Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii to Barack Obama, Sr. (born in Nyanza Province, Kenya) and Ann Dunham (born in Wichita, Kansas). His parents met while both were attending the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where his father was enrolled as a foreign student. Obama's parents separated when he was two years old and later divorced. His father went to Harvard University to pursue Ph.D. studies, then returned to Kenya, where he died in an auto accident when the younger Obama was twenty-one years old.

When he was 5 years old, his mother married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian foreign student, with whom she had one daughter, Maya. The family moved to Jakarta in 1967, where Obama attended local schools from ages 6 to 10. In his memoir "Dreams of My Father", Obama describes his experiences growing up in his mother's American middle class family. His knowledge about his absent Luo father came mainly through family stories and photographs.Of his early childhood, Obama writes: "That my father looked nothing like the people around me—that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk—barely registered in my mind." The book describes his struggles as a young adult to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage. He used alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine during his teenage years, Obama writes, to "push questions of who I was out of my mind."

I will post extracts of what Obama wrote about his time spent in Indonesia here for the Indochatters, he was 6 years old when he arrived in Djakrta:




.. to be cont'd

He was 6 years old and his step father forced him to see such scene? I don't think it's right...

"...red, hairy-skinned fruit so sweet at the center that only a stomachache could make me stop."
Rambutan?

Thanks for typing it for all of us, Tanga! His childhood, and Jakarta in the late 60s, seems very idyllic and exotic for the (hopeful) US presidential candidate.

Welcome! let me go on!

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cont'd

"The first thing to remember is how to protect yourself."

Lolo and I faced off in the backyard. A day earlier, I had shown up at the house with an egg-sized lump on the side of my head. Lolo had looked up from washing his motorcycle nad asked me what had happened, and I told him about my tussle with an older boy who lived down the road. The boy had run off with my friend's soccer ball, I said, in the middle of our game. When I chased after him, the boy picked up a rock. It wasn't fair, I said, my voice choking with aggrievement. He had cheated.

Lolo had parted my hair with his fingers and silently examined the wound. "It's not bleeding," he said finally, before returning to his chrome.

I thought that had ended the matter. But when he came home from work the next day, he had with him two pairs of boxing gloves. They smelled of new leather, the larger pair black, the smaller pair red, the laces tied together and thrown over his shoulder.

He now finished tying the laces on my gloves and stepped back to examine his handiwork. My hands dangled at my sides like bulbs at the end of thin stalks. He shook his head and raised the gloves to cover my face.

"There. Keep your hands up." He adjusted my elbows, then crouched into a stance and started to bob. "You want to keep moving, but always stay low -- don't give them a target. How does the that feel?" I nodded, copying his movements as best I could. After a few minutes, he stopped and held his palm up in front of my nose.

"Okay," he said. "Let's see your swing."

This I could do. I took a step back, wound up, and delivered my best shot. His hand barely wobbled.

"Not bad," Lolo said. He nodded to himself, his expression unchanged. "Not bad at all. Agh, but look where your hands are now. What did I tell you? Get them up..."

I raised my arms, throwing soft jabs at Lolo's palm, glancing upon at him every so often and realizing how familiar his face had become after our two years together, as familiar as the earth on which we stood. It had taken me less than six months to learn Indonesia's language, its customs, and its legends. I had survived chicken pox, measles, and the sting of my teachers' bamboo switches. The children of farmers, servants, and low-level bureaucrats had become my best friends, and together we ran the streets morning and night, hustling odd jobs, catching crickets, battling swift kites with razor-sharp lines -- the loser watched his kite soar off with the wind, and knew that somewhere other children had formed a long wobbly train, their heads toward the sky, waiting for their prize to land. With Lolo, I learned how to eat small green chilli peppers raw with dinner (plenty of rice), and, away from the dinner table, I was introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy). Like many Indonesians, Lolo followed a brand of Islam that could make room for the remnants of more ancient animist and Hindu faiths. He explained that a man took on the powers of whatever he ate. On day soon, he promised, he would bring home a piece of tiger meat for us to share.

That's how things were, one long adventure, the bounty of a young boy's life. In letters to my grandparents ((in Hawaii), I would faithfully record many of these events, confident that more civilizing packages of chocolate and peanut butter would surely follow. But not everything made its way into my letters; some things I found too difficult to explain. I didn't tell Toot and Gramps about the face of the man who had come to our door one day with a gaping hole where his nose should have been: the whistling sound he made as he asked my mother for food. Nor did I mention the time that one of my friends told me in the middle of recess that his baby brother had died the night before of an evil spirit brought in by the wind -- the terror that danced in my friend's eyes for the briefest of moments before he let out a strange laugh and punched my arm and broke off into a breathless run. There was the empty look on the faces of farmers the year the rains never came, the stoop in their shoulders as they wandered barefoot through their barren, cracked fields, bending over every so often to crumble earth between their fingers; and their desperation the following year when the rains lasted for over a month, swelling the river and fields until the streets gushed with water and swept as high as my waist and families scrambled to rescue their goats and their hens even as chunks of their huts washed away.

The world was violent, I was learning, unpredictable and often cruel. My grandparents knew nothing about such a world, I decided; there was no point in disturbing them with questions they couldn't answer. Sometimes, when my mother came home from work, I would tell her the things I had seen or heard, and she would stroke my forehead, listening intently, trying her best to explain what she could. I always appreciated the attention -- her voice, the touch of her hand, defined all that was secure. But her knowledge of floods and exorcisms and cockfights left much to be desired. Everything was as new to her as it was to me, and I would leave such conversations felling that my questions had only given her unnecessary cause for concern.

So it was to Lolo that I turned for guidance and instruction. He didn't talk much, but he was easy to be with. With his family and friends he introduced me as his son, but he never pressed things beyond matter-of-fact advice or pretended that our relationship was more than it was. I appreciated this distance; it implied a manly trust. And his knowledge of the world seemed inexhaustible. Not just how to change a flat tire or open in chess. He knew more elusive things, ways of managing the emotion I felt, ways to explain fate's constant mysteries.

Like how to deal with beggars. They seemed to be everywhere, a gallery of ills -- men, women, children, in tattered clothing matted with dirt, some without arms, others without feet, victims of scurvy or polio or leprosy walking on their hands or rolling down the crowded sidewalks in jerry-built carts, their legs twisted behind them like contortionists'. At first, I watched my mother give over her money to anyone who stopped at our door or stretched our an arm as we passed on the streets. Later, when it became clear that the tide of pain was endless, she gave more selectively, learning to calibrate the level of misery. Lolo thought her moral calculations endearing but silly, and whenever he caught me following her example with the few coins in my possession, he would raise his eyebrows and take me aside.

"How much money do you have?" he would ask.

I'd empty my pocket. "Thirty rupiah."

"How many beggars are there on the street?"

I tried to imagine the number that had come by the house in the last week. "You see?" he said, once it was clear I'd lost count. "Better to save your money and make sure you don't end up on the street yourself."

He was the same way about servants. They were mostly young villagers newly arrived in the city, often working for families not much better off than themselves, sending money to their people back in the country or saving enough to start their own businesses. If they had ambition, Lolo was willing to help them get their start, and he would generally tolerate their personal idiosyncracies: for over a year, he employed a good-natured young man who liked to dress up as a woman on weekends -- Lolo loved the man's cooking. But he would fire the servants without compunction if they were clumsy, forgetful, or otherwise cost him money; and he would be baffled when either my mother or I tried to protect them from his judgment.

"Your mother has a soft heart," Lolo would tell me one day after my mother tried to take the blame for knocking a radio off the dresser. "That's a good thing in a woman. But you will be a man someday, and a man needs to have more sense."

It had nothing to do with good or bad, he explained, like or dislike. It was a matter of taking life on its own terms.

I felt a hard knock to the jaw, and looked up at Lolo's sweating face.

"Pay attention. Keep your hands up."

We sparred for another half hour before Lolo decided it was time for a rest. My arms burned; my head flashed with a dull, steady throb. We took a jug full of water and sat down near the crocodile pond.

"Tired?" he asked me.

I slumped forward, barely nodding. He smiled, and rolled up one of his pant legs to scratch his calf. I noticed a series of indented scars that ran from his ankle halfway up his shin.

"What are those?"

"Leech marks," he said. "From when I was in New Guinea. They crawl inside your army boots while you're hiking through the swamps. At night, when you take off your socks, they're stuck there, fat with blood. You sprinkle salt on them and they die, but you still have to dig them out with a hot knife."

I ran my finger over one of the oval grooves. It was smooth and hairless where the skin had been singed. I asked Lolo if it had hurt.

"Of course it hurt," he said, taking a sip from the jug. "Sometimes, you can't worry about hurt. Sometimes you worry only about getting where you have to go."

We fell silent, and I watched him out of the corner of my eye. I realised that I had never heard him talk about what he was feeling. I had never seen him really angry or sad. He seemed to inhabit a world of hard surfaces and well-defined thoughts. A queer notion suddenly sprang into my head.

"Have you ever seen a man killed?" I asked him.

He glanced down, surprised by the question.

"Have you?" I asked again.

"Yes," he said.

"Was it bloody?"

"Yes."

I thought for a moment. "Why was the man killed? The one you saw?"

"Because he was weak."

"That's all?"

Lolo shrugged and rolled his pant leg back down. "That's usually enough. Men take advantage of weakness in other men. They're just like countries in that way. The strong man takes the weak man's land. He makes the weak man work in his fields. If the weak man's woman is pretty, the strong man will take her." He paused to take another sip of water, then asked, "Which would you rather be?"

I didn't answer, and Lolo squinted up at the sky. "Better to be strong," he said finally, rising to his feet. "If you can't be strong, be clever and make peace with someone who's strong. But always better to be strong yourself. Always."

As a boy grew up in Indonesia of a Kenyan father, Obama has certainly crisscrossed the religious, cultural and ethnics divide. I am wondering if Kenyan or Indonesian government for that matter would proactively yet silently reaching out to his camp to endorse him in his bid and preparing to nurture a possible future relationship to benefit both, should he win.

well, i live in Kenya now and the folks here have a love-hate relationship with the US, they love their $$$ but can't stand their arrogance. That said, Barack Obama's half-sister who is full on Kenyan is here to raise campaign funds for him, Auma Obama. I guess his entire village in Luo land is rooting for him, so does the current Kenyan presidential hopeful Raila Odinga who is also of Luo tribe, wanting Obama to win. Kenya is having its presidential election on 27 Dec.

okay cont'd...


My mother watched us from inside the house, propped up at her desk grading papers. What are they talking about? She wondered to herself. Blood and guts, probably; swallowing nails. Cheerful manly things.

She laughed aloud, then caught her self. That wasn't fair. She really was grateful for Lolo's solicitude toward me. He wouldn't have treated his own son very differently. She knew that she was lucky for Lolo's basic kindness. She set her papers aside and watched me do push-ups. He's growing so fast, she thought. She tried to picture herself on the day of our arrival, a mother of twenty-four with a child in tow, married to a man whose history, whose country, she barely knew. She had known so little then, she realized now, her innocence carried right along with her American passport. Things could have turned out worse. Much worse.

She had expected it to be difficult, this new life of hers. Before leaving Hawaii, she had tried to learn all she could about Indonesia: the population, the fifth in the world, with hundreds of tribes and dialects; the history of colonialism, first the Dutch for over three centuries, then the japanese during the war, seeking control over vast stores of oil, metal and timber; the fight for independence after the war and the emergence of a freedom fighter named Sukarno as the country's first president. Sukarno had grown corrupt, they said; he was a demagogue, totalitarian, too comfortable iwth the Communists.

