daughter, all of them Sanskrit, before settling on Maya Kassandra. The name was important to Ann, Maya told me; she wanted “beautiful names.” Stanley, the name Ann felt burdened with as a child, was not on the list.
In Indonesia, Ann was a striking figure who did not go unnoticed. “Maybe just her presence — the way she carried herself,” said Halimah Bellows, whom Ann hired in the spring of 1971. She dressed simply, with little or no makeup, and wore her hair long, held back by a headband. By Javanese standards, she was, as Felina Pramono, an Indonesian colleague, put it, “a bit sturdy for a woman.” She had strong opinions — and rarely softened them to please others.
“She used to tear me apart,” says Kay Ikranagara, one of Ann’s closest friends, in a tone that sounded almost fond. Ann told her she needed to be bolder and stronger. She made fun of her inadequacy in the kitchen. She told her she should give her housekeeper explicit instructions, not simply let her do whatever she wanted. “With everybody she was like that: she would tell them what was wrong with them,” Ikranagara said. Family members were not spared. “She was very scathing about the traditional Indonesian wife role,” Ikranagara recalled. “She would tell Maya not to be such a wimp. She didn’t like this passive Indonesian female caricature. She would tell me not to fall into that.”
Ikranagara was the daughter of a development economist from the University of California who taught at the University of Indonesia in the late 1950s. She lived in Jakarta as a teenager, studied anthropology and linguistics in the 1960s at Berkeley and then returned to Jakarta, where she met her husband. She met Ann while teaching part time at the management school and writing her dissertation in linguistics. They had a lot in common: Indonesian husbands, degrees in anthropology, babies born in the same month, opinions shaped by the 1960s. They were less conscious than others of the boundaries between cultures, Ikranagara told me, and they rejected what they saw as the previous generation’s hypocrisy on the subject of race. “We had all the same attitudes,” she said. “When we met people who worked for the oil companies or the embassy, they belonged to a different culture than Ann and I. We felt they didn’t mix with Indonesians, they were part of an insular American culture.” Servants seemed to be the only Indonesians those Americans knew.
But by the early 1970s, Lolo’s new job had plunged him deeply into the oil-company culture. Foreign businesses in Indonesia were required to hire and train Indonesian partners. The exercise struck some people as a sham: companies would hire an Indonesian director, pay him well and give him little or nothing to do. Trisulo, Lolo’s brother-in-law, told me he did not recall the exact nature of Lolo’s job with Union Oil. His son, Sonny Trisulo, said it may have been “government relations.” Whatever it was, Lolo’s job included socializing with oil-company executives and their wives. He joined the Indonesian Petroleum Club, a private watering hole in Central Jakarta for oil-company people and their families, which offered swimming, tennis and dining. Ann was expected to socialize, too. Any failure to do so reflected badly on Lolo. “It’s the society that asks it,” Ikranagara said. “Your husband is supposed to show up at social functions with you at his side, dressed in a kain and kebaya,” a costume consisting of a traditional, tightly fitted, long-sleeved blouse and a length of unstitched cloth wound around the lower part of the body. “You’re supposed to sit with the women and talk about your children and your servants.”
Ann begged off. “She didn’t understand these folks — the idea of living an expatriate life that was so completely divorced from the world around you, that involves hiding yourself away in these protective cells of existence,” Maya said. “That was peculiar to her, and she was bored by it.” Ann complained to her friend Bill Collier that all those middle-aged white Americans talked about inane things. Lolo, she told Collier, “was becoming more American all the time.” Occasionally, the young Obama would overhear Lolo and Ann arguing in their bedroom about Ann’s refusal to attend his oil-company dinners, at which, he writes in “Dreams From My Father,” “American businessmen from Texas and Louisiana would slap Lolo’s back and boast about the palms they had greased to obtain the new offshore-drilling rights, while their wives complained to my mother about the quality of Indonesian help. He would ask her how it would look for him to go alone and remind her that these were her own people, and my mother’s voice would rise to almost a shout.
“ ‘They are not my people.’ ”
The relationship between Ann and Lolo appears to have begun deteriorating even before Lolo took the oil-company job. As Obama describes it, something happened between them when Lolo was called back to Jakarta during the time of unrest in Indonesia and they spent a year apart. In Hawaii, Lolo was full of life, regaling Ann with stories from his childhood, confiding his plans to return to his country and teach at the university. Now he barely spoke to her. Some nights, he would sleep with a pistol under his pillow; other nights, she would hear him “wandering through the house with a bottle of imported whiskey, nursing his secrets.” Ann’s loneliness was a constant, Obama writes, “like a shortness of breath.”
Ann had pieced together some of what happened in Indonesia in 1965 and afterward from fragmentary information that people let slip. Her new Indonesian friends talked to her about corruption in government agencies, police and military shakedowns, the power of the president’s entourage. Lolo would not talk about any of it. According to Obama, a cousin of Lolo’s finally explained to Ann what happened when her husband returned from Hawaii. Upon arriving in Jakarta, he was taken away for questioning and told he had been conscripted and would be sent to the jungles of New Guinea for a year. It could have been worse: students returning from Soviet-bloc countries were jailed or even vanished. Obama writes that Ann concluded that “power had taken Lolo and yanked him back into line just when he thought he’d escaped, making him feel its weight, letting him know that his life wasn’t his own.” In response, Lolo made his peace with power, “learned the wisdom of forgetting; just as his brother-in-law had done, making millions as a high official in the national oil company.”
Lolo had disappointed Ann, but her refusal to conform to his culture’s expectations apparently angered him as well. “She didn’t know, as little I knew, how Indonesian men change when suddenly their family is around,” Renske Heringa, a Dutch anthropologist and close friend of Ann’s in the 1980s who herself married a man who was half Indonesian, told me. “And how Indonesian men like women to be easy and open abroad, but when you get to Indonesia, the parents are there, the family is there, you have to behave. You have to be the little wife. As a wife, you were not supposed to make yourself visible besides being beautiful. By the time I knew Ann, she was a hefty woman. She didn’t care about getting dressed, wearing jewelry, the way Indonesian women do. That was not her style. He expected her to do it. That is one reason she didn’t stick it out. She absolutely refused to. I understand why he couldn’t accept it.”
