Five-year-old Ananda is the youngest member of the Valley family still living in Koto. When she is not in kindergarten, she spends most of her time with her grandmother, Maryati, the oldest member of the family in the village, her single mother, and a number of other members of the family who live on their ancestral land and are her mother's cousins. Ananda, her mother and grandmother have just moved into a new house built for them by her three aunts who live in the rantau. They have all achieved some measure of success in their professions and recently bought a piece of land across the road from the family's traditional holdings that was put up for sale by another extended family in the village (see Hasanah's story in Chapter 10). In addition to providing a place for their mother and sister to live, these women wanted to maintain a stake in the village that they owned themselves. While they could, in theory, have built a house on the family's communal property across the road from where their new house is located, this would have meant negotiating with other family members and also that they would not own the property outright. The current situation means that they own the house as well as the land on which it is located and can do whatever they like with it in the future.

Other changes have taken place in Koto that mark a break with tradition. About 90 metres down the road from Ananda's house, a woman from a nearby village has opened a small, roadside stand selling coffee and light meals. The owner, her adult daughter and several grandchildren are all living on the premises which they built on a plot of land leased to them by the village family that owns the adjacent fields. While it is unclear whether such a venture can be successful in Koto, it is concerning to a number of the members of the Valley family, who are increasingly worried about people from outside the village gaining control of land and assets that rightfully belong to the extended families that originate in Koto (see the story of Marni and Marjan in Chapter 10). Nonetheless, the family has been slow to document their own land and obtain deeds to their hereditary assets as it is now possible to do within the Indonesian legal system.