A poor country, underdeveloped, utterly foreign -- this much she had known. She was prepared for the dysentery and fevers, the cold water baths and having to squat over a hole in the ground to pee, the electricity's going out every few weeks, the heat and endless mosquitoes. Nothing more than inconveniences, really, and she was tougher than she looked, oughter than even she had known herself to be. And anyway, that was part of what had drawn her to Lolo after Barack (Barack Obama's father is also named Barack) had left, the promise of something new and important, helping her husband rebuild a country in a charged and challenging place beyond her parents' reach.

But she wasn't prepared for the loneliness. It was constant, like a shortness of breath. There was nothing definite that she could point to, really. Lolo had welcomed her warmly and gone out of his way to make her feel at home, providing her with whatever creature comforts he could afford. His family had treated her with tact and generosity; and treated her son as one of their own.

Still, something had happened between her and Lolo in the year that they had been apart. In Hawaii, he had been so full of life, so eager with his plans. At night when they were alone, he would tell her about growing up as a boy during the war, watching his father and eldest brother leave to join the revolutionary army, hearing the news that both had been killed and everything had been lost, the Dutch army's setting their house aflame, their flight into the countryside, his mother's selling her gold jewelry a piece a a time in exchange for food. Things would be changing now that the Dutch had been driven out, Lolo had told her; he would return and teach at the university, be a part of that change.

He didn't talk that way anymore. In fact, it seemed as though he barely spoke to her at all, only out of necessity or when spoken to, and even then only of the task at hand, repairing a leak or planning a trip to visit some distant cousin. It was as if he had pulled into some dark hidden place, out of reach, taking with him the brightest part of himself. On some nights, she would hear him up after everyone else had gone to bed, wandering through the house with a bottle of imported whiskey, nursing his secrets. Other nights he would tuck a pistol under his pillow before falling to sleep. Whenever she asked him what was wrong, he could gently rebuff her, saying he was just tired. It was as if he had come to mistrust words somehow. Words, and the sentiments words carried.

She suspected these problems had something to do with Lolo's job. He was working for the army as a geologist, surveying roads and tunnels, when she arrived. It was a mind-numbing work that didn't pay very much; the refridgerator alone cost two months' salary. And now with a wife and child to provide for... no wonder he was depressed. She hadn't travelled all this way to be a burden, she decided. She would carry her own weight.

She found herself a job right away teaching English to Indonesian businessmen at the American embassy, part of the US foreign aid package to developing countries. The money helped but didn't relieve her loneliness. The Indonesian businessmen weren't much interested in the niceties of the English language, and several made passes at her. the Americans were mostly older men, careerists in the State Department, the occasional economist or journalist who would mysteriously disappear for months at a time, their affiliation or function in the embassy never quite clear. Some of them were caricatures of the ugly American, prone to making jokes about Indonesians until they found out that she was married to one, and then they would try to play it off -- Don't take Jim too seriously, the heat's gotten to him, how's your son by the way, fine, fine boy.

These men knew the country, though, or parts of it anyway, the closets where the skeletons were buried. Over lunch or casual conversation they would share with her things she couldn't learn in the published new reports. They explained how Sukarno had frayed badly the nerves of a US government already obsessed with the march of communism through Indochina, what with his nationalist rhetoric and his politics of nonalignment -- he was as bad as Lumumba (Zaire) or Nasser (Egypt), only worse, given Indonesia's strategic importance. Word was that CIA had played a part in the coup, although nobody knew for sure. More certain was the fact taht after the coup, the military had swept the countryside for supposed Communist sympathizers. The death toll was anybody's guess: a few hundred thousand, maybe; half million. Even the smart guys at the Agency had lost count.

Innuendo, half-whispered asides; that's how she found out that we had arrived in Djakarta less than a year after one fo the more brutla and swift campaigns of suppression in modern times. The idea frightened her, the notion that history could be swallowed up so completely, the same way the rich and loamy earth could soak up the rivers of blood that had once coursed through the streets; the way people could continue about their business beneath giant posters of the new president as if nothing had happened, a nation busy developing itself. As her circle of Indonesian friends widened, a few of them would be willing to her other stories -- about the corruption that pervaded government agencies, the shakedowns by police and the military, entire industries carved out for the president's family and entourage. And with each new story, she would go to Lolo in private and ask him : "Is it true?"

He would never say. The more she asked, the more steadfast he became in his good-natured silence. "Why are you worrying about such talk?" he would ask her. "Why don't you buy a new dress for the party?" She had finally complained to one of Lolo's cousins, a pediatrician who had helped looked after Lolo during the war.

"You don't understand," the cousin had told her gently.

"Understand what?"

The circumstances of Lolo's return. He hadn't planned on coming back from Hawaii so early, you know. During the purge, all students studying abroad had been summoned without explanation, their passports revoked. When Lolo stepped off the plane, he had no idea of what might happen next. We couldn't see him; the army officials took him away and questioned him. they told him that he had just been conscripted and would be going to the jungles of New Guinea for a year. And he was one of the lucky ones. Students studying in Eastern Bloc countries did much worse. Many of them are still in jail. Or vanished.

"You shouldn't be too hard on Lolo," the cousin repeated. "Such times are best forgotten."

My mother had left the cousin's house in a daze. Outside the sun was high, the air full of dust, but instead of taking a taxi home, she began to walk without direction. She found herself in a wealthy neighborhood where the diplomats and generals lived in sprawling houses with tall wrought-iron gates. She saw a woman in bare feet and a tattered shawl wandering though an open gate and up the driveway, where a group of men were washing a fleet of Mercedes-Benzes and Land Rovers. One of the men shouted at the woman to leave, but the woman stood where she was, a bony arm stretched out before her, her face shrouded in shadow. Another man finally dug in his pocket and thew out a handful of coins. The woman ran after the coins with terrible speed, checking the road suspiciously as she gathered them into her bosom.

Power: The word fixed in my mother's mind like a curse. In America, it had generally remained hidden from view until you dug beneath the surface of things; until you visited an Indian reservation or spoke to a black person whose trust you had earned. But here power was undisguised, indiscriminate, naked always fresh in the memory. 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. That's how things were; you couldn't change it, you could just live by the rules, so simple once you learned them. And so, Lolo had 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; just as another brother had tried to do, only he had miscalculated and was now reduced to stealing pieces of silverware whenever he came for a visit, selling them later for loose cigarettes.

She remembered what Lolo had told her once when her constant questioning had finally touched a nerve. "Guilt is a luxury only foreigners can afford," he had said. "Like saying whatever pops into your head." She didn't know what it was like to lose everything, to wake up and feel her belly eating itself. She didn't know how crowded and treacherous the path to security could be. Without absolute concentration, one could easily slip, tumble backward.

He was right, of course. She was a foreigner, middle-class and white and protected by her heredity whether she wanted protection or not. She could always leave if things got too messy. that possibility negated anything she might say to Lolo; it was the unbreachable barrier between them. She looked out the window now and saw that Lolo and I had moved on, the grass flattened where the two of us had been. The sight made her shudder slightly, and she rose to her feet, filled with a sudden panic.

Power was taking her son.

Wow, this is like some novel fresh out of the bookshelves! I can't believe how vivid the memory of his childhood was. Hmm, fishy...

I was introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy). Like many Indonesians, Lolo followed a brand of Islam that could make room for the remnants of more ancient animist and Hindu faiths. He explained that a man took on the powers of whatever he ate. On day soon, he promised, he would bring home a piece of tiger meat for us to share.
Dog? Grasshopper? TIGER? Eww, gross!!
What's up with this man? I hope people around the world wouldn't take this as a stereotype of every Indonesians

^Who is the intended audience for this book? I guess his American voters.
Every presidential hopeful writes some kind of memoir for their trail campaign headline and a chaptor or two of dramatized vivid childhood intimate details but uplifting and compelling are probably good to elicit a subconscious feeling that Obama is the man who has overcome all hardships despite all odds.

when will Barack Obama come to Indo again?

Yeah, let's throw him rotten eggs for being such a drama queen on describing Indonesia then!

Dang, bhas, u are too thin-skinned... i dun think the Senator is dissing Indonesia at all, but accurately describing his own family's existence in Jakarta. Many folks talk about his past in Indonesia disparagingly, calling him a muslim or madrassa mad terrorist. I think he grew up in the most normal circumstances in Indonesia. His experiences probably reflects many thousands of indonesians whose family had to struggle against an unpredictable climate in those days. His narrative is down-to-earth, matter-of-fact. He doesn't embellish. I know Indonesians who do believe that you take on the powers of whatever animals you ate... dang... even the chinese believe that kinda stuff, so it's not backward or anything. It's our culture, our sense of surrealism in life is strong, and I am glad that a politician from America who may become the leader of the world superpower understood this point of our lives. How folks in developing countries think, on the ground.

Much as he said that his mom realised that Power is taking away his son, i found it amazing that Power in america is now giving him a chance to be a world leader, maybe not in this election, but surely the next US presidential election.

JoRagan, his book "Dreams of My Father", his story of race and inheritance was written more than 10 years when Mr Obama had been elected as the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. In the wake of some modest publicity, he had received an advance from a publisher and went to work with the belief that the story of his family, and his efforts to understand that story, might speak in some way to the fissures of race that have characterised the American experience, as well as the fluid state of identity -- the leaps through time, the collision of cultures -- that mark our modern life.

Read his book, it's worth opening up your mind to Mr Obama's mind.

Mr Obama has a new book titled "The Audacity of Hope" which is recently released with his intended audience being his current electorate.

cont'd


Looking back, I'm not sure that Lolo ever fully understood what my mother was going through during these years, why the things he was working so hard to provide for her seemed only to increase the distance between them. He was not a man to ask himself such questions. Instead, he maintained his concentration, and over the period that we lived in Indonesia, he proceeded to climb. With the help of his brother-in-law, he landed a new job in the government relations office of an American oil company. We moved to a house in a better neighborhood; a car replaced the motorcycle; a television and hi-fi replaced the crocodiles and Tata, the ape; Lolo could sign for our dinners at a company club. Sometimes, I would overhear him and my mother arguing in their bedroom, usually about her refusal to attend his company dinner parties, where American businessmen from Texas and Louisiana would slap Lolo's back and boast about hte 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.

Such arguments were rare, though; my mother and Lolo would remain cordial through the birth of my sister, Maya, through the separation and eventual divorce, up until the last time I saw Lolo, ten years later, when my mother helped him to travel to Los Angeles to treat a liver ailment that would kill him at the age of fifty-one. What tension I noticed had mainly to do with the gradual shift in my mother's attitude towards me. She has always encouraged my rapid acculturation in Indonesia: It had made me relatively self-sufficient, undemanding on a tight budget, and extremely well mannered when compared to 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.

Her initial efforts centered on education. Without the money to send me to the International School, where most of Djakarta's foreign children went, she had arranged from the moment of our arrival to supplement my Indonesian schooling with lessons from a US correspondence course.

Her efforts now redoubled. Five days a week, she came into my room at four in the morning, force-fed me breakfast, and proceeded to teach me my English lessons for three hours before I left for school and she went to work. I offered stiff resistance to this regimen, but in response to every strategy I concocted, whether unconvincing ("My stomach hurts") or indisputably true (my eyes kept closing every five minutes), she would patiently repeat her most powerful defense :

"This is no picnic for me either, buster."