One morning in January 2009, at the offices of the management school for which Ann had worked, I met a man in his late 50s named Saman. Like some Javanese, he went by a single name. Speaking in Bahasa Indonesia, with Ann’s former assistant Felina Pramono translating, he told me that he worked as a houseboy for Lolo and Ann in the early 1970s. One of seven children from a family of farmers, Saman moved to Jakarta as a teenager to find work. When he worked for Ann and Lolo, his duties included gardening; taking care of a pet turtle, dog, rabbit and bird; and taking Barry to school by bicycle or becak. Ann and Lolo paid Saman well and treated all four members of the household staff equally, he said. He remembered Lolo as stern and Ann as kindhearted.
Ann would finish teaching at 9 in the evening and sometimes not return home until midnight, Saman said. She seemed barely to sleep. She would stay up, typing and correcting Barry’s homework, then get up again before dawn. On one occasion, Saman said: “She got home late with a student, but the student didn’t see her home properly. So he dropped her near the house, and Soetoro got very mad because of that.” An argument ensued, which Saman overheard. “He said: ‘I’ve warned you many times. Why are you still doing this?’ ” Saman recalled. Whether Lolo’s worry was infidelity or simply what others might think is unclear from Saman’s story. After the argument, he said, Ann appeared in the house with a towel pressed to her face and blood running from her nose. It is difficult to know what to make of the nearly 40-year-old recollection. No one else I interviewed suggested there was ever violence between Ann and Lolo, a man many people described as patient and sweet-tempered.
When one fellow teacher, an Indonesian man whom Ann befriended, asked about her husband in 1968 or 1969, she told him grimly: “I’m never asked. I’m told.” Reflecting on her marriage some years later, Ann told another Indonesian friend, Yang Suwan, resignedly: “Don’t you know that you don’t argue and you don’t discuss with a Javanese person? Because problems don’t exist with Javanese people. Time will solve problems.”
With her children, Ann made a point of being more physically affectionate than her mother had been with her, she told one friend. She was cuddly and would say, “I love you,” according to Maya, a hundred times a day. She was playful — making pottery, weaving decorations, doing art projects that stretched across the room. “I think that we benefited a great deal from her focus when we were with her, when she was beside us,” Maya told me. “So that made the absences hurt a little less.” Where her children were involved, Ann was easily moved to tears, even occasionally when speaking about them to friends. She preferred humor to harping, but she was exacting about the things she believed mattered most. Richard Hook, who worked with Ann in Jakarta in the late 1980s and early 1990s, said she told him that she worked to instill ideas about public service in her son. She wanted Barry to have a sense of obligation, to give something back. She wanted him to start off, Hook said, with the attitudes and values she had taken years to learn.
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Ann would finish teaching at 9 in the evening and sometimes not return home until midnight, Saman said. She seemed barely to sleep. She would stay up, typing and correcting Barry’s homework, then get up again before dawn. On one occasion, Saman said: “She got home late with a student, but the student didn’t see her home properly. So he dropped her near the house, and Soetoro got very mad because of that.” An argument ensued, which Saman overheard. “He said: ‘I’ve warned you many times. Why are you still doing this?’ ” Saman recalled. Whether Lolo’s worry was infidelity or simply what others might think is unclear from Saman’s story. After the argument, he said, Ann appeared in the house with a towel pressed to her face and blood running from her nose. It is difficult to know what to make of the nearly 40-year-old recollection. No one else I interviewed suggested there was ever violence between Ann and Lolo, a man many people described as patient and sweet-tempered.
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When one fellow teacher, an Indonesian man whom Ann befriended, asked about her husband in 1968 or 1969, she told him grimly: “I’m never asked. I’m told.” Reflecting on her marriage some years later, Ann told another Indonesian friend, Yang Suwan, resignedly: “Don’t you know that you don’t argue and you don’t discuss with a Javanese person? Because problems don’t exist with Javanese people. Time will solve problems.”
With her children, Ann made a point of being more physically affectionate than her mother had been with her, she told one friend. She was cuddly and would say, “I love you,” according to Maya, a hundred times a day. She was playful — making pottery, weaving decorations, doing art projects that stretched across the room. “I think that we benefited a great deal from her focus when we were with her, when she was beside us,” Maya told me. “So that made the absences hurt a little less.” Where her children were involved, Ann was easily moved to tears, even occasionally when speaking about them to friends. She preferred humor to harping, but she was exacting about the things she believed mattered most. Richard Hook, who worked with Ann in Jakarta in the late 1980s and early 1990s, said she told him that she worked to instill ideas about public service in her son. She wanted Barry to have a sense of obligation, to give something back. She wanted him to start off, Hook said, with the attitudes and values she had taken years to learn.
“If you want to grow into a human being,” Obama remembers her saying, “you’re going to need some values.” When necessary, Ann was, according to two accounts, not unwilling to reinforce her message. “She talked about disciplining Barry, including spanking him for things where he richly deserved a spanking,” said Don Johnston, who worked with Ann in the early 1990s, sometimes traveling with her in Indonesia and living in the same house. Saman said that when Barry failed to finish homework sent from Hawaii by his grandmother, Ann “would call him into his room and would spank him with his father’s military belt.” President Obama, through a spokeswoman, said his mother never resorted to physical discipline.
One evening in the house in Matraman, Saman said, he and Barry were preparing to go to sleep. They often slept in the same place — sometimes in the bunk bed in Barry’s room, sometimes on the dining-room floor or in the garden. On this occasion, Barry, who was 8 or 9 at the time, asked Saman to turn out the light. When Saman did not do it, he said, Barry hit him in the chest. When he did not react, Barry hit him harder, and Saman struck him back. Barry began to cry loudly, attracting Ann’s attention. According to Saman, Ann did not respond. She seemed to realize that Barry had been in the wrong. Otherwise, Saman would not have struck him.
“We were not permitted to be rude, we were not permitted to be mean, we were not permitted to be arrogant,” Maya told me. “We had to have a certain humility and broad-mindedness. We had to study. . . . If we said something unkind about someone, she would try to talk about their point of view. Or, ‘How would you feel?’ Sort of compelling us ever toward empathy and those kinds of things and not allowing us to be selfish. That was constant, steady, daily.”
