Jakarta: a love story Paperback – Large Print, August 9, 2025

Stanley Ann Dunham found much comfort living with the simplicity of the peasants in Indonesia and making a profound difference in the economic appeasement in this country. The impact of her work lives on changing lives on a daily basis.She died in 1995 just after receiving her Ph.D. in Economic Anthropology and before her son became the 44th president of the United States. Her dissertation, Surviving Against the Odds, published by Duke University Press in 2009 isn’t a novel, but an explosion of “village industry in Indonesia,” It expounds with the years she spent in Indonesia as an American pursuing the economic threats to the village cultures and most importantly the crafts that are created from blacksmithing, to batiks, birdcages, and clay items. She explored the non-agricultural ways of making a living in Kajar that could have become mainly factory produced or imported from outside the country if she did not go in there and live among the indigenous people there. In the months I spent writing about her I grew to understand how the involvement of an educated and caring woman can make a difference in the way a group lives. She saw the need for blacksmithing businesses to have low interest loans. She lived among the people so she understood the family as a deep spiritual system of beliefs that went beyond what people from other cultures may understand. Read more