Then there were periodic concerns with my safety, the voice of my grandmother ascendant. I remember coming home after dark one day to find a large search party of neighbors that had been assembled in our yard. My mother didn't look happy, but she was so relieved to see me that it took her several minutes to notice a wet sock, brown with mud, wrapped around my forearm.

"What's that?"

"What?"

"That. Why do you have a sock wrapped around your arm?"

"I cut myself."

"Let's see."

"It's not that bad."

"Barry, let me see it."

I unwrapped the sock, exposing a long gash that ran from my wrist to my elbow. It had missed the vein by an inch, but ran deeper at the muscle, where pinkish flesh pulsed out from under the skin. Hoping to calm her down, I explained what had happened: A friend and I had hitchhiked out to his family's farm, and it started to rain, and on the farm was a terrific place to mudslide, and there was this barbed wire that marked the farm's boundaries, and ....

"Lolo!"

My mother laughs at this point when she tells this story, the laughter of a mother forgiving her child those sins that have passed. But her tone alters slightly when she remembers that Lolo had suggested that we wait until morning to get me stitched up, and she had to browbeat our only neighbor with a car to drive us to the hospital. She remembers that most of the lights were out at the hospital when we arrived, with no receptionist in sight; she recalls the sound of her frantic footsteps echoing through the hallway until she finally found two young men in boxer shorts playing dominoes in a small room in the back. When she asked them where the doctors were, the men cheerfully replied, "We are the doctors" and went on to finish their game before slipping on their trousers and giving me twenty stitches that would leave an ugly scar. And through it all was the pervading sense that her child's life might slip away when she wasn't looking, that everyone else around her would be too busy trying to survive to notice -- that, when it counted, she would have plenty of sympathy bt no one beside her who believed in fighting against a threatening fate.

It was these sorts of issues, I realise now, less tangible than school transcripts or medical services, that became the focus of her lessons with me. "If you want to grow into a human being," she would say to me, "you're going to need some values."

Honesty -- Lolo should not have hidden the refrigerator in the storage room when the tax officials came, even if everyone else , including the tax officials, expected such things.

Fairness -- the parents of wealthier students should not give television sets to the teachers during Ramadan, and their children could take no pride in the higher marks they might have received.

Straight talk -- if you didn't like the shirt I bought you for your birthday, you should have just said so instead of keeping it wadded up in the bottom of your closet.

Independent judgement -- just because the other children tease the poor boy about his haircut doesn't mean you have to do it too.

It was as if, by travelling halfway around the globe, away from the smugness and hypocrisy that familiarity had disclosed, my mother could give voice to the virtues of her midwestern past (Mr Obama's mother and grandparents originally came from Wisconsin. The grandparents settled in Honolulu Hawaii where Obama's mom met his Kenyan father during her studies) and offer them up in a distilled form. The problem was that she had few reinforcements; wherever she took me aside for such commentary, I would dutifully nod my assent, but she must have known that many of her ideas seemed rather impractical. Lolo had merely explained the poverty, the corruption, the constant scramble for security; he hadn't created it.

It remained all around me and bred a relentless skepticism

My mother's confidence in needlepoint virtues depended on a faith I didn't possess, a faith that she would refuse to describe as religious; that in fact, her experience told her was sacrilegious: a faith that rational, thoughtful people could shape their own destiny. In a land where fatalism remained a necessary tool for enduring hardship, where ultimate truths were kept separate from day-to-day realities, she was a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism.

She had only one ally in all this, and that was the distant authority of my father. Increasingly, she would remind me of his story, how he had grown up poor, in a poor country, in a poor continent; how his life had been hard, as hard as anything that Lolo might have known. He hadn't cut corners though, or played all the angles. He was diligent and honest, no matter what it cost him. He had led his life according to principles that demanded a different kind of toughness, principles that promised a higher form of power. I would follow his example, my mother decided. I had no choice. It was in the genes

"You have to thank me for your eyebrows... your father has these little wispy eyebrows that don't amount to much. But your brains, your character, you got from him."

Her message came to embrace black people generally. She would come home with books on the civil rights movement, the recordings of Mahalia Jackson, the speeches of Dr King. When she told me stories of school children from wealthier white schools but who went to become doctors and lawyers and scientists, I felt chastened by my reluctance to wake up and study in the mornings. If I told her about the goose-stepping demonstrations my Indonesian Boy Scout troop performed in front of the president, she might mention a different kind of march, a march of children no older than me, a march for freedom. Every black man was Thurgood Marshall or Sidney Poitier; every black woman Fannie Lou Hamer or Lena Horne. To be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to bear.

Burdens we were to carry with style. More than once, my mother would point out: "Harry Belafonte is the best-looking man on the planet."

It was in this context that I came across the picture in Life magazine of the black man who tried to peel off his skin. I imagine other black children, then and now, undergoing similar moments of revelation. Perhaps it comes sooner for most -- the parent's warning not to cross the boundaries of a particular neighborhood, or the frustration of not having hair like Barbie no matter how long you tease and comb, or the tale of a father's or grandfather's humiliation at the hands of an employer or a cop, overheard while you're supposed to be asleep. Maybe it's easier for a child to receive the bad news in small doses, allowing for a system of defences to build up -- although I suspect I was one of the luckier ones, having been given a stretch of childhood free from self-doubt.

I know that seeing that article was violent for me, an ambush attack. My mother had warned me about bigots -- they were ignorant, uneducated people one should avoid. If I could not yet consider my own mortality, Lolo had helped me to understand the potential of disease to cripple, of accidents to maim, of fortunes to decline. I could correctly identify common greed or cruelty in others, and sometimes even in myself. But that one photograph had told me something else: that there was a hidden enemy out there, one that could reach me without anyone's knowledge, not even my own. When I got home that night from the embassy library, I went into the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror with all my sense and limbs seemingly intact, looking as I had always looked, and wondered if something was wrong with me. The alternative seemed no less frightening -- that the adults around me lived in the midst of madness.

The initial flush of anxiety would pass, and I would spend my remaining year in Indonesia much as I had before. I retained a confidence that was not always justified and an irrepressible talent for mischief. But my vision had been permanently altered. On the imported television shows that had started running in the evenings, I began to notice that Cosby never got the girl on I Spy, that the black man on Mission Impossible spent all his time underground. I noticed that there was nobody like me on Sears, Roebuck Christmas catalog that Toot and Gramps sent us, and that Santa was a white man.

I kept all these observations to myself, deciding that either my mother didn't see them or she was trying to protect me and that I shouldn't expose her efforts as having failed. I still trusted my mother's love -- but I now faced the prospect that her account of the world, and my father's place in it, was somehow incomplete.

I was only kidding about the rotten eggs
But I am dissatisfied with the way he described Indonesia and Indonesians. I don't mind the poverty and our different brand of religiosity, because those are still relevant even now. I don't like how he portrayed us like uncivilized people. Yes, I came from a modest family, I observe my religion in a different manner and has much respect to my ancestral beliefs, but I don't hide my refrigerators nor eat dogs and crickets.

Talk about backward, what's up with that hospital story? When she asked them where the doctors were, the men cheerfully replied, "We are the doctors" and went on to finish their game before slipping on their trousers and giving me twenty stitches that would leave an ugly scar. Ok, so Indonesian hospitals' standard are still kinda low even now, and I hate how doctors make deals that would only hurt the patients, but I can't believe how those young doctors would finish up their games first before tending the patient, when they saw a boy badly injured.

So I'm sorry if I don't believe in his sincerity and his biographer's for that matter. I believe in trying to make the book better, by putting romanticism about hardships in a backward country

I know how u mean that his portrayal may be stilted to the naked side of Indonesian life. It's an autobiography, not a showcase for the Indonesian tourism board. He obviously spoke to his mom at length about the time they spent in Indonesia with his stepfather Lolo. The vast gulf of difference between life for the ordinary people in Hawaii and the people in Jakarta. Their struggle to stay afloat in the system that followed the fall of Sukarno.

Just remember this, Barack Obama lived in Indonesia as an ordinary kid, he didn't live like a typical expat kid with access to privileges that other expatriates to this day take for granted. His observations were about life for ordinary folks in Indonesia back in the late 60's, it may not be true anymore now that you have fridges and tvs in your homes, but it was true back then. Farmers starved when the rains didn't come. Beggars are a common sight, floods regularly happen to the city, even to this day! What he portrayed very powerfully is the Haves and Have Nots in Jakarta. To this day, I believe the division between the Haves and Have Nots is still just as wide as the days when he was growing up in Jakarta. Tell me.... is this not the truth? Or does truth hurt that much we get a stomachache juz reading about it from an African American? Would hte truth be easier to stomach if it came say from an Indonesian?

The other great chapters Mr Obama wrote are his experiences working as a campaigner in the slums of Chicago, campaigning for the ghetto folks and seeing how they were juz being left behind by the system.

Mr Obama may not be the typical white American with old money, nor pedigree, nor be a Vietnam war viet. But he's been with the folks who have been on the bottom of the scale and want to climb up. I think his vote is worth it.

So does the maderfackin cool Bernie Mac it seems... hehe...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RviYo3WsqjU

I don't like the part where they killed chicken infront of the boy

Maybe the incident came across as portraying an uncivilised people... but you know what, people here in Kenya still kill chickens like that. and it doesnt mean they are uncivilised. In fact, Kenyans are more civilised and charming than any african american I have known. But they just have issues of survival and the wide division between the Haves and Have Nots here in Kenya makes the people here share similar values as Indonesians :

Honesty, Fairness, Straight Talk, Independent Judgement.

Those values above which Obama's mom felt was found in her mid-western upbringing, can also be found in Indonesia and Kenya as well...but you know what? The struggle to be ahead of the game and the sudden collapse to poverty can make those values a liability to survival. Isn't that right?

I agree with that opinion. I also understand Lolo's action and policy about giving money / helping the poors.

Sure, it's pragmatic advice what Lolo gave about dealing with the poor and the pembantus in your homes. But what Obama's mom did was really cool. Instead of letting Obama get caught up in his stepfather's race to survive and get up the social ladder, she taught Obama about values that weren't pragmatic for survival, but rather hopeful, noble and beautiful values ... human rights sufferage for the poor, destitute, have-nots, blacks... etc. Obama later left Indonesia to pursue his college education and then Harvard University for law. He later went on to Chicago to work in the ghettoes. I feel that such a man is truly rare to find in politics. He is a true gem, like maybe the next Martin Luther King Jr.

I hope he won't get assassinated by the freaks in America.

I like what Lolo said about how :

"Guilt is a luxury only foreigners can afford," he had said. "Like saying whatever pops into your head." She didn't know what it was like to lose everything, to wake up and feel her belly eating itself. She didn't know how crowded and treacherous the path to security could be. Without absolute concentration, one could easily slip, tumble backward.


Sometimes I think that the anti-American or anti-democracy rhetoric is misguided. We should be anti-poverty, anti-corruption and anti-denial of truths.

Obama's father in Kenya went into politics when the country became independent from the English colonials. He spoke whatever popped into his head against the Kenyan government, and tumbled backward into hunger and alcoholism.

On this international chat forum that is hosted by Ben in NYC, we can speak whatever pops into our heads and yet not tumble into hunger and poverty. Such a freedom is a luxury indeed. But if Americans have it, we ought to share it too. It's time to face the unpleasant truths of our societies. That our asian values are shaped historically by Power Unbridled and Abusive. And if we don't check this Power, with Honesty, Fairness, Straight Talk and Independent Judgment as our core values, we will NEVER get ahead as a people with our leaders.