It was clear to many that Ann believed Barry, in particular, was unusually gifted. She would boast about his brains, his achievements, how brave he was. Benji Bennington, a friend of Ann’s from Hawaii, told me, “Sometimes when she talked about Barack, she’d say, ‘Well, my son is so bright, he can do anything he ever wants in the world, even be president of the United States.’ I remember her saying that.” Samardal Manan, who taught with Ann in Jakarta, remembered Ann saying something similar — that Barry could be, or perhaps wanted to be, the first black president.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” Lolo asked Barry one evening, according to Saman.
“Oh, prime minister,” Barry answered.
What mattered as much as anything to Ann, as a parent, was her children’s education. But that was not simple. Indonesian schools in the late 1960s and early 1970s were inadequate; there were not enough of them, the government controlled the curriculum, teachers were poorly trained. Westerners sent their children to the Jakarta International School, but it was expensive and difficult to get into. Obama attended two Indonesian schools, one Catholic and one Muslim. The experience cannot have failed to have left a mark. The Javanese, especially the Central Javanese, place an enormous emphasis on self-control. Even to sneeze was to exhibit an untoward lack of self-control, said Michael Dove, who got to know Ann when they were both anthropologists working in Java in the 1980s. “You demonstrate an inner strength by not betraying emotion, not speaking loudly, not moving jerkily,” he said. Self-control is inculcated through a culture of teasing, Kay Ikranagara told me. Her husband, known only as Ikranagara, said, “People tease about skin color all the time.” If a child allows the teasing to bother him, he is teased more. If he ignores it, it stops. “Our ambassador said this was where Barack learned to be cool,” Kay told me. “If you get mad and react, you lose. If you learn to laugh and take it without any reaction, you win.”
With time, Ann’s thinking about Barack’s future changed. “She had always encouraged my rapid acculturation in Indonesia,” he wrote in his memoir. “It had made me relatively self-sufficient, undemanding on a tight budget, and extremely well mannered when compared with other American children. She had taught me to disdain the blend of ignorance and arrogance that too often characterized Americans abroad. But she now had learned, just as Lolo had learned, the chasm that separated the life chances of an American from those of an Indonesian. She knew which side of the divide she wanted her child to be on. I was an American, she decided, and my true life lay elsewhere.”
In early 1971, Ann told Barry that he would be returning to Hawaii. He would live with his grandparents in Honolulu and attend Punahou School, a respected prep school within walking distance of the Dunhams’ apartment. “She said that she and Maya would be joining me in Hawaii very soon — a year, tops — and that she’d try to make it there for Christmas,” he wrote in “Dreams From My Father.” Ann’s uncle Charles Payne told me he suspected that her mother, Madelyn, played a part in the decision. “Madelyn always had a great concern about Barack getting a good education,” he said. “I think that was her defense against his racial mixture — that education was the solution to whatever problems that would bring.”
As Obama later described his send-off, an Indonesian co-pilot who was a friend of Ann’s escorted him to the plane “as she and Lolo and my new sister, Maya, stood by at the gate.”
Ann uprooted Barry, at age 6, and transplanted him to Jakarta. Now she was uprooting him again, at barely 10, and sending him back, alone. She would follow him to Hawaii only to leave him again, less than three years later.
When we spoke last July, Obama recalled those serial displacements. “I think that was harder on a 10-year-old boy than he’d care to admit at the time,” Obama said, sitting in a chair in the Oval Office and speaking about his mother with a mix of affection and critical distance. “When we were separated again during high school, at that point I was old enough to say, ‘This is my choice, my decision.’ But being a parent now and looking back at that, I could see — you know what? — that would be hard on a kid.”
He spoke about his mother with fondness, humor and a degree of candor that I had not expected. There was also in his tone at times a hint of gentle forbearance. Perhaps it was the tone of someone whose patience had been tested, by a person he loved, to the point where he had stepped back to a safer distance. Or perhaps it was the knowingness of a grown child seeing his parent as irredeemably human.
“She was a very strong person in her own way,” Obama said, when I asked about Ann’s limitations as a mother. “Resilient, able to bounce back from setbacks, persistent — the fact that she ended up finishing her dissertation. But despite all those strengths, she was not a well-organized person. And that disorganization, you know, spilled over. Had it not been for my grandparents, I think, providing some sort of safety net financially, being able to take me and my sister on at certain spots, I think my mother would have had to make some different decisions. And I think that sometimes she took for granted that, ‘Well, it’ll all work out, and it’ll be fine.’ But the fact is, it might not always have been fine, had it not been for my grandmother. . . . Had she not been there to provide that floor, I think our young lives could have been much more chaotic than they were.”
But he did not, he said, hold his mother’s choices against her. Part of being an adult is seeing your parents “as people who have their own strengths, weaknesses, quirks, longings.” He did not believe, he said, that parents served their children well by being unhappy. If his mother had cramped her spirit, it would not have given him a happier childhood. As it was, she gave him the single most important gift a parent can give — “a sense of unconditional love that was big enough that, with all the surface disturbances of our lives, it sustained me, entirely.”
New York Times
By JANNY SCOTT
Published: April 20, 2011
The photograph showed the son, but my eye gravitated toward the mother. That first glimpse was surprising — the stout, pale-skinned woman in sturdy sandals, standing squarely a half-step ahead of the lithe, darker-skinned figure to her left. His elastic-band body bespoke discipline, even asceticism. Her form was well padded, territory ceded long ago to the pleasures of appetite and the forces of anatomical destiny. He had the studied casualness of a catalog model, in khakis, at home in the viewfinder. She met the camera head-on, dressed in hand-loomed textile dyed indigo, a silver earring half-hidden in the cascading curtain of her dark hair. She carried her chin a few degrees higher than most. His right hand rested on her shoulder, lightly. The photograph, taken on a Manhattan rooftop in August 1987 and e-mailed to me 20 years later, was a revelation and a puzzle. The man was Barack Obama at 26, the community organizer from Chicago on a visit to New York. The woman was Stanley Ann Dunham, his mother. It was impossible not to be struck by the similarities, and the dissimilarities, between them. It was impossible not to question the stereotype to which she had been expediently reduced: the white woman from Kansas.
