Stories: Sarah Obama
-
Fighting AIDS in Obama’s Ancestral Land
World AIDS Day is approaching, and it's time, once again, for an accounting. In the roughly 30 years since the disease was recognized, more than 25 million (pdf) have died from it. An estimated 34 million (pdf) are living with it; 2.5 million new infections are recorded each year. There has been progress. As anti-retroviral medications become more widely...
-
Obama Step-Grandma on Women’s Rights
No visit to Kenya is complete without calling on Sarah Obama, President Obama's remarkably sharp 90-year-old step-grandmother, the woman who raised his father, Barack Obama Sr. Since the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, Westerners have trooped to her door, eager to learn about the president's African heritage from the woman he calls "Granny." Obama used her accounts of the...
-
Sarah Obama: Barack Was Born in America
When I was in Kenya earlier this summer with the International Reporting Project, we met with Sarah Obama at her home near Kisumu for a 45-minute interview. She is President Obama's step-grandmother, and she attended his presidential inauguration. During the interview, she was asked by Irin Carmon about "people who believe the president was born in Kenya." Sarah Obama...
-
“Barack Obama Wasn’t Born in Kenya”
These days, you need an appointment to see Obama’s Granny, and yesterday we had one. In Kogelo they call her Mama Sarah Obama, and the once-modest home of Barack Obama’s step-grandmother, 90, is now a heavily guarded compound, reached by a namesake road. The money comes from donations, she told us, though the Kenyan...
-
Mama Sarah Obama
We are visiting with Barack Obama's step-grandmather, Mama Sarah Obama, to talk about her work helping orphans and the elderly. If the iPhone video turned out, I may post a few of her repsonses to our questions.