I don't get you Tangy, where in my post that I said the truth hurts me? and I don't mind it coming from an African American either. I have also already admit that there are a lot of bad things in his story that are still relevant to our current situation.

But the way the story goes make Indonesians seemed like barbaric people. I've already highlighted the part in the hospital. While it's true that our standard is not very good, I don't think our doctors are that cruel. I have some doctor friends, and from them I know that they are bound by an oath.

And what's up with that talk of his mother teaching him moral values? So his stepfather was a corrupt man, so what? Every country in the world has that kind of people, not just Indonesia. I am an ordinary Indonesian, and I know that our parents teach the same thing the their children, about honesty, fairness, and independent judgment. Maybe not straight talk :P , 'cos we do tend to keep to ourselves.

Wow, interesting pov of Barrack Tangy, thanks for sharing with us.

So Lolo somehow has fills Barrack's father figure, including on exposing the boy to the "ugly reality of this world" where dog eats dog...
Well somebody have to tell innocent kid about harsh reality of the world eventually. so he'll not become the prey.
On the other hand his mother has balance it with teaching him value of kindness, very feminine good traits.
Complete understanding of bothside that makes somebody has better understanding of situation.

ok bhas, it's juz that u seem to suugest that Barack Obama made up the stories or exaggerated them in order to make Indonesians look real bad. I don't think he made up the story abt the hospital doctors nor the headless chicken that's all i meant when i said the truth hurts.. that these things do and can happen in Indonesia (and not just indonesia, but any country where the survival game is tough)..



This is exactly what i meant that u feel that Mr Obama made these stories up juz cuz these stories that happened to his family didn't make Indonesia look good. I look beyond his portrayal of Lolo and the hospital to realise the message he is making. And that message is that Power Corrupts, and this Power saps the life and blood of Indonesian peoples like Lolo. I liked what he mentioned that in America, Power is just more hidden, but it's there. However, the opportunities to escape from the thumb of powerful people are more available in America than Indonesia. I mean, if u offended someone powerful in Indonesia, you'd be finished (at least in those days of the late 60s). In America theoretically, free speech is more common.. u have the likes of Michael Moore who can speak so badly about his President in a movie and still go on to become a millionaire and overnight celebrity. Can this ever happen in Indonesia? Let's not talk abt Indonesia, even in Singapore, it can NEVER happen. In Asia, we are definitely screwed over by Power so much more. And yet, we live with it and accept it without complaint.



Calling his stepfather a corrupt man is to simplistic. His stepfather was a complicated guy, a guy who wanted to do good for his country and people but got screwed over by the Powers-that-be. Witht he fall of Sukarno, and the crackdown on Communists, Lolo became a persona-non-grata in the new Suharto regime. But Lolo learnt how to come to terms with the new Powers-that-be. He learnt how to live with them and work according to their rules, which is corruption and bribes in the oil company. Remember he got a job with an American oil company that bribed the Powers that be in Indonesia (Suharto's cronies)... Lolo learnt how to become a master at the art of survival and prospered. But I think that ate his soul. He died very young at aged 51 from liver failure.




I believe many asians just DO NOT have independent judgment in certain matters, especially politicks and human rights issues. They just go with the flow and accept the dog eat dog principle. I think this applies to their parents.

Anyways, I know u love INdonesia and want it to be portrayed in a good light.

I think Obama painted a picture of his childhood Indonesia that is not an indictment about Indonesia. Rather, it's an indictment of how lives can be unpredictable and uncertain when you are poor and destitute anywhere in the world. For he goes on to talk about the work he did in the ghettoes in Chicago, how the lives of african-americans are seriously no different from the lives of any poor people around the world, and they are right in the heart of America. His birthplace. Even America's system can fail sections of its own peoples.

You are welcome!

Tell me something Indochatters, did your dads ever showed you the 'ugly reality'of the world?

My dad never really did that. In fact, he always tried to hide the ugly reality of the world from us when we were growing up...

I still think he is a corrupt man (independent thinking ). Many men (and women) would rather die than ever becoming someone like him. My parent taught me that to submit to temptations is so easy, but nothing beats the feeling of being able to sleep tight at night, without the guilt that you have hurt other people in the process of giving in to the temptations.

My parent also taught me the harsh reality of life, but they did that without slaughtering a chicken in front of my eyes. Certainly not when I was THAT young, they did it gradually. There is time for every thing.

Never. And there was time when I regreted his not showing me that. Because then I have to learn it myself and without any experiences at all.

when did u learn abt death from yr parents? i doubt they ever taught u that. Lolo taught his step son about death. He was sucked into the corrupt system, and to get ahead, he played the system. I hope u never have to play the system to survive and get ahead of everyone else, Bhas. I think u are indeed a non-typical Indonesian!

Actually my dad initially try to protect his family from ugly reality, but I think he knows that sometimes it was inevitable.
So actually he prepared me to face the worst (fight) by put me in karate course since elementary school.
He said martial art can develop character, bravery, and indepence.

For example, my first encounter with crime, when I go to school some of the street thugs rob me, ask me for money with force.
I push them, hit one of them, then I run away like hell, luckily I manage to get into school. Then when I tell my dad, he tell me about the ugly side of the world. Tell me that I must be careful, there's bad people lurking to prey on weak.

In my childhood, father of my childhood friend (in neighborhood) often hold me and caress me, he said I'm soo cute and so, sometimes when I play at my friend house, he like to touch me in thigh, hand, cheeck.
I don't know why, but my innocence six-sense tell me that, that was wrong. I feel awkward. So I tell my father that he often hug me. Sensing the potential of child molesting, my father told me not to play at that house again, and never let adult stranger touch me too intimately. He said sometimes man can do that "dirty things" to other man or boy, and I must be careful, and at early age somehow I can sense what that "dirty thing" means, it has something to do with sex. So I tried to be careful.

Another episode is when I was in junior high and afterschool I went to a big bookstore. Then a man try to talk to me, get me into the conversation. I felt weird and try to avoid him, but he still stalking me. And when I want to go home, he ask weather he can drive me home. I said No...., he still insist, then I just run away across the street and catch the bus. Somehow I know he has bad plan. I don't know weather he is kidnapper, paedophiles, or just fukin lunatics, the first thing came to my mind is to survive.

I mean....., what if my father keep me completely from "ugly" reality and make me grow in some sort of "glasshouse" and know nothing about the harsh and ugly world. What if he never prepared me with enough information and ability (fighting and running )? I might be ended up being raped by paedophile. Scary huh.

Wow, mojo, your story is indeed scary! If my dad knew there was a child molester in the neighborhood, he would call his frens up and beat the crap out of the guy. Yeah, my dad used to get into fights with drunks and gangsters in the neighborhood. He was like the vigilante police. He taught my brother and me and our frens in the neighborhood taekwando and karate and how to fight with this thing that looks like sticks.

I was only involved in a fight only once. I lost to the guy though. I didn't use any of the martial arts my father taught me, instead, I just use words to make him lose face in front of the other kids, he got so mad he used a piece of wood to whack me and I fainted!

wahhh he whacked you!
the only time I got in a fight with a guy is when I poked his head with a pen really hard..lolz

u mean like this?



yeah the guy who whacked me was later jeered forever by everyone in the neighborhood!!

Unfortunately, I am every Indonesian, tangy. Our parents can do so much with morals, at the end it's every people for him/herself. I hope I would never have to sell my beliefs for worldly things...

God, what kind of man is that, hitting a girl? A real man wouldn't hit a woman, but he would just throw nasty words at her instead

Barack Obama Straddles Different Worlds

By SHARON COHEN, The Associated Press
2007-12-14 19:43:00.0
Current rank: # 1,470 of 8,634
CHICAGO -

It was a Wednesday night ritual for Barack Obama: After a day of debating taxes, the death penalty or some other divisive issue, he'd head to a meeting of "The Committee."

Lawmakers and lobbyists, Democrats and Republicans alike, would put their politics on hold and gather for ... their weekly poker game.

It was a chance for Obama, then an Illinois state lawmaker, to socialize over cards and cigars (or, in his case, cigarettes). It also was a way for this son of an African goat herder, this Harvard-educated lawyer, author and professor to show he could be just one of the guys.

That was nothing new for him.

He had already navigated the exotic corners of Hawaii and Indonesia, the halls of privilege of Cambridge, Mass., and the poverty-wracked streets of Chicago as a boy, a student and a young man.

Along the way, Barack Obama - now a freshman U.S. senator and Democratic presidential candidate - set out to do the things he says will work in the White House: bridging gaps, making connections, forging alliances.

"Barack knows what he has to do to fit in and he has the capability to do it," says state Sen. Terry Link, his longtime friend and occasional poker host in Springfield. "He tries to make it where he doesn't stand out."'

His half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, puts it another way.

"He walks between worlds," she says. "That's what he's done his entire life."

---

From the very beginning, Barack Obama has blended cultures.

His father, also named Barack Obama, was a black scholarship student who traveled from his small village in Kenya to attend the University of Hawaii. His mother, Stanley Ann Dunham (her father always wanted a son), was white and just 18 when they met in a Russian class.

Barack - "blessed" in Arabic - was born on Aug. 4, 1961. His parents' marriage was short-lived.

His father left his family to study at Harvard when his son was 2, returning just once. Obama wrote poignantly about that visit in his memoir - remembering the basketball his father gave him, the African records they danced to, the Dave Brubeck concert they attended.

Obama, then 10, never saw his father again.

By then, Obama's mother had remarried, to Lolo Soetoro, another university student. They moved to his native Indonesia, plunging the 6-year-old Obama into a land of delicacies such as snake meat and grasshopper, a pet monkey, Tata, and the harsh realities of Third World poverty and disease.

After four years, Obama returned to Hawaii, first living with his mother, then with his maternal grandparents: Gramps and Toot or Tutu (Hawaiian for grandmother) - all transplants from Kansas.

Today, Maya sees traces of all three in her half-brother.

From their mother, she says, "he gets his ability to build bridges, to keep an open mind ... his taste for adventure, his curiosity and his compassion."

From their grandmother, Madelyn: "his pragmatism, his levelheadedness, his ability to stay centered in the eye of the storm."

From their grandfather, Stanley: "his love of the game. My grandfather ... pursued life with great zest and enthusiasm and a great sense of possibility."

---

In Hawaii, Obama was typical. And atypical.

He was a scholarship student at the prestigious Punahou School, a private academy in Honolulu where he was "intelligent, but not overly intellectual," says his half-sister. He was outgoing, laughed easily and wasn't above showing off.

Obama - then known as Barry - had a rebellious streak. One friend remembers they were both suspended in 7th grade for pitching quarters on school grounds.

The chubby kid who collected Spider-Man and Conan the Barbarian comics grew into a teen who listened to jazz saxophonist Grover Washington Jr. and Earth, Wind & Fire, tooled around in Gramps' old Ford Granada, golfed, played poker, sang in the choir and joined Ka Wai Ola, the school's literary journal.

Obama also loved basketball and as a forward dubbed "Barry O'Bomber," he favored a left-handed double pump shot. During his senior year, the varsity team captured the state championship.

Obama was both a fierce competitor and a sensitive friend. His buddy, Mike Ramos, says if he missed several baskets during pickup games, "Obama was the guy to say, 'Keep shooting. Don't worry. It'll drop.' "

There also was an introspective side to Obama, the outsider grappling with his biracial roots.

Though he had a racially mixed group of friends, he and two others among Punahou's few black students met weekly for what became known as "ethnic corner."

"It was more about learning from one another, other than it's the only place we feel safe," says Tony Peterson, one of the three. They discussed interracial dating, education - and, he says, probably "whether we would see a black president in our lifetime."

Peterson and other buddies say Obama never spoke of the turmoil he revealed in his memoir, "Dreams from My Father," in which he wrote about wrestling with his racial identity and using drugs - including marijuana and cocaine - to "push questions of who I was out of my mind."

In a 1999 article written for the Punahou Bulletin, Obama said that as one of the few blacks in the school, "I probably questioned my identity a bit harder than most. As a kid from a broken home and family of relatively modest means, I nursed more resentments than my circumstances justified, and I didn't always channel those resentments in particularly constructive ways."

---

Obama arrived in Chicago in 1985 with a college degree, a map of the city and a new job - community organizer.

Starting salary: About $13,000 a year (including a car allowance.)

Obama, who had worked in New York briefly after graduating from Columbia University, knew little about Chicago's bare-knuckle politics. But living abroad gave him experience as an outsider and a natural empathy for people without money and power, says Gerald Kellman, the man who hired him.

Working for the Developing Communities Project, Obama organized black churches on the industrial South Side, an area crippled by the loss of steel mills and factories.

Obama's task was to mobilize residents to agitate for themselves, whether it was lobbying for a job training center, pushing for more park services or removing asbestos from a housing project.

"He seemed to listen well and he learned fast," Kellman says. But even though Obama worked with people trained by Saul Alinsky, the father of community organizing, he didn't adopt hard-nose tactics.

"He did not like personal confrontation," Kellman says. "He had no trouble challenging power and challenging people on issues. When it came to face-to-face situations, he valued civility a great deal. ... When it came to negotiating conflict, he was very good at that."

Obama became close to many of those he organized - women old enough to be his mother.

"This kid was so bright - I shouldn't say kid, this man was so bright, but he didn't hit you over the head with it," recalls Loretta Augustine-Herron, a founding member of the communities project. "He was matter-of-fact and smooth. ... He explained things so nobody would be offended."

The women doted on him. They chided him when he would eat just a spinach salad for lunch, laughed when he showed off his dance moves ("He didn't lack confidence, I can tell you that," Augustine-Herron says) and joked about his punctuality and seriousness.

"If we don't hurry up, baby-faced Obama is going to be mad," they'd prod one another as they rushed to a meeting with him.

Yvonne Lloyd says Obama prepared them for dealing with bureaucrats, telling them whom to approach, guiding them on what to say - then offering critiques.

"He was there, trying and pushing," says Lloyd, mother of 11. "He energized us. When you've been a housewife all your life and all you've done is raise kids, you don't know too much about the outside world. He taught us."

And if there was something he didn't know, he'd find out. "'Let me look into it' were his favorite words," says Lloyd, who still calls Obama "my skinny little boy."

Obama remained close with his half-sister, Maya, who visited Chicago during the summers. When her father died when she was just a teen, Obama, nearly a decade older, took on a paternal role, taking her on tours of college campuses.

Obama also was honing his writing skills, crafting vivid short stories about pastors and crumbling communities, inspired by his Chicago experiences. He showed them to fellow organizer Mike Kruglik, who was impressed by how he had captured the feel of the streets. "I couldn't figure out how he had the time and energy to do it," he says.

In three years as an organizer, Obama became increasingly aware of the limits to what he could achieve and grew more pragmatic, Kellman says. His father's experience as a civil servant in Africa was a cautionary tale.

"He had this sense of his dad being too idealistic and not practical enough ... and not accomplishing what he wanted," he adds. (Obama later wrote that his father - who was killed in an automobile accident - had died "a bitter man.")

Obama said in his memoir that during those years in Chicago, he "broke out of the larger isolation" he had when he arrived and discovered that sharing life stories with people "gave me the sense of place and purpose I'd been looking for."

He was ready to move on - to Harvard Law School.

But he promised he'd return.

---

Obama entered Harvard older than many classmates, stepping into an incubator for America's elite - future Supreme Court justices, Fortune 500 leaders, U.S. senators and presidents.

Former classmates and professors remember him as an intellect with mature judgment, a conciliator who could see both sides of an issue.

"He wasn't someone that you simply wanted to read his class notes or hear his voice," says Charles Ogletree, a Harvard law professor who served as a mentor to Obama and other black students. "You wanted to hear him thinking. There was something special about him."

The law school had plenty of achievers trying to edge out their competition but that wasn't Obama's style, says Laurence Tribe, a professor who hired him as a research assistant.

"He was not at all about credit but results," Tribe says. "He would often give credit to others that he did the work for."

Tribe says Obama also could deal with very smart people "in ways that didn't bend them out of shape. He learned how to move through those circles ... made few waves and got things done."

Obama had two pivotal moments at Harvard. One came during his first summer when he worked at a large Chicago corporate law firm and met another Harvard law graduate, Michelle Robinson, who would become his wife and the mother of their two daughters, Malia and Sasha.

The other was a professional triumph: Obama made headlines when he was elected the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, perhaps the most prestigious legal journal in the nation.

"For us, it was a real major celebration, a real milestone, a real landmark," says Earl Martin Phalen, a black classmate. "It didn't have the same meaning for him. ... He did not take that pound-on-my-chest attitude, 'Look at me, I'm the first one.' He was conscious of the historical significance but understood ... there was a responsibility."

With graduation, Obama became a hot commodity. High-powered job offers flooded in. He chose another direction.

---

Back in Chicago, Obama joined a small civil rights firm, ran a voter registration drive and lectured on constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School.

In 1996, he won a state Senate seat representing Hyde Park - the South Side neighborhood that encompasses the university as well as some very poor neighborhoods.

Obama later wrote that he understood politics was "a full-contact sport and minded neither the sharp elbows nor the occasional blind-side hit." But in Springfield, the state capital, he was known as a pragmatist who'd cross party lines, working with other Democrats as well as Republicans.

Obama helped change laws governing the death penalty, ethics and racial profiling, and he won tax credits for the working poor. But he failed in his campaign for universal health care.

As a newcomer in the clubby atmosphere of Springfield, Obama also encountered cold shoulders. Some lawmakers initially thought he was a bit arrogant.

"It took him a while to prove that he was a real guy," says state Sen. Kirk Dillard, a Republican who appears in an Obama campaign commercial. "For the first couple of years, there was some healthy skepticism. ... It was especially true among his fellow African-American legislators."

Obama's roots and his style - he avoids the racially tinged rhetoric some black politicians use - have long stirred debate about his racial identity. Some black leaders and commentators have questioned whether he is "black enough."

Obama says there never has been any question about him being black.

"If you look African-American in society, you're treated as an African-American," he said in a CBS "60 Minutes" interview this year. "And when you're a child in particular that is how you begin to identify yourself. At least that's what I felt comfortable identifying myself as."

But Obama also said in that same interview that his racial identity is "not the core of who I am."

Being a black man, though, has undeniably shaped Obama's life experiences.

In his book "The Audacity of Hope," he says being a senator has spared him from some of the "bumps and bruises" many black men endure. But, he also wrote, he has faced the "litany of petty slights," including security guards trailing him in department stores and white couples tossing him keys outside restaurants, mistaking him for a valet.

"I know what it's like to have people tell me I can't do something because of my color, and I know the bitter swill of swallowed-back anger," he wrote.

But all through life - from his childhood in Hawaii to his legislative days in Springfield - Obama has counted on a racially mixed group of friends and political alliances.

As a state senator, some of his closest friends were suburban and rural white lawmakers. Obama also found a powerful ally in Emil Jones, the state Senate president, an old-school Chicago Democrat known for cutting deals, punishing enemies and having several family members on the state payroll.

Three years into his legislative career, Obama, both restless and ambitious, challenged U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush, a veteran who had an approval rating of about 70 percent and deep roots in the community, dating back decades to when he was a Black Panther.

During that campaign, Obama was dogged by the same question - whether he was "black enough" for the district. His academic credentials mattered little to some voters who felt Rush better understood them.

Obama stumbled badly, losing the primary by 31 percentage points. When he arrived at his victory party, the race had already been called for Rush.

"Barack was perceived as an outsider," says Link, the state senator. "He wasn't one of the boys."

He wasn't deterred.

Two years later, he began plotting his next move - a campaign for the U.S. Senate.

By then, he had a network of friends and supporters in Springfield, including his poker buddies who saw similarities in how he approached his work and the game.

"He was a very calculated player," Link says. "If he was going to play the hand, he knew it was a hand he could win. That's his politics, too. He's not going to do it just to do it."

---

Some call it The Speech - a 17-minute star-making turn as a keynote speaker at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

Obama was little known outside Illinois when he was chosen for the high-profile address. But he had impressed John Kerry, then the Democratic presidential nominee, after the Massachusetts senator heard him speak at a fundraiser, and the two men campaigned together in Chicago that spring.

His appearance at the convention that July night followed an old Broadway plot line: Barack Obama walked on stage an unknown. He walked off a star.

Commentators and politicians were buzzing with talk about his future - and mentioning him as a possible presidential candidate.

But first things first.

Four months later, Obama, helped by some lucky breaks, won the U.S. Senate seat in a landslide. He became the third black U.S. senator since Reconstruction.

Since then, he has had the Midas touch: Two best-selling books, a Grammy award for recording one of them, magazine covers, TV appearances, invitations galore.

Last fall, Obama became one of the hottest attractions on the 2006 campaign trail, stumping for Democratic candidates around the nation.

Even President Bush has taken note of Obama's enormous popularity. When the senator attended a White House reception after being sworn in, he says, Bush warned him people would be gunning for him, waiting for a slip.

From the moment Obama emerged on the national scene, the question was asked:

Would he run for president? No, no, no, he said. Absolutely not.

Then after a scant two years in the U.S. Senate, the man who was an obscure state lawmaker not that long ago reversed course.

On a blustery February day, Barack Obama returned to Springfield to the steps of the Old Capitol, where his hero Abraham Lincoln was a legislator.

He came to make another big speech.

He announced he was running for president.

I'd like to see what'll happen in the next election.

Wow... interesting story.
Thanks.
I did not know his background and I was happy to find that he has some first-hand experience with Asian culture.
Even without this background info, I was leaning towards him, rather than others such as Hillary Clinton, who strikes me as too conservative and vain. I dread having another preacher as president.

I'm rooting Barrack and Hillary. The Democrat has better candidates compare with the Republic.

a bit of illustration on Obama when he was in Jakarta. A class photo- he's the circled one. I wonder what his classmates are doing right now? (taken from Washington Post)

The teacher looks like she's eating goreng pisang??

^ LOL

@ rasi: there was an article from Kompas about Barrack's classmates. Some of them are now successful persons and they were asked bout how Barrack was in his school.

Wednesday, Apr. 09, 2008
The Story of Barack Obama's Mother
By Amanda Ripley/Honolulu Each of us lives a life of contradictory truths. We are not one thing or another. Barack Obama's mother was at least a dozen things. S. Ann Soetoro was a teen mother who later got a Ph.D. in anthropology; a white woman from the Midwest who was more comfortable in Indonesia; a natural-born mother obsessed with her work; a romantic pragmatist, if such a thing is possible.

"When I think about my mother," Obama told me recently, "I think that there was a certain combination of being very grounded in who she was, what she believed in. But also a certain recklessness. I think she was always searching for something. She wasn't comfortable seeing her life confined to a certain box."

Obama's mother was a dreamer. She made risky bets that paid off only some of the time, choices that her children had to live with. She fell in love—twice—with fellow students from distant countries she knew nothing about. Both marriages failed, and she leaned on her parents and friends to help raise her two children.

"She cried a lot," says her daughter Maya Soetoro-Ng, "if she saw animals being treated cruelly or children in the news or a sad movie—or if she felt like she wasn't being understood in a conversation." And yet she was fearless, says Soetoro-Ng. "She was very capable. She went out on the back of a motorcycle and did rigorous fieldwork. Her research was responsible and penetrating. She saw the heart of a problem, and she knew whom to hold accountable."

Today Obama is partly a product of what his mother was not. Whereas she swept her children off to unfamiliar lands and even lived apart from her son when he was a teenager, Obama has tried to ground his children in the Midwest. "We've created stability for our kids in a way that my mom didn't do for us," he says. "My choosing to put down roots in Chicago and marry a woman who is very rooted in one place probably indicates a desire for stability that maybe I was missing."

Ironically, the person who mattered most in Obama's life is the one we know the least about—maybe because being partly African in America is still seen as being simply black and color is still a preoccupation above almost all else. There is not enough room in the conversation for the rest of a man's story.

But Obama is his mother's son. In his wide-open rhetoric about what can be instead of what was, you see a hint of his mother's credulity. When Obama gets donations from people who have never believed in politics before, they're responding to his ability—passed down from his mother—to make a powerful argument (that happens to be very liberal) without using a trace of ideology. On a good day, when he figures out how to move a crowd of thousands of people very different from himself, it has something to do with having had a parent who gazed at different cultures the way other people study gems.

It turns out that Obama's nascent career peddling hope is a family business. He inherited it. And while it is true that he has not been profoundly tested, he was raised by someone who was.

In most elections, the deceased mother of a candidate in the primaries is not the subject of a magazine profile. But Ann Soetoro was not like most mothers.

Stanley Ann Dunham
Born in 1942, just five years before Hillary Clinton, Obama's mother came into an America constrained by war, segregation and a distrust of difference. Her parents named her Stanley because her father had wanted a boy. She endured the expected teasing over this indignity, but dutifully lugged the name through high school, apologizing for it each time she introduced herself in a new town.

During her life, she was known by four different names, each representing a distinct chapter. In the course of the Stanley period, her family moved more than five times—from Kansas to California to Texas to Washington—before her 18th birthday. Her father, a furniture salesman, had a restlessness that she inherited.

She spent her high school years on a small island in Washington, taking advanced classes in philosophy and visiting coffee shops in Seattle. "She was a very intelligent, quiet girl, interested in her friendships and current events," remembers Maxine Box, a close high school friend. Both girls assumed they would go to college and pursue careers. "She wasn't particularly interested in children or in getting married," Box says. Although Stanley was accepted early by the University of Chicago, her father wouldn't let her go. She was too young to be off on her own, he said, unaware, as fathers tend to be, of what could happen when she lived in his house.

After she finished high school, her father whisked the family away again—this time to Honolulu, after he heard about a big new furniture store there. Hawaii had just become a state, and it was the new frontier. Stanley grudgingly went along yet again, enrolling in the University of Hawaii as a freshman.

Mrs. Barack H. Obama
Shortly before she moved to Hawaii, Stanley saw her first foreign film. Black Orpheus was an award-winning musical retelling of the myth of Orpheus, a tale of doomed love. The movie was considered exotic because it was filmed in Brazil, but it was written and directed by white Frenchmen. The result was sentimental and, to some modern eyes, patronizing. Years later Obama saw the film with his mother and thought about walking out. But looking at her in the theater, he glimpsed her 16-year-old self. "I suddenly realized," he wrote in his memoir, Dreams from My Father, "that the depiction of childlike blacks I was now seeing on the screen ... was what my mother had carried with her to Hawaii all those years before, a reflection of the simple fantasies that had been forbidden to a white middle-class girl from Kansas, the promise of another life, warm, sensual, exotic, different."

By college, Stanley had started introducing herself as Ann. She met Barack Obama Sr. in a Russian-language class. He was one of the first Africans to attend the University of Hawaii and a focus of great curiosity. He spoke at church groups and was interviewed for several local-newspaper stories. "He had this magnetic personality," remembers Neil Abercrombie, a member of Congress from Hawaii who was friends with Obama Sr. in college. "Everything was oratory from him, even the most commonplace observation."

Obama's father quickly drew a crowd of friends at the university. "We would drink beer, eat pizza and play records," Abercrombie says. They talked about Vietnam and politics. "Everyone had an opinion about everything, and everyone was of the opinion that everyone wanted to hear their opinion—no one more so than Barack."

The exception was Ann, the quiet young woman in the corner who began to hang out with Obama and his friends that fall. "She was scarcely out of high school. She was mostly kind of an observer," says Abercrombie. Obama Sr.'s friends knew he was dating a white woman, but they made a point of treating it as a nonissue. This was Hawaii, after all, a place enamored of its reputation as a melting pot.

But when people called Hawaii a "melting pot" in the early 1960s, they meant a place where white people blended with Asians. At the time, 19% of white women in Hawaii married Chinese men, and that was considered radical by the rest of the nation. Black people made up less than 1% of the state's population. And while interracial marriage was legal there, it was banned in half the other states.

When Ann told her parents about the African student at school, they invited him over for dinner. Her father didn't notice when his daughter reached out to hold the man's hand, according to Obama's book. Her mother thought it best not to cause a scene. As Obama would write, "My mother was that girl with the movie of beautiful black people playing in her head."

On Feb. 2, 1961, several months after they met, Obama's parents got married in Maui, according to divorce records. It was a Thursday. At that point, Ann was three months pregnant with Barack Obama II. Friends did not learn of the wedding until afterward. "Nobody was invited," says Abercrombie. The motivations behind the marriage remain a mystery, even to Obama. "I never probed my mother about the details. Did they decide to get married because she was already pregnant? Or did he propose to her in the traditional, formal way?" Obama wonders. "I suppose, had she not passed away, I would have asked more."

Even by the standards of 1961, she was young to be married. At 18, she dropped out of college after one semester, according to University of Hawaii records. When her friends back in Washington heard the news, "we were very shocked," says Box, her high school friend.

Then, when Obama was almost 1, his father left for Harvard to get a Ph.D. in economics. He had also been accepted to the New School in New York City, with a more generous scholarship that would have allowed his family to join him. But he decided to go to Harvard. "How can I refuse the best education?" he told Ann, according to Obama's book.

Obama's father had an agenda: to return to his home country and help reinvent Kenya. He wanted to take his new family with him. But he also had a wife from a previous marriage there—a marriage that may or may not have been legal. In the end, Ann decided not to follow him. "She was under no illusions," says Abercrombie. "He was a man of his time, from a very patriarchal society." Ann filed for divorce in Honolulu in January 1964, citing "grievous mental suffering"—the reason given in most divorces at the time. Obama Sr. signed for the papers in Cambridge, Mass., and did not contest the divorce.

Ann had already done things most women of her generation had not: she had married an African, had their baby and gotten divorced. At this juncture, her life could have become narrower—a young, marginalized woman focused on paying the rent and raising a child on her own. She could have filled her son's head with well-founded resentment for his absent father. But that is not what happened.

S. Ann Dunham Soetoro
When her son was almost 2, Ann returned to college. Money was tight. She collected food stamps and relied on her parents to help take care of young Barack. She would get her bachelor's degree four years later. In the meantime, she met another foreign student, Lolo Soetoro, at the University of Hawaii. ("It's where I send all my single girlfriends," jokes her daughter Soetoro-Ng, who also married a man she met there.) He was easygoing, happily devoting hours to playing chess with Ann's father and wrestling with her young son. Lolo proposed in 1967.

Mother and son spent months preparing to follow him to Indonesia—getting shots, passports and plane tickets. Until then, neither had left the country. After a long journey, they landed in an unrecognizable place. "Walking off the plane, the tarmac rippling with heat, the sun bright as a furnace," Obama later wrote, "I clutched her hand, determined to protect her."

Lolo's house, on the outskirts of Jakarta, was a long way from the high-rises of Honolulu. There was no electricity, and the streets were not paved. The country was transitioning to the rule of General Suharto. Inflation was running at more than 600%, and everything was scarce. Ann and her son were the first foreigners to live in the neighborhood, according to locals who remember them. Two baby crocodiles, along with chickens and birds of paradise, occupied the backyard. To get to know the kids next door, Obama sat on the wall between their houses and flapped his arms like a great, big bird, making cawing noises, remembers Kay Ikranagara, a friend. "That got the kids laughing, and then they all played together," she says.

Obama attended a Catholic school called Franciscus Assisi Primary School. He attracted attention since he was not only a foreigner but also chubbier than the locals. But he seemed to shrug off the teasing, eating tofu and tempeh like all the other kids, playing soccer and picking guavas from the trees. He didn't seem to mind that the other children called him "Negro," remembers Bambang Sukoco, a former neighbor.

At first, Obama's mother gave money to every beggar who stopped at their door. But the caravan of misery—children without limbs, men with leprosy—churned on forever, and she was forced to be more selective. Her husband mocked her calculations of relative suffering. "Your mother has a soft heart," he told Obama.

As Ann became more intrigued by Indonesia, her husband became more Western. He rose through the ranks of an American oil company and moved the family to a nicer neighborhood. She was bored by the dinner parties he took her to, where men boasted about golf scores and wives complained about their Indonesian servants. The couple fought rarely but had less and less in common. "She wasn't prepared for the loneliness," Obama wrote in Dreams. "It was constant, like a shortness of breath."

Ann took a job teaching English at the U.S. embassy. She woke up well before dawn throughout her life. Now she went into her son's room every day at 4 a.m. to give him English lessons from a U.S. correspondence course. She couldn't afford the élite international school and worried he wasn't challenged enough. After two years at the Catholic school, Obama moved to a state-run elementary school closer to the new house. He was the only foreigner, says Ati Kisjanto, a classmate, but he spoke some Indonesian and made new friends.

Indonesia has the world's largest Muslim population, but Obama's household was not religious. "My mother, whose parents were nonpracticing Baptists and Methodists, was one of the most spiritual souls I ever knew," Obama said in a 2007 speech. "But she had a healthy skepticism of religion as an institution. And as a consequence, so did I."

In her own way, Ann tried to compensate for the absence of black people in her son's life. At night, she came home from work with books on the civil rights movement and recordings of Mahalia Jackson. Her aspirations for racial harmony were simplistic. "She was very much of the early Dr. [Martin Luther] King era," Obama says. "She believed that people were all basically the same under their skin, that bigotry of any sort was wrong and that the goal was then to treat everybody as unique individuals." Ann gave her daughter, who was born in 1970, dolls of every hue: "A pretty black girl with braids, an Inuit, Sacagawea, a little Dutch boy with clogs," says Soetoro-Ng, laughing. "It was like the United Nations."

In 1971, when Obama was 10, Ann sent him back to Hawaii to live with her parents and attend Punahou, an élite prep school that he'd gotten into on a scholarship with his grandparents' help. This wrenching decision seemed to reflect how much she valued education. Ann's friends say it was hard on her, and Obama, in his book, describes an adolescence shadowed by a sense of alienation. "I didn't feel [her absence] as a deprivation," Obama told me. "But when I think about the fact that I was separated from her, I suspect it had more of an impact than I know."

A year later, Ann followed Obama back to Hawaii, as promised, taking her daughter but leaving her husband behind. She enrolled in a master's program at the University of Hawaii to study the anthropology of Indonesia.

Indonesia is an anthropologist's fantasyland. It is made up of 17,500 islands, on which 230 million people speak more than 300 languages. The archipelago's culture is colored by Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim and Dutch traditions. Indonesia "sucks a lot of us in," says fellow anthropologist and friend Alice Dewey. "It's delightful."

Around this time, Ann began to find her voice. People who knew her before describe her as quiet and smart; those who met her afterward use words like forthright and passionate. The timing of her graduate work was perfect. "The whole face of the earth was changing," Dewey says. "Colonial powers were collapsing, countries needed help, and development work was beginning to interest anthropologists."

Ann's husband visited Hawaii frequently, but they never lived together again. Ann filed for divorce in 1980. As with Obama's father, she kept in regular contact with Lolo and did not pursue alimony or child support, according to divorce records.

"She was no Pollyanna. There have certainly been moments when she complained to us," says her daughter Soetoro-Ng. "But she was not someone who would take the detritus of those divorces and make judgments about men in general or love or allow herself to grow pessimistic." With each failed marriage, Ann gained a child and, in one case, a country as well.

Ann Dunham Sutoro
After three years of living with her children in a small apartment in Honolulu, subsisting on student grants, Ann decided to go back to Indonesia to do fieldwork for her Ph.D. Obama, then about 14, told her he would stay behind. He was tired of being new, and he appreciated the autonomy his grandparents gave him. Ann did not argue with him. "She kept a certain part of herself aloof or removed," says Mary Zurbuchen, a friend from Jakarta. "I think maybe in some way this was how she managed to cross so many boundaries."

In Indonesia, Ann joked to friends that her son seemed interested only in basketball. "She despaired of him ever having a social conscience," remembers Richard Patten, a colleague. After her divorce, Ann started using the more modern spelling of her name, Sutoro. She took a big job as the program officer for women and employment at the Ford Foundation, and she spoke up forcefully at staff meetings. Unlike many other expats, she had spent a lot of time with villagers, learning their priorities and problems, with a special focus on women's work. "She was influenced by hanging out in the Javanese marketplace," Zurbuchen says, "where she would see women with heavy baskets on their backs who got up at 3 in the morning to walk to the market and sell their produce." Ann thought the Ford Foundation should get closer to the people and further from the government, just as she had.

Her home became a gathering spot for the powerful and the marginalized: politicians, filmmakers, musicians and labor organizers. "She had, compared with other foundation colleagues, a much more eclectic circle," Zurbuchen says. "She brought unlikely conversation partners together."

Obama's mother cared deeply about helping poor women, and she had two biracial children. But neither of them remembers her talking about sexism or racism. "She spoke mostly in positive terms: what we are trying to do and what we can do," says Soetoro-Ng, who is now a history teacher at a girls' high school in Honolulu. "She wasn't ideological," notes Obama. "I inherited that, I think, from her. She was suspicious of cant." He remembers her joking that she wanted to get paid as much as a man, but it didn't mean she would stop shaving her legs. In his recent Philadelphia speech on race, in which he acknowledged the grievances of blacks and whites, Obama was consciously channeling his mother. "When I was writing that speech," he told nbc News, "her memory loomed over me. Is this something that she would trust?" When it came to race, Obama told me, "I don't think she was entirely comfortable with the more aggressive or militant approaches to African-American politics."

In the expat community of Asia in the 1980s, single mothers were rare, and Ann stood out. She was by then a rather large woman with frizzy black hair. But Indonesia was an uncommonly tolerant place. "For someone like Ann, who had a big personality and was a big presence," says Zurbuchen, "Indonesia was very accepting. It gave her a sense of fitting in." At home, Ann wore the traditional housecoat, the batik daster. She loved simple, traditional restaurants. Friends remember sharing bakso bola tenis, or noodles with tennis-ball-size meatballs, from a roadside stand.

Today Ann would not be so unusual in the U.S. A single mother of biracial children pursuing a career, she foreshadowed, in some ways, what more of America would look like. But she did so without comment, her friends say. "She wasn't stereotypical at all," says Nancy Peluso, a friend and an environmental sociologist. "But she didn't make a big deal out of it."

Ann's most lasting professional legacy was to help build the microfinance program in Indonesia, which she did from 1988 to '92—before the practice of granting tiny loans to credit-poor entrepreneurs was an established success story. Her anthropological research into how real people worked helped inform the policies set by the Bank Rakyat Indonesia, says Patten, an economist who worked there. "I would say her work had a lot to do with the success of the program," he says. Today Indonesia's microfinance program is No. 1 in the world in terms of savers, with 31 million members, according to Microfinance Information eXchange Inc., a microfinance-tracking outfit.

While his mother was helping poor people in Indonesia, Obama was trying to do something similar 7,000 miles (about 11,300 km) away in Chicago, as a community organizer. Ann's friends say she was delighted by his career move and started every conversation with an update of her children's lives. "All of us knew where Barack was going to school. All of us knew how brilliant he was," remembers Ann's friend Georgia McCauley.

Every so often, Ann would leave Indonesia to live in Hawaii—or New York or even, in the mid-1980s, Pakistan, for a microfinance job. She and her daughter sometimes lived in garage apartments and spare rooms of friends. She collected treasures from her travels—exquisite things with stories she understood. Antique daggers with an odd number of curves, as required by Javanese tradition; unusual batiks; rice-paddy hats. Before returning to Hawaii in 1984, Ann wrote her friend Dewey that she and her daughter would "probably need a camel caravan and an elephant or two to load all our bags on the plane, and I'm sure you don't want to see all those airline agents weeping and rending their garments." At his house in Chicago, Obama says, he has his mother's arrowhead collection from Kansas—along with "trunks full of batiks that we don't really know what to do with."

In 1992, Obama's mother finally finished her Ph.D. dissertation, which she had worked on, between jobs, for almost two decades. The thesis is 1,000 pages, a meticulous analysis of peasant blacksmithing in Indonesia. The glossary, which she describes as "far from complete," is 24 pages. She dedicated the tome to her mother; to Dewey, her adviser; "and to Barack and Maya, who seldom complained when their mother was in the field."

In the fall of 1994, Ann was having dinner at her friend Patten's house in Jakarta when she felt a pain in her stomach. A local doctor diagnosed indigestion. When Ann returned to Hawaii several months later, she learned it was ovarian and uterine cancer. She died on Nov. 7, 1995, at 52.

Before her death, Ann read a draft of her son's memoir, which is almost entirely about his father. Some of her friends were surprised at the focus, but she didn't seem obviously bothered. "She never complained about it," says Peluso. "She just said it was something he had to work out." Neither Ann nor her son knew how little time they had left.

Obama has said his biggest mistake was not being at his mother's side when she died. He went to Hawaii to help the family scatter the ashes over the Pacific. And he carries on her spirit in his campaign. "When Barack smiles," says Peluso, "there's just a certain Ann look. He lights up in a particular way that she did."

After Ann's death, her daughter dug through her artifacts, searching for Ann's story. "She always did want to write a memoir," Soetoro-Ng says. Finally, she discovered the start of a life story, but it was less than two pages. She never found anything more. Maybe Ann had run out of time, or maybe the chemotherapy had worn her out. "I don't know. Maybe she felt overwhelmed," says Soetoro-Ng, "because there was so much to tell."
—With reporting by Zamira Loebis and Jason Tedjasukmana/Jakarta

An inspiring story.

I'll take it. Tiki-Man loves batik.

OBAMA WON



Congrats...


Right-to-left: Barack Obama and Maya Soetoro with their mother Ann Dunham and grandfather Stanley Dunham in Hawaii (early 1970s).








Isn't that sweet..., their wishes finaly become reality.

Fascinating, the new President of USA has Indonesian background.... I think this closeness has made Indonesian rather affectionate to this man. I hope this will bring more warmness and friendship between Indonesia-USA billateral relations.

I and the rest of Indonesians are happy with his landslide win, I hope we are not being under illusion because Obama has Indonesian background, he will automatically put higher priority of Indonesia in his foreign policy.

I dont think his year in office will have tremendous impact to our bilateral relationship, but he could bridge the America's negative image to the world and especially to Indonesia and Kenya. But again, it's always nice to know Obama actually still speaks basic Indonesia

lol....not really to be frank i was hoping for John McCain , he seems to be a better candidate for me but then again my opinion is invalid in this issue. Good luck to Obama and congrats to him.

World tunes in to see Obama win historic US election

8 hours ago

SYDNEY (AFP) — From the bars of London to the small Japanese town of Obama, it seemed like the whole world tuned in Wednesday to see Barack Obama win one of the most anticipated US presidential races for decades.

Parties spilled onto the streets, share traders were glued to their screens and expat Americans joined election-day rallies in cities around the globe as Obama beat the Republican John McCain to the White House.

For the tens of millions more without a direct share in the vote, it was a chance also to see Obama make history as the first black US leader.

In Obama, an ancient fishing town on the Sea of Japan, residents dressed in Hawaiian skirts and did a hula dance in celebration, embracing Hawaiian-born Obama as one of their own.

"I'm so excited because Obama shares our town's name. But even if the town was called McCain I would still support Barack Obama," said 44-year-old dancer Masayo Ishibashi.

In London, Americans clutching hot dogs and swigging bottled beer crowded the Democrat -dominated Yates bar in the nightclub quarter, the second largest party in town after a bash at the US embassy.

"It would be nice to have a president who is celebrated when he goes abroad and his effigy is not burned," said David Grey, who runs a male salon.

There were similar scenes across western Europe. In Berlin, CNN and German media giant Bertelsmann threw a party with mini hamburgers and chicken nuggets on the Unter den Linden boulevard -- just down the road from where Obama drew 200,000 people to hear him speak in July.

Catherena Oostveen, a German-Russian actress who trained in Los Angeles and New York, showed up in a red-white-and-blue t-shirt and a cowboy hat.

"Obama is so intelligent and inspiring that I hope he can change the things that the rest of the world is so angry about right now," she said.

In Paris, American expats gathered at one of Ernest Hemingway's favourite watering holes as well as other bars.

Across town, proudly wearing an Obama pin, Herve Moussakanda loaded up his plate with cheese before sidling up to a big screen in a Paris club.

"I just couldn't miss this. This is historic. A dream come true," he said, one of hundreds of French blacks here cheering the first African-American to win the White House.

In an upmarket suburb of the Indonesian capital Jakarta, where Obama spent part of his schooldays, ex-classmate Dewi Asmara Oetojo recalled an easy-going little boy who said he wanted to be president.

"It's just amazing, I mean we're so proud of him," said Oetejo, a lawmaker in Indonesia's parliament.

"At that time we were so small we never thought he had the qualities of a leader. He said 'I want to be president' and we all thought it was so funny."

In Afghanistan, where tens of thousands of US soldiers are still fighting Al-Qaeda remnants and the Taliban, about 150 Americans, Afghans and US embassy staff watched the results come in at the upmarket Serena hotel -- targeted by bombers in January.

Rafaat, an Afghan who runs a finance company and spends much of his time in the United States, said Obama would be a welcome change from President George W. Bush.

"This is a good news for America and for Afghanistan," he said.

"We are fed up with Bush and his policies. My wife voted for Bush in 2000 and we regretted it for seven years."

Celebrations began early in Sydney, with hundreds of people packed into an event organised by expat Democrats and spilling onto the street.

"The drinks are flowing and everybody is already pretty into the party and it's hard to believe, when you step outside, it's still the middle of the day on a work day," said Lyndsi Crowder, a volunteer.

Cubans spent the hours glued to their TV sets, some capturing US channels illegally with a satellite receiver.

"It's not that I'm a fan of politics," said Elisa, a 36-year-old Old Havana resident who did not want to give her last name, "but these elections are very important.

"If Obama finally wins, many things could start to change between Cuba and the United States."

Many of Beijing's expat bars were also full to the brim. Some introduced a special breakfast with red and blue cocktails representing the candidates.

At the swanky Marriott Renaissance hotel, 600 Chinese students, academics and government officials were hosted by US embassy officials, who gave them a taste with a voting booth complete with ballot box and real ballot.

Joyce Tu, a pro-Obama Chinese businesswoman, lamented the lack of elections in China.

"China will never have a minority president," she told AFP, "and will never have a non-Communist party president as long as we never have elections."

haha you're not the only one. I was rooting for McCain also.
but Congrats to Obama. this is def a history in the making.

TO add on SDN 01 MENTENG SUPPORTS BARRY.(former obama's primary school in jakarta.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKyfIzwiiKM .. Hope the kids there will be inspired and more obama-s will be produced in the future.

btw congrats for obama.

XxRyoChanxX
I voted for Obama and I am glad he won. I hope to meet him someday and I hoped the few Indonesian-Americans we have here in America voted for him too.

Indonesian-Americans to vote for Obama as economy worsens
Yenni Djahidin , Contributor , Washington | Fri, 10/17/2008 10:26 AM | World

In a couple of weeks, Americans will vote in a historic presidential election.

For the first time, the presidential candidate of one of the main parties is not a white male. The campaign turned ugly a few weeks ago when the race issue and raw emotion showed on national television.

Fortunately, Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain has restrained his attacks on the campaign trail.

However, his political advertisements still question Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama's true identity.

Obama is the son of an African father and a white mother. McCain's campaign also has attempted to question Obama's association with controversial figures such as the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and former 1960s radical William Ayers.

"Those are scare tactics that the Republicans use to discredit Obama," said Zulkarnain Tajibnapis, an American citizen from Indonesia.

"However, those tactics don't work anymore because of the economic crisis."

Zulkarnain, who retired last year as an editor with Voice of America's Indonesian Service, lives in Virginia, one of the most hotly contested states in the election this year. For the past 40 years, Virginia has always supported the Republican candidate for president.

Zulkarnain predicted that Senator Obama would win the election because political polls show that he leads by a large margin.

"Obama has looked more presidential in the debates with McCain. I'm more likely to vote for Obama because I trust him to fix the economy," he said.

Zulkarnain quickly added that anything could happen between now and election day.

"Although the polls show a large margin, you can't be so certain because some white people are dishonest about who they want to win," he said.

The campaign heated up recently after the collapse of the financial markets in the U.S.

Several polls have shown Obama enjoying a big lead after prices on the New York Stock Exchange dropped to their lowest levels since the terrorist attacks in 2001.

Many Americans see Obama as more suitable to fix the economy. People are also angered by failed government policies during President George W. Bush's two terms in office. Obama's campaign keeps reminding voters that a McCain presidency would be similar to Bush's.

In the southern U.S. state of Tennessee, Nurbaini McKoski said she had not yet made up her mind, but she complained about the political atmosphere in the South, which she called "very racist".

"People are very racist toward blacks and Asians. Most people here are traditional white folks," said McKoski, who is also known as Uni Ben. McKoski taught chemistry at University of Andalas in West Sumatra before she emigrated to the United States in the late 1980s after marrying a U.S. citizen.

The couple settled in Knoxville, Tennessee, where she continued teaching at a local college for a while. She said she now offers private tutoring and sometimes works as an "essential oils consultant for Indonesia".

"People here are so ignorant. They don't know about Islam. They think Obama is a Muslim, which he is not," she said, referring to one piece of misleading information that has been spread among voters.

"Even if he is a Muslim, so what? If he is capable, why not?

"I won't say I would vote for Obama, but I think Obama thinks about ordinary people. He will work for ordinary people. McCain will not be a president for ordinary people," she said.

She also said she admired Obama's personal journey as he had worked hard to get a scholarship and attend an Ivy League college. In 1982, McKoski won a scholarship from the World Bank to study at Mississippi State University.

In Pennsylvania, another hotly contested state, Oki N. Ali said he was ready to defect from his party.

Born in Washington DC to Indonesian parents, Ali said he wanted change.

"I am a registered Republican, but I will vote for Obama this time. I'm tired of Bush's administration and I see McCain as another Bush," he said.

The recently married and new father of one, Oki said his chief concern right now was the economy and job security.

"I have trouble finding a new job and my retirement fund has dropped in value significantly," said Oki, who works as an information technology specialist. Oki and his young family also spend time in Virginia, where they hope to buy a house.

"There is a lot of uncertainty right now," he said.

Oki said he supported Obama because he is young, fresh and not considered as "Old Washington". McCain and his running mate, Governor Sarah Palin, he said, always question people's loyalty to the country, but they never answer the real questions about how to fix the problems.

"I don't support Obama because he spent some time in my mother's homeland, but I support him because it is time to change Washington," he said.

Ali said he would remain a registered Republican because he grew up during the presidency of Ronald Reagan.

"Many people my age are Republicans because Reagan was a great president," he explained.

In Maryland, Oki's cousin Meddy Soeparta has also decided to support Obama. He said McCain's campaign messages kept changing and seemed to be dishonest.

"I'm a conservative and have traditional values but now the economy is in trouble and we need a change in leadership," said Meddy, 37, who was also born in DC to Indonesian parents.

"There is a new energy in Obama's campaign. It seems like the majority of people are on his side," said Meddy, who works as a commercial banker in Maryland.

"I hope the new administration will take some action to fix the economy."

Meddy said he did not want to see a repeat of the past four years, especially over American policy in Iraq.

"I want the troops to quit from Iraq, but that's not necessarily a defeat. We want to let the Iraqi government take control of their country and use money from their oil," he said.

Like Ali, Meddy said he would remain a registered Republican.


He is loved by the students at his former school in Jakarta
Menteng students overjoyed with Obama's win
http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2008/11...ma039s-win.html

I predict a homecoming welcome by Presiden SBY and Obama's former classmates when he eventually returns there as the US president.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ca-VDudMuM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NblCBtk6H-U

Ahh well at least i got a friend here....ahahaha
Long Love McCain !!!! And the Republicans !!!

Former Menteng student now US President

Obama Barack has been democratically elected President of the US.

Quite an about face for the best democracy money can buy, in view of the Bush presidential se-lection.

But of course, corruption, collusion and nepotism is the sole monopoly of the Third World - or so the deluded denizens of the West repeat to themselves as they hug their knees, rocking back and forth - reminding themselves of how they uphold human rights equally across the board, entirely devoid of double-standards and totally oblivious to race, creed or religion.

Barrak Hussein Obama II was born to a white American Ann Dunhma and Kenyan Barrak Hussein Obama Snr, in Nyang’oma Kogelo now in Kenya.

Here the Indonesian link starts.

Ann Dunham married in 1967 Lolo Soetoro, a Javanese, whose own father, in 1946 was killed along with his eldest brother were killed, after which the Dutch army burned down the family’s home. Soetoro fled with his mother into the countryside to survive. Incidentally yet more proof of Dutch War Crimes - delibrate destruction of civilian property outside the scope of battle.

Pak Lolo Soetoro was an army geologist then later a government relations consultant or Mobil Oil. Obama describes Soetoro as well-mannered, even-tempered, and easy with people

From age 6 to 10, Obama lived in Jakarta. Age six, Obama attended the Catholic Primary St Francis di Assisi. Much was made of the lie he was educated in a Madrassa - or more accurately a pesantren - this of course was totally untrue. Obama Jnr later attended Model Primary School, Menteng and was registered as a Muslim - as his father was Muslim.

In Obama’s own words:

In the Muslim school, the teacher wrote to tell my mother that I made faces during Koranic studies. My mother wasn’t overly concerned. ‘Be respectful,’ she’d say. In the Catholic school, when it came time to pray, I would close my eyes, then peek around the room. Nothing happened. No angels descended. Just a parched old nun and 30 brown children, muttering words.

One of “Berry’s” childhood friends was Adi who often visited “Berry’s” 16 Jalan Haji Ramli house. Speaking volumes of Dutch “development” at the time the road was of this established middle-class neighbourhood was a dirt lane where Obama used to wile away the hours kicking a soccer ball.

Adi recalled Obama and his friends wore plastic bags over their shoes to walk through the muddy street during the rainy seasons.

Neighborhood Muslims worshiped in a nearby house, which has since been replaced by a larger mosque. Sometimes, when the muezzin sounded the call to prayer, Lolo and Barry would walk to the makeshift mosque together, Adi said.

His mother often went to the church, but Barry was Muslim. He went to the mosque,” Adi said. “I remember him wearing a sarong.”

Obama spent most his spare time hanging out with Adi and other friends at the home of Yunaldi Askiar, a classmate. They used to play a kind of fencing game using sticks, kick a ball up and down the narrow dirt lanes or go swimming in the river behind the school, said Askiar, 42, a car mechanic.

Obama was taller and better dressed than most kids in classes where shoes and socks were still luxuries, so he stood out from the start. As an African American, and the only foreigner, he suffered racial taunts and teasing but never turned to violence.

“At first, everybody felt it was weird to have him here,” Israella Dharmawan, his first grade teacher said. “But also they were curious about him, so wherever he went, the kids were following him.”

His friends enjoyed playing tricks on Berry: Harmon Aski recalled,

“Sometimes we’d say, ‘Barry, do you want a chocolate?’ And we’d give him a chocolate. The next day we’d give him a chocolate again. The third time we’d give him terasi (fermented shrimp paste) wrapped up like chocolate. Obama didn’t get mad. He would laugh it off.”

Ann Soetoro moved to Yogyakarta, while Obama Jnr studied in Jakarta. She was inspired by Jogja village industries, which became the basis of her 1992 doctoral dissertation.

“She loved living in Java,” said Dr. Dewey, who recalled accompanying Ms. Soetoro to a metalworking village. “People said: ‘Hi! How are you?’ She said: ‘How’s your wife? Did your daughter have the baby?’ They were friends. Then she’d whip out her notebook and she’d say: ‘How many of you have electricity? Are you having trouble getting iron?’ ”

Dunham-Soetoro became a consultant for the United States Agency for International Development on setting up a village credit program, then a Ford Foundation program officer in Jakarta specializing in women’s work. Later, she was a consultant in Pakistan, then joined Indonesia’s oldest bank to work on what is described as the world’s largest sustainable microfinance program, creating services like credit and savings for the poor.



In his tellingly-titled Memoir, Dreams from My Father, Obama describes his Indonesian interlude as “one long adventure, the bounty of a young boy’s life”. But he also recalls being troubled by the poverty around him: “the empty look on the faces of farmers the year the rains never came,” and the desperation of the disabled beggars who came to the family’s door.

“The world was violent, I was learning, unpredictable and often cruel,” he writes. Obama and his mother thus we were very well acquainted with the harsh realities of indigenous Indonesians.

Fermina Katarina Sinaga, recalled yojhng Obama in her class: in the common task of class to write an essay titled “My dream: What I want to be in the future.” Obama “wrote ‘I want to be a president,’ ” she said. During a later writing assignment on family, he wrote, “My father is my idol.

The Indonesian connection for Obama and all that shaped him proving once again all things Javanese and indigenous Indonesian the bedrock for the towering monuments built on the foundations of a great civilisation.

Indonesia Matters