Once, long ago, Evie looked after "Barry" Obama, the kid who would grow up to become the world's most powerful man. Now, his transgender former nanny has given up her tight, flowery dresses, her brocade vest and her bras, and is living in fear on Indonesia's streets. 
 
 In this Friday, Jan. 27, 2012 photo, Evie, also known as Turdi, the former nanny of U.S. President Barack Obama, irons laundry in her room at a boarding house in a slum in Jakarta, Indonesia. Evie, who... (Associated Press) 
 
 In this Friday, Jan. 27, 2012 photo, Evie, also known as Turdi, the former nanny of U.S. President Barack Obama, stands at the doorway of her room at a boarding house in a slum in Jakarta, Indonesia.... (Associated Press) 
 
 In this Friday, Jan. 27, 2012 photo, Evie, also known as Turdi, the former nanny of U.S. President Barack Obama, shows a picture of herself, left, dressed as a woman with an unidentified friend in a pageant,... (Associated Press) 
 
 In this Friday, Jan. 20, 2012 photo, an Indonesian transvestite Yulianus Retoblaut who is also known as Mami Yulie, center, is accompanied by fellow transvestites as she is interviewed by a local TV after... (Associated Press) 
 
 In this Friday, Jan. 27, 2012 photo, Indonesian transvestites perform a dance for small change in Jakarta, Indonesia. Indonesia's attitude toward transgenders is complex. Nobody knows how many of them... (Associated Press) 
 
 Evie, who was born a man but believes she is really a woman, has endured a lifetime of taunts and beatings because of her identity. She describes how soldiers once shaved her long, black hair to the scalp and smashed out glowing cigarettes onto her hands and arms. 
 
 The turning point came when she found a transgender friend's bloated body floating in a backed-up sewage canal two decades ago. She grabbed all her girlie clothes in her arms and stuffed them into two big boxes. Half-used lipstick, powder, eye makeup _ she gave them all away. 
 
 "I knew in my heart I was a woman, but I didn't want to die like that," says Evie, now 66, her lips trembling slightly as the memories flood back. "So I decided to just accept it. ... I've been living like this, a man, ever since." 
 
 Indonesia's attitude toward transgenders is complex. 
 
 Nobody knows how many of them live in the sprawling archipelagic nation of 240 million, but activists estimate 7 million. Because Indonesia is home to more Muslims than any other country in the world, the pervasiveness of men who live as women and vice versa often catches newcomers by surprise. They hold the occasional pageant, work as singers or at salons and include well-known celebrity talk show host Dorce Gamalama. 
 
 However, societal disdain still runs deep _ when transgenders act in TV comedies, they are invariably the brunt of the joke. They have taken a much lower profile in recent years, following a series of attacks by Muslim hard-liners. And the country's highest Islamic body has decreed that they are required to live as they were born because each gender has obligations to fulfill, such as reproduction. 
 
 "They must learn to accept their nature," says Ichwan Syam, a prominent Muslim cleric at the influential Indonesian Ulema Council. "If they are not willing to cure themselves medically and religiously" they have "to accept their fate to be ridiculed and harassed." 
 
 Many transgenders turn to prostitution because jobs are hard to find and because they want to live according to what they believe is their true gender. In doing so, they put themselves at risk of contracting AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. 
 
 Some, like Evie, have decided it's better to hide their feelings. Others are pushing back. Last month, a 50-year-old Indonesian transvestite applied to be the next leader of the national human rights commission, showing up in a borrowed luxury vehicle with paparazzi cameras flashing as she stepped out. 
 
 "I'm too ugly to be a prostitute," Yuli Retoblaut said, chuckling. "But I can be their bodyguard." 
 
 The threat of violence is very real: Indonesia's National Commission for Human Rights receives about 1,000 reports of abuses per year, ranging from murder and rape to the disruption to group activities. Worldwide, at least one person is killed every other day, according to the Trans Murder Monitoring Project, which collects homicide reports. 
 
 Evie says she chose her current name because she thought it sounded sweet. But she adds, as she pulls out her national identification card, her official name is Turdi and gender male. Several longtime residents of Obama's old Menteng neighborhood confirmed that Turdi had worked there as his nanny for two years, also caring for his baby sister Maya. When asked about the nanny, the White House had no comment. 
 