The president’s mother has served as any of a number of useful oversimplifications. In the capsule version of Obama’s life story, she is the white mother from Kansas coupled alliteratively to the black father from Kenya. She is corn-fed, white-bread, whatever Kenya is not. In “Dreams From My Father,” the memoir that helped power Obama’s political ascent, she is the shy, small-town girl who falls head over heels for the brilliant, charismatic African who steals the show. In the next chapter, she is the naïve idealist, the innocent abroad. In Obama’s presidential campaign, she was the struggling single mother, the food-stamp recipient, the victim of a health care system gone awry, pleading with her insurance company for coverage as her life slipped away. And in the fevered imaginings of supermarket tabloids and the Internet, she is the atheist, the Marxist, the flower child, the mother who abandoned her son or duped the newspapers of Hawaii into printing a birth announcement for her Kenyan-born baby, on the off chance that he might want to be president someday.
The earthy figure in the photograph did not fit any of those, as I learned over the course of two and a half years of research, travel and nearly 200 interviews. To describe Dunham as a white woman from Kansas turns out to be about as illuminating as describing her son as a politician who likes golf. Intentionally or not, the label obscures an extraordinary story — of a girl with a boy’s name who grew up in the years before the women’s movement, the pill and the antiwar movement; who married an African at a time when nearly two dozen states still had laws against interracial marriage; who, at 24, moved to Jakarta with her son in the waning days of an anticommunist bloodbath in which hundreds of thousands of Indonesians were slaughtered; who lived more than half her adult life in a place barely known to most Americans, in the country with the largest Muslim population in the world; who spent years working in villages where a lone Western woman was a rarity; who immersed herself in the study of blacksmithing, a craft long practiced exclusively by men; who, as a working and mostly single mother, brought up two biracial children; who believed her son in particular had the potential to be great; who raised him to be, as he has put it jokingly, a combination of Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi and Harry Belafonte; and then died at 52, never knowing who or what he would become.
Obama placed the ghost of his absent father at the center of his lyrical account of his life. At times, he has seemed to say more about the grandparents who helped raise him than about his mother. Yet she shaped him, to a degree Obama has seemed increasingly to acknowledge. In the preface to the 2004 edition of “Dreams From My Father,” issued nine years after the first edition and nine years after Dunham’s death, Obama folded in a revealing admission: had he known his mother would not survive her illness, he might have written a different book — “less a meditation on the absent parent, more a celebration of the one who was the single constant in my life.”
Dunham, for whom a letter in Jakarta from her son in the United States could raise her spirits for a full day, surely wondered about her place in his life. On rare occasions, she indicated as much — painfully, wistfully — to close friends. But she would not have been inclined to overstate her case. As she told him, with a dry humor that seems downright Kansan, “If nothing else, I gave you an interesting life.”
Ann Dunham, who jettisoned the name Stanley upon emerging from childhood, was just 17 years old in the fall of 1960 when she became pregnant with the child of a charismatic Kenyan named Barack Hussein Obama, a fellow student at the University of Hawaii who was more than six years her senior. She dropped out of school, married him and gave birth shortly before their union ended. In the aftermath, she met Lolo Soetoro, an amiable, easygoing, tennis-playing graduate student from the Indonesian island of Java. They married in 1964, after Ann’s divorce came through, but their early life together was upended by forces beyond their control. On Sept. 30, 1965, six Indonesian army generals and one lieutenant were kidnapped and killed in Jakarta, in what the army characterized as an attempted coup planned by the Communist Party. Students studying abroad, including Lolo, whose studies were sponsored by the government, were soon summoned home. A year later, in 1967, Ann graduated with a degree in anthropology, gathered up her 6-year-old child and moved to Indonesia to join her husband.
The four years that followed were formative for mother and son — and are a subject of curiosity and an object of speculation for many Americans today. These were years in which Ann lived closely with the young Obama, who at the time was called Barry; she impressed upon him her values and, consciously and unconsciously, shaped his emerging understanding of the world. She made choices about her own life too, setting an example that in some ways Obama would eventually embrace, while in other ways intentionally leaving it behind.
The white woman and her half-African son made quite a pair traveling in Indonesia together. Elizabeth Bryant, an American who lived in the city of Yogyakarta at the time, remembers a lunch held at another expatriate’s house that Ann and Barry attended. Ann arrived in a long skirt made of Indonesian fabric — not, Bryant noticed, a look that other American women in Indonesia seemed to favor. Ann instructed Barry to shake hands, then to sit on the sofa and turn his attention to an English-language workbook she brought along. Ann, who had been in Indonesia for nearly four years, talked about whether to go back to Hawaii. “She said, ‘What would you do?’ ” Bryant recalled when I spoke to her nearly 40 years later. “I said, ‘I could live here as long as two years, then would go back to Hawaii.’ She said, ‘Why?’ I said it was hard living, it took a toll on your body, there were no doctors, it was not healthy. She didn’t agree with me.”
Over lunch, Barry, who was 9 at the time, sat at the dining table and listened intently but did not speak. When he asked to be excused, Ann directed him to ask the hostess for permission. Permission granted, he got down on the floor and played with Bryant’s son, who was 13 months old. After lunch, the group took a walk, with Barry running ahead. A flock of Indonesian children began lobbing rocks in his direction. They ducked behind a wall and shouted racial epithets. He seemed unfazed, dancing around as though playing dodge ball “with unseen players,” Bryant said. Ann did not react. Assuming she must not have understood the words, Bryant offered to intervene. “No, he’s O.K.,” Ann said. “He’s used to it.”
“We were floored that she’d bring a half-black child to Indonesia, knowing the disrespect they have for blacks,” Bryant said. At the same time, she admired Ann for teaching her boy to be fearless. A child in Indonesia needed to be raised that way — for self-preservation, Bryant decided. Ann also seemed to be teaching Barry respect. He had all the politeness that Indonesian children displayed toward their parents. He seemed to be learning Indonesian ways.
“I think this is one reason he’s so halus,” Bryant said of the president, using the Indonesian adjective that means “polite, refined, or courteous,” referring to qualities some see as distinctively Javanese. “He has the manners of Asians and the ways of Americans — being halus, being patient, calm, a good listener. If you’re not a good listener in Indonesia, you’d better leave.”
