President Barack Obama has dinner with his sister Auma Obama, and the rest of his family
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Arlette Saenz: President Obama Reunites With Family