 Evie, who like many Indonesians goes by a single name, now lives in a closet-sized hovel in a tightly packed slum in an eastern corner of Jakarta, collecting and scrubbing dirty laundry to pay for food. She wears baggy blue jeans and a white T-shirt advertising a tranquil beach resort far away in a place she's never been. She speaks softly, politely, and a deep worry line is etched between her eyes. 
 
 As a child, Evie was often beaten by a father who couldn't stand having such a "sissy" for a son. 
 
 "He wanted me to act like a boy, even though I didn't feel it in my soul," she says. 
 
 Teased and bullied, she dropped out of school after the third grade and decided to learn how to cook. 
 
 As it turned out, she was pretty good at it, making her way into the kitchens of several high-ranking officials by the time she was a teenager, she recalls with a smile and a wink. And so it was, at a cocktail party in 1969, that she met Ann Dunham, Barack Obama's mother, who had arrived in the country two years earlier after marrying her second husband, Indonesian Lolo Soetoro. 
 
 Dunham was so impressed by Evie's beef steak and fried rice that she offered her a job in the family home. It didn't take long before Evie also was 8-year-old Barry's caretaker, playing with him and bringing him to and from school. 
 
 Neighbors recalled that they often saw Evie leave the house in the evening fully made up and dressed in drag. But she says it's doubtful Barry ever knew. 
 
 "He was so young," says Evie. "And I never let him see me wearing women's clothes. But he did see me trying on his mother's lipstick, sometimes. That used to really crack him up." 
 
 When the family left in the early 1970s, things started going downhill. She moved in with a boyfriend. That relationship ended three years later, and she became a sex worker. 
 
 "I tried to get a job as a maid, but no one would hire me," says Evie. "I needed money to buy food, get a place to stay." 
 
 It was a cat-and-mouse game with security guards and _ because the country was still under the dictatorship of Gen. Suharto _ soldiers. They often rounded up "banshees" or "warias," as they are known locally, loaded them into trucks, and brought them to a field where they were kicked, hit and otherwise abused. 
 
 The raid that changed everything came in 1985. She and her friends scattered into dark alleys to escape the swinging batons. One particularly beautiful girl, Susi, jumped into a canal strewn with garbage. 
 
 When things quieted, those who ran went back to look for her. 
 
 "We searched all night," says Evie, who is still haunted by the memory of her friend's face. "Finally ... we found her. It was horrible. Her body swollen, face bashed in." 
 
 Today Evie seeks solace in religion, going regularly to the mosque and praying five times a day. She says she's just waiting to die. 
 
 "I don't have a future anymore." 
 
 She says she didn't know the boy she helped raise won the 2008 U.S. presidential election until she saw a picture of the family in local newspapers and on TV. She blurted out that she knew him. 
 
 "I couldn't believe my eyes," she says, breaking into a huge grin. 
 
 Her friends at first laughed and thought she was crazy, but those who live in the family's old neighborhood say it's true. 
 
 "Many neighbors would remember Turdi ... she was popular here at that time," says Rudy Yara, who still lives across the street from Obama's former house. "She was a nice person and was always patient and caring in keeping young Barry." 
 
 Evie hopes her former charge will use his power to fight for people like her. Obama named Amanda Simpson, the first openly transgender appointee, as a senior technical adviser in the Commerce Department in 2010. 
 
 For Evie, who's now just trying to earn enough to survive each day on Jakarta's streets, the election victory itself was enough to give her a reason _ for the first time in a long time _ to feel proud. 
 
 "Now when people call me scum," she says, "I can just say: 'But I was the nanny for the President of the United States!'" 
 
 ____ 
 
 Associated Press writer Robin McDowell contributed from Jakarta. ||||| In this Friday, Jan. 27, 2012 photo, Indonesian transvestites perform a dance for small change in Jakarta, Indonesia. Indonesia's attitude toward transgenders is complex. Nobody knows how many of them... (Associated Press) 
 
 Once, long ago, Evie looked after "Barry" Obama, the kid who would grow up to become the world's most powerful man. Now, his transgender former nanny has given up her tight, flowery dresses, her brocade vest and her bras, and is living in fear on Indonesia's streets. 
 