Indonesia was still in a state of shock when Ann arrived in 1967 for the first of three extended periods of residence that would eventually add up to the majority of her adult life. The details of the attempted coup and countercoup remain in dispute even today, as do the particulars of the carnage that followed. But it is known that neighbors turned on neighbors. According to Adrian Vickers, the author of “A History of Modern Indonesia,” militias went door to door in villages, abducting suspects, raping women, even targeting children. “The best way to prove you were not a Communist was to join in the killings,” Vickers writes. Bill Collier, a friend of Ann’s who arrived in Indonesia in 1968 and spent 15 years doing social and economic surveys in villages, told me that researchers were told by people living near brackish waterways that they had been unable to eat the fish because of decaying corpses in the water. Many Indonesians chose never to speak about what had happened.
The Jakarta that greeted Ann Soetoro and her son was a tapestry of villages — low-rise and sprawling — interwoven with wooded areas, paddy fields and marshland. Narrow alleys disappeared into warrens of tile-roofed houses in the rambling urban hamlets called kampungs. Squatter colonies lined the canals, which served as public baths, laundry facilities and sewers, all in one. During the long rainy season from November through March, canals overflowed, saturating cardboard shanties and flooding much of the city. Residents traveled mostly on foot or by bicycle or bicycle-propelled rickshaws called becaks. Power outages were common. There were so few working phones that it was said that half the cars on the streets were ferrying messages from one office to the next. “Secretaries would spend hours just dialing and redialing phone numbers trying to get through,” Halimah Brugger, an American who moved there in 1968, told me. Westerners were rare, black people even rarer. Western women got a lot of attention. “I remember creating quite a sensation just being pedaled down the street in a becak, wearing a short skirt,” Brugger said. Letters from the United States took weeks to reach their destination. Foreigners endured all manner of gastrointestinal upsets. Deworming was de rigueur.
Yet the city had a magical charm. People who were children in Jakarta in that period, including Barack Obama, reminisce about the sound of the Muslim call to prayer in the days before public-address systems, and the signature sounds called out by street vendors wheeling their carts through the kampungs. Tea was still served on the veranda of the old Hotel des Indes. Ceiling fans turned languidly in the midafternoon heat, and kerosene lamps flickered in the houses lining the narrow alleys at night. For anyone of no interest to government security forces, life was simple. For a foreigner, it was possible to arrive in Indonesia in 1967 largely ignorant of the horror of just two years before. “I was quite naïve about the whole thing,” Brugger said. “It was all over then. I never felt the slightest bit endangered.” Years later, many people would look back on the late 1960s and early 1970s as a honeymoon period, Vickers writes. Restrictions on the press eased, a youth culture flowered, literary and cultural life thrived. It was, some later commented, Indonesia’s Prague Spring.
When Ann arrived, Lolo was in the army. His salary was low. On her first night in Indonesia, Ann complained later to a colleague, Lolo served her white rice and dendeng celeng — dried, jerked wild boar, which Indonesians hunted in the forests when food was scarce. But when Lolo completed his military service, his brother-in-law Trisulo used his contacts as a vice president at the Indonesian oil company Pertamina to help Lolo get a job in the Jakarta office of the Union Oil Company of California. By the early 1970s, Lolo and Ann had moved into a rented house in Matraman, a middle-class area of Jakarta. The house was a pavilyun, an annex on the grounds of a bigger main house. It had three bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, a library and a terrace. Like the households of other Indonesians who could afford it, it had a sizable domestic staff. Two female servants shared a bedroom; two men — a cook and a houseboy — slept mostly on the floor of the house or in the garden. The staff freed Ann from domestic obligations to a degree that would have been almost impossible in the United States. There were people to clean the house, prepare meals, buy groceries and look after her children — enabling her to work, pursue her interests and come and go as she wanted. The domestic staff made it possible, too, for Ann and Lolo to cultivate their own professional and social circles, which did not necessarily overlap.
By January 1968, Ann had gone to work as the assistant to the American director of Lembaga Indonesia-Amerika, a binational organization financed by the United States Information Service and housed at the U.S. Agency for International Development. She supervised a small group of Indonesians who taught English classes for Indonesian government employees and businessmen being sent by U.S.A.I.D. to the United States for graduate studies. It would be an understatement to say she disliked the job. “I worked at the U.S. Embassy in Djakarta for 2 horrible years,” she wrote to a friend. As Obama describes the job in his memoir, “The Indonesian businessmen weren’t much interested in the niceties of the English language, and several made passes at her.” Occasionally, she took Barry to work. Joseph Sigit, an Indonesian who worked as the office manager at the time, told me, “Our staff here sometimes made a joke of him because he looked different — the color of his skin.”
Obama’s Young Mother AbroadPublished: April 20, 2011
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By January 1968, Ann had gone to work as the assistant to the American director of Lembaga Indonesia-Amerika, a binational organization financed by the United States Information Service and housed at the U.S. Agency for International Development. She supervised a small group of Indonesians who taught English classes for Indonesian government employees and businessmen being sent by U.S.A.I.D. to the United States for graduate studies. It would be an understatement to say she disliked the job. “I worked at the U.S. Embassy in Djakarta for 2 horrible years,” she wrote to a friend. As Obama describes the job in his memoir, “The Indonesian businessmen weren’t much interested in the niceties of the English language, and several made passes at her.” Occasionally, she took Barry to work. Joseph Sigit, an Indonesian who worked as the office manager at the time, told me, “Our staff here sometimes made a joke of him because he looked different — the color of his skin.”
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HAWAII TIME Barack Obama with his father at the Honolulu airport at Christmas in 1971.
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Joked with him — or about him? I asked.
“With and about him,” Sigit said, with no evident embarrassment.
Two years later, at 27, Ann was hired to start an English-language business-communications department in one of the few private nonprofit management-training schools in the country. The school, called the Institute for Management Education and Development, was started several years earlier by a Dutch Jesuit priest with the intention of helping to build an Indonesian elite. Ann trained the teachers, developed the curriculum and taught top executives. In return, she received not just a paycheck but also a share of the revenue from the program. She also became a popular teacher. Ann’s classes “could be a riot of laughter from beginning to end. She had a great sense of humor,” said Leonard Kibble, who taught part time at the institute in the early 1970s. Some of the laughter involved Ann’s still-incomplete mastery of the Indonesian language. In one slip that Kibble said Ann delighted in recounting, she tried to tell a student that he would “get a promotion” if he learned English. Instead of using the phrase naik pangkat, she said naik pantat. The word naik means to “go up, rise, or mount”; pangkat means “rank” or “position.” Pantat means “buttocks.”
That same year, on Aug. 15, 1970, shortly after Barry’s ninth birthday and during what would turn out to be the only visit by her mother, Madelyn Dunham, to Indonesia, Ann gave birth to Maya Kassandra Soetoro at Saint Carolus Hospital, a Catholic hospital thought by Westerners at that time to be the best in Jakarta. When Halimah Brugger gave birth in the same hospital two years later, she told me, the doctor delivered her baby without the luxury of a stethoscope, gloves or gown. “When the baby was born, the doctor asked my husband for his handkerchief,” Brugger said. “Then she stuffed it in my mouth and gave me 11 stitches without any anesthesia.” Ann tried out three different names for her new daughter, all of them Sanskrit, before settling on Maya Kassandra. The name was important to Ann, Maya told me; she wanted “beautiful names.” Stanley, the name Ann felt burdened with as a child, was not on the list.
In Indonesia, Ann was a striking figure who did not go unnoticed. “Maybe just her presence — the way she carried herself,” said Halimah Bellows, whom Ann hired in the spring of 1971. She dressed simply, with little or no makeup, and wore her hair long, held back by a headband. By Javanese standards, she was, as Felina Pramono, an Indonesian colleague, put it, “a bit sturdy for a woman.” She had strong opinions — and rarely softened them to please others.
“She used to tear me apart,” says Kay Ikranagara, one of Ann’s closest friends, in a tone that sounded almost fond. Ann told her she needed to be bolder and stronger. She made fun of her inadequacy in the kitchen. She told her she should give her housekeeper explicit instructions, not simply let her do whatever she wanted. “With everybody she was like that: she would tell them what was wrong with them,” Ikranagara said. Family members were not spared. “She was very scathing about the traditional Indonesian wife role,” Ikranagara recalled. “She would tell Maya not to be such a wimp. She didn’t like this passive Indonesian female caricature. She would tell me not to fall into that.”
Ikranagara was the daughter of a development economist from the University of California who taught at the University of Indonesia in the late 1950s. She lived in Jakarta as a teenager, studied anthropology and linguistics in the 1960s at Berkeley and then returned to Jakarta, where she met her husband. She met Ann while teaching part time at the management school and writing her dissertation in linguistics. They had a lot in common: Indonesian husbands, degrees in anthropology, babies born in the same month, opinions shaped by the 1960s. They were less conscious than others of the boundaries between cultures, Ikranagara told me, and they rejected what they saw as the previous generation’s hypocrisy on the subject of race. “We had all the same attitudes,” she said. “When we met people who worked for the oil companies or the embassy, they belonged to a different culture than Ann and I. We felt they didn’t mix with Indonesians, they were part of an insular American culture.” Servants seemed to be the only Indonesians those Americans knew.
But by the early 1970s, Lolo’s new job had plunged him deeply into the oil-company culture. Foreign businesses in Indonesia were required to hire and train Indonesian partners. The exercise struck some people as a sham: companies would hire an Indonesian director, pay him well and give him little or nothing to do. Trisulo, Lolo’s brother-in-law, told me he did not recall the exact nature of Lolo’s job with Union Oil. His son, Sonny Trisulo, said it may have been “government relations.” Whatever it was, Lolo’s job included socializing with oil-company executives and their wives. He joined the Indonesian Petroleum Club, a private watering hole in Central Jakarta for oil-company people and their families, which offered swimming, tennis and dining. Ann was expected to socialize, too. Any failure to do so reflected badly on Lolo. “It’s the society that asks it,” Ikranagara said. “Your husband is supposed to show up at social functions with you at his side, dressed in a kain and kebaya,” a costume consisting of a traditional, tightly fitted, long-sleeved blouse and a length of unstitched cloth wound around the lower part of the body. “You’re supposed to sit with the women and talk about your children and your servants.”
Ann begged off. “She didn’t understand these folks — the idea of living an expatriate life that was so completely divorced from the world around you, that involves hiding yourself away in these protective cells of existence,” Maya said. “That was peculiar to her, and she was bored by it.” Ann complained to her friend Bill Collier that all those middle-aged white Americans talked about inane things. Lolo, she told Collier, “was becoming more American all the time.” Occasionally, the young Obama would overhear Lolo and Ann arguing in their bedroom about Ann’s refusal to attend his oil-company dinners, at which, he writes in “Dreams From My Father,” “American businessmen from Texas and Louisiana would slap Lolo’s back and boast about the palms they had greased to obtain the new offshore-drilling rights, while their wives complained to my mother about the quality of Indonesian help. He would ask her how it would look for him to go alone and remind her that these were her own people, and my mother’s voice would rise to almost a shout.
“ ‘They are not my people.’ ”
The relationship between Ann and Lolo appears to have begun deteriorating even before Lolo took the oil-company job. As Obama describes it, something happened between them when Lolo was called back to Jakarta during the time of unrest in Indonesia and they spent a year apart. In Hawaii, Lolo was full of life, regaling Ann with stories from his childhood, confiding his plans to return to his country and teach at the university. Now he barely spoke to her. Some nights, he would sleep with a pistol under his pillow; other nights, she would hear him “wandering through the house with a bottle of imported whiskey, nursing his secrets.” Ann’s loneliness was a constant, Obama writes, “like a shortness of breath.”
Ann had pieced together some of what happened in Indonesia in 1965 and afterward from fragmentary information that people let slip. Her new Indonesian friends talked to her about corruption in government agencies, police and military shakedowns, the power of the president’s entourage. Lolo would not talk about any of it. According to Obama, a cousin of Lolo’s finally explained to Ann what happened when her husband returned from Hawaii. Upon arriving in Jakarta, he was taken away for questioning and told he had been conscripted and would be sent to the jungles of New Guinea for a year. It could have been worse: students returning from Soviet-bloc countries were jailed or even vanished. Obama writes that Ann concluded that “power had taken Lolo and yanked him back into line just when he thought he’d escaped, making him feel its weight, letting him know that his life wasn’t his own.” In response, Lolo made his peace with power, “learned the wisdom of forgetting; just as his brother-in-law had done, making millions as a high official in the national oil company.”
Lolo had disappointed Ann, but her refusal to conform to his culture’s expectations apparently angered him as well. “She didn’t know, as little I knew, how Indonesian men change when suddenly their family is around,” Renske Heringa, a Dutch anthropologist and close friend of Ann’s in the 1980s who herself married a man who was half Indonesian, told me. “And how Indonesian men like women to be easy and open abroad, but when you get to Indonesia, the parents are there, the family is there, you have to behave. You have to be the little wife. As a wife, you were not supposed to make yourself visible besides being beautiful. By the time I knew Ann, she was a hefty woman. She didn’t care about getting dressed, wearing jewelry, the way Indonesian women do. That was not her style. He expected her to do it. That is one reason she didn’t stick it out. She absolutely refused to. I understand why he couldn’t accept it.”
One morning in January 2009, at the offices of the management school for which Ann had worked, I met a man in his late 50s named Saman. Like some Javanese, he went by a single name. Speaking in Bahasa Indonesia, with Ann’s former assistant Felina Pramono translating, he told me that he worked as a houseboy for Lolo and Ann in the early 1970s. One of seven children from a family of farmers, Saman moved to Jakarta as a teenager to find work. When he worked for Ann and Lolo, his duties included gardening; taking care of a pet turtle, dog, rabbit and bird; and taking Barry to school by bicycle or becak. Ann and Lolo paid Saman well and treated all four members of the household staff equally, he said. He remembered Lolo as stern and Ann as kindhearted.
Ann would finish teaching at 9 in the evening and sometimes not return home until midnight, Saman said. She seemed barely to sleep. She would stay up, typing and correcting Barry’s homework, then get up again before dawn. On one occasion, Saman said: “She got home late with a student, but the student didn’t see her home properly. So he dropped her near the house, and Soetoro got very mad because of that.” An argument ensued, which Saman overheard. “He said: ‘I’ve warned you many times. Why are you still doing this?’ ” Saman recalled. Whether Lolo’s worry was infidelity or simply what others might think is unclear from Saman’s story. After the argument, he said, Ann appeared in the house with a towel pressed to her face and blood running from her nose. It is difficult to know what to make of the nearly 40-year-old recollection. No one else I interviewed suggested there was ever violence between Ann and Lolo, a man many people described as patient and sweet-tempered.
When one fellow teacher, an Indonesian man whom Ann befriended, asked about her husband in 1968 or 1969, she told him grimly: “I’m never asked. I’m told.” Reflecting on her marriage some years later, Ann told another Indonesian friend, Yang Suwan, resignedly: “Don’t you know that you don’t argue and you don’t discuss with a Javanese person? Because problems don’t exist with Javanese people. Time will solve problems.”
With her children, Ann made a point of being more physically affectionate than her mother had been with her, she told one friend. She was cuddly and would say, “I love you,” according to Maya, a hundred times a day. She was playful — making pottery, weaving decorations, doing art projects that stretched across the room. “I think that we benefited a great deal from her focus when we were with her, when she was beside us,” Maya told me. “So that made the absences hurt a little less.” Where her children were involved, Ann was easily moved to tears, even occasionally when speaking about them to friends. She preferred humor to harping, but she was exacting about the things she believed mattered most. Richard Hook, who worked with Ann in Jakarta in the late 1980s and early 1990s, said she told him that she worked to instill ideas about public service in her son. She wanted Barry to have a sense of obligation, to give something back. She wanted him to start off, Hook said, with the attitudes and values she had taken years to learn.
Obama’s Young Mother AbroadPublished: April 20, 2011
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Ann would finish teaching at 9 in the evening and sometimes not return home until midnight, Saman said. She seemed barely to sleep. She would stay up, typing and correcting Barry’s homework, then get up again before dawn. On one occasion, Saman said: “She got home late with a student, but the student didn’t see her home properly. So he dropped her near the house, and Soetoro got very mad because of that.” An argument ensued, which Saman overheard. “He said: ‘I’ve warned you many times. Why are you still doing this?’ ” Saman recalled. Whether Lolo’s worry was infidelity or simply what others might think is unclear from Saman’s story. After the argument, he said, Ann appeared in the house with a towel pressed to her face and blood running from her nose. It is difficult to know what to make of the nearly 40-year-old recollection. No one else I interviewed suggested there was ever violence between Ann and Lolo, a man many people described as patient and sweet-tempered.
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When one fellow teacher, an Indonesian man whom Ann befriended, asked about her husband in 1968 or 1969, she told him grimly: “I’m never asked. I’m told.” Reflecting on her marriage some years later, Ann told another Indonesian friend, Yang Suwan, resignedly: “Don’t you know that you don’t argue and you don’t discuss with a Javanese person? Because problems don’t exist with Javanese people. Time will solve problems.”
With her children, Ann made a point of being more physically affectionate than her mother had been with her, she told one friend. She was cuddly and would say, “I love you,” according to Maya, a hundred times a day. She was playful — making pottery, weaving decorations, doing art projects that stretched across the room. “I think that we benefited a great deal from her focus when we were with her, when she was beside us,” Maya told me. “So that made the absences hurt a little less.” Where her children were involved, Ann was easily moved to tears, even occasionally when speaking about them to friends. She preferred humor to harping, but she was exacting about the things she believed mattered most. Richard Hook, who worked with Ann in Jakarta in the late 1980s and early 1990s, said she told him that she worked to instill ideas about public service in her son. She wanted Barry to have a sense of obligation, to give something back. She wanted him to start off, Hook said, with the attitudes and values she had taken years to learn.
“If you want to grow into a human being,” Obama remembers her saying, “you’re going to need some values.” When necessary, Ann was, according to two accounts, not unwilling to reinforce her message. “She talked about disciplining Barry, including spanking him for things where he richly deserved a spanking,” said Don Johnston, who worked with Ann in the early 1990s, sometimes traveling with her in Indonesia and living in the same house. Saman said that when Barry failed to finish homework sent from Hawaii by his grandmother, Ann “would call him into his room and would spank him with his father’s military belt.” President Obama, through a spokeswoman, said his mother never resorted to physical discipline.
One evening in the house in Matraman, Saman said, he and Barry were preparing to go to sleep. They often slept in the same place — sometimes in the bunk bed in Barry’s room, sometimes on the dining-room floor or in the garden. On this occasion, Barry, who was 8 or 9 at the time, asked Saman to turn out the light. When Saman did not do it, he said, Barry hit him in the chest. When he did not react, Barry hit him harder, and Saman struck him back. Barry began to cry loudly, attracting Ann’s attention. According to Saman, Ann did not respond. She seemed to realize that Barry had been in the wrong. Otherwise, Saman would not have struck him.
“We were not permitted to be rude, we were not permitted to be mean, we were not permitted to be arrogant,” Maya told me. “We had to have a certain humility and broad-mindedness. We had to study. . . . If we said something unkind about someone, she would try to talk about their point of view. Or, ‘How would you feel?’ Sort of compelling us ever toward empathy and those kinds of things and not allowing us to be selfish. That was constant, steady, daily.”
It was clear to many that Ann believed Barry, in particular, was unusually gifted. She would boast about his brains, his achievements, how brave he was. Benji Bennington, a friend of Ann’s from Hawaii, told me, “Sometimes when she talked about Barack, she’d say, ‘Well, my son is so bright, he can do anything he ever wants in the world, even be president of the United States.’ I remember her saying that.” Samardal Manan, who taught with Ann in Jakarta, remembered Ann saying something similar — that Barry could be, or perhaps wanted to be, the first black president.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” Lolo asked Barry one evening, according to Saman.
“Oh, prime minister,” Barry answered.
What mattered as much as anything to Ann, as a parent, was her children’s education. But that was not simple. Indonesian schools in the late 1960s and early 1970s were inadequate; there were not enough of them, the government controlled the curriculum, teachers were poorly trained. Westerners sent their children to the Jakarta International School, but it was expensive and difficult to get into. Obama attended two Indonesian schools, one Catholic and one Muslim. The experience cannot have failed to have left a mark. The Javanese, especially the Central Javanese, place an enormous emphasis on self-control. Even to sneeze was to exhibit an untoward lack of self-control, said Michael Dove, who got to know Ann when they were both anthropologists working in Java in the 1980s. “You demonstrate an inner strength by not betraying emotion, not speaking loudly, not moving jerkily,” he said. Self-control is inculcated through a culture of teasing, Kay Ikranagara told me. Her husband, known only as Ikranagara, said, “People tease about skin color all the time.” If a child allows the teasing to bother him, he is teased more. If he ignores it, it stops. “Our ambassador said this was where Barack learned to be cool,” Kay told me. “If you get mad and react, you lose. If you learn to laugh and take it without any reaction, you win.”
With time, Ann’s thinking about Barack’s future changed. “She had always encouraged my rapid acculturation in Indonesia,” he wrote in his memoir. “It had made me relatively self-sufficient, undemanding on a tight budget, and extremely well mannered when compared with other American children. She had taught me to disdain the blend of ignorance and arrogance that too often characterized Americans abroad. But she now had learned, just as Lolo had learned, the chasm that separated the life chances of an American from those of an Indonesian. She knew which side of the divide she wanted her child to be on. I was an American, she decided, and my true life lay elsewhere.”
In early 1971, Ann told Barry that he would be returning to Hawaii. He would live with his grandparents in Honolulu and attend Punahou School, a respected prep school within walking distance of the Dunhams’ apartment. “She said that she and Maya would be joining me in Hawaii very soon — a year, tops — and that she’d try to make it there for Christmas,” he wrote in “Dreams From My Father.” Ann’s uncle Charles Payne told me he suspected that her mother, Madelyn, played a part in the decision. “Madelyn always had a great concern about Barack getting a good education,” he said. “I think that was her defense against his racial mixture — that education was the solution to whatever problems that would bring.”
As Obama later described his send-off, an Indonesian co-pilot who was a friend of Ann’s escorted him to the plane “as she and Lolo and my new sister, Maya, stood by at the gate.”
Ann uprooted Barry, at age 6, and transplanted him to Jakarta. Now she was uprooting him again, at barely 10, and sending him back, alone. She would follow him to Hawaii only to leave him again, less than three years later.
When we spoke last July, Obama recalled those serial displacements. “I think that was harder on a 10-year-old boy than he’d care to admit at the time,” Obama said, sitting in a chair in the Oval Office and speaking about his mother with a mix of affection and critical distance. “When we were separated again during high school, at that point I was old enough to say, ‘This is my choice, my decision.’ But being a parent now and looking back at that, I could see — you know what? — that would be hard on a kid.”
He spoke about his mother with fondness, humor and a degree of candor that I had not expected. There was also in his tone at times a hint of gentle forbearance. Perhaps it was the tone of someone whose patience had been tested, by a person he loved, to the point where he had stepped back to a safer distance. Or perhaps it was the knowingness of a grown child seeing his parent as irredeemably human.
“She was a very strong person in her own way,” Obama said, when I asked about Ann’s limitations as a mother. “Resilient, able to bounce back from setbacks, persistent — the fact that she ended up finishing her dissertation. But despite all those strengths, she was not a well-organized person. And that disorganization, you know, spilled over. Had it not been for my grandparents, I think, providing some sort of safety net financially, being able to take me and my sister on at certain spots, I think my mother would have had to make some different decisions. And I think that sometimes she took for granted that, ‘Well, it’ll all work out, and it’ll be fine.’ But the fact is, it might not always have been fine, had it not been for my grandmother. . . . Had she not been there to provide that floor, I think our young lives could have been much more chaotic than they were.”
But he did not, he said, hold his mother’s choices against her. Part of being an adult is seeing your parents “as people who have their own strengths, weaknesses, quirks, longings.” He did not believe, he said, that parents served their children well by being unhappy. If his mother had cramped her spirit, it would not have given him a happier childhood. As it was, she gave him the single most important gift a parent can give — “a sense of unconditional love that was big enough that, with all the surface disturbances of our lives, it sustained me, entirely.”
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