 Evie, who was born a man but believes she is really a woman, has endured a lifetime of taunts and beatings because of her identity. She describes how soldiers once shaved her long, black hair to the scalp and smashed out glowing cigarettes onto her hands and arms. 
 
 The turning point came when she found a transgender friend's bloated body floating in a backed-up sewage canal two decades ago. She grabbed all her girlie clothes in her arms and stuffed them into two big boxes. Half-used lipstick, powder, eye makeup _ she gave them all away. 
 
 "I knew in my heart I was a woman, but I didn't want to die like that," says Evie, now 66, her lips trembling slightly as the memories flood back. "So I decided to just accept it. ... I've been living like this, a man, ever since." 
 
 Indonesia's attitude toward transgenders is complex. 
 
 Nobody knows how many of them live in the sprawling archipelagic nation of 240 million, but activists estimate 7 million. Because Indonesia is home to more Muslims than any other country in the world, the pervasiveness of men who live as women and vice versa often catches newcomers by surprise. They hold the occasional pageant, work as singers or at salons and include well-known celebrity talk show host Dorce Gamalama. 
 
 However, societal disdain still runs deep _ when transgenders act in TV comedies, they are invariably the brunt of the joke. They have taken a much lower profile in recent years, following a series of attacks by Muslim hard-liners. And the country's highest Islamic body has decreed that they are required to live as they were born because each gender has obligations to fulfill, such as reproduction. 
 
 "They must learn to accept their nature," says Ichwan Syam, a prominent Muslim cleric at the influential Indonesian Ulema Council. "If they are not willing to cure themselves medically and religiously" they have "to accept their fate to be ridiculed and harassed." 
 
 Many transgenders turn to prostitution because jobs are hard to find and because they want to live according to what they believe is their true gender. In doing so, they put themselves at risk of contracting AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. 
 
 Some, like Evie, have decided it's better to hide their feelings. Others are pushing back. Last month, a 50-year-old Indonesian transvestite applied to be the next leader of the national human rights commission, showing up in a borrowed luxury vehicle with paparazzi cameras flashing as she stepped out. 
 
 "I'm too ugly to be a prostitute," Yuli Retoblaut said, chuckling. "But I can be their bodyguard." 
 
 The threat of violence is very real: Indonesia's National Commission for Human Rights receives about 1,000 reports of abuses per year, ranging from murder and rape to the disruption to group activities. Worldwide, at least one person is killed every other day, according to the Trans Murder Monitoring Project, which collects homicide reports. 
 
 Evie says she chose her current name because she thought it sounded sweet. But she adds, as she pulls out her national identification card, her official name is Turdi and gender male. Several longtime residents of Obama's old Menteng neighborhood confirmed that Turdi had worked there as his nanny for two years, also caring for his baby sister Maya. When asked about the nanny, the White House had no comment. 
 
 Evie, who like many Indonesians goes by a single name, now lives in a closet-sized hovel in a tightly packed slum in an eastern corner of Jakarta, collecting and scrubbing dirty laundry to pay for food. She wears baggy blue jeans and a white T-shirt advertising a tranquil beach resort far away in a place she's never been. She speaks softly, politely, and a deep worry line is etched between her eyes. 
 
 As a child, Evie was often beaten by a father who couldn't stand having such a "sissy" for a son. 
 
 "He wanted me to act like a boy, even though I didn't feel it in my soul," she says. 
 
 Teased and bullied, she dropped out of school after the third grade and decided to learn how to cook. 
 
 As it turned out, she was pretty good at it, making her way into the kitchens of several high-ranking officials by the time she was a teenager, she recalls with a smile and a wink. And so it was, at a cocktail party in 1969, that she met Ann Dunham, Barack Obama's mother, who had arrived in the country two years earlier after marrying her second husband, Indonesian Lolo Soetoro. 
 
 Dunham was so impressed by Evie's beef steak and fried rice that she offered her a job in the family home. It didn't take long before Evie also was 8-year-old Barry's caretaker, playing with him and bringing him to and from school. 
 
 Neighbors recalled that they often saw Evie leave the house in the evening fully made up and dressed in drag. But she says it's doubtful Barry ever knew. 
 
 "He was so young," says Evie. "And I never let him see me wearing women's clothes. But he did see me trying on his mother's lipstick, sometimes. That used to really crack him up." 
 
 When the family left in the early 1970s, things started going downhill. She moved in with a boyfriend. That relationship ended three years later, and she became a sex worker. 
 
 "I tried to get a job as a maid, but no one would hire me," says Evie. "I needed money to buy food, get a place to stay." 
 
 It was a cat-and-mouse game with security guards and _ because the country was still under the dictatorship of Gen. Suharto _ soldiers. They often rounded up "banshees" or "warias," as they are known locally, loaded them into trucks, and brought them to a field where they were kicked, hit and otherwise abused. 
 
 The raid that changed everything came in 1985. She and her friends scattered into dark alleys to escape the swinging batons. One particularly beautiful girl, Susi, jumped into a canal strewn with garbage. 
 
 When things quieted, those who ran went back to look for her. 
 
 "We searched all night," says Evie, who is still haunted by the memory of her friend's face. "Finally ... we found her. It was horrible. Her body swollen, face bashed in." 
 
 Today Evie seeks solace in religion, going regularly to the mosque and praying five times a day. She says she's just waiting to die. 
 
 "I don't have a future anymore." 
 
 She says she didn't know the boy she helped raise won the 2008 U.S. presidential election until she saw a picture of the family in local newspapers and on TV. She blurted out that she knew him. 
 
 "I couldn't believe my eyes," she says, breaking into a huge grin. 
 
 Her friends at first laughed and thought she was crazy, but those who live in the family's old neighborhood say it's true. 
 
 "Many neighbors would remember Turdi ... she was popular here at that time," says Rudy Yara, who still lives across the street from Obama's former house. "She was a nice person and was always patient and caring in keeping young Barry." 
 
 Evie hopes her former charge will use his power to fight for people like her. Obama named Amanda Simpson, the first openly transgender appointee, as a senior technical adviser in the Commerce Department in 2010. 
 
 For Evie, who's now just trying to earn enough to survive each day on Jakarta's streets, the election victory itself was enough to give her a reason _ for the first time in a long time _ to feel proud. 
 
 "Now when people call me scum," she says, "I can just say: 'But I was the nanny for the President of the United States!'" 
 
 ____ 
 
 Associated Press writer Robin McDowell contributed from Jakarta. ||||| 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. 
 
 Photo 
 
 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. 
 
 Photo 
 
 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. 
 
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 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.” 
 
 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.” 
 
 Photo 
 
 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. 
 
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 “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.” 
 
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 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. 
 
 Photo 
 
 “ ‘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. 
 
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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.” 
 
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 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. 
 
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 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.” 
 
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 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.”
– Indonesia is home to 7 million transgendered people who face ongoing harassment, rape, and murder—and Barack Obama's former nanny is among their ranks. Following years of abuse, Evie, born a man, decided to leave cross-dressing behind after a friend was brutally murdered in 1985, the AP reports, in an exclusive look at her predicament and the situation in Indonesia at large. Though the lifestyle is very much in the public eye—a major talk-show host is transgendered—attacks have mounted in recent years, and the country's top Islamic organization has condemned the transgender lifestyle, the AP reports. "They must learn to accept their nature" or "accept their fate to be ridiculed and harassed," says a top cleric. As a child, Evie dropped out of school and pursued a career in cooking, eventually finding work as a cook for Obama's mother in 1969. During that time, she became a de facto nanny to an 8-year-old Barack and sister Maya. And though she often went out at night dressed as a woman, "I never let him see me wearing women's clothes. But he did see me trying on his mother's lipstick, sometimes. That used to really crack him up." But after the family moved away, Evie fell on hard times and ultimately became a sex worker. Today, she says she doesn't "have a future anymore" and is simply counting down the days until she dies. Still, when she found out that Obama had become president, "I couldn't believe my eyes," she notes. "Now when people call me scum, I can just say: 'But I was the nanny for the president of the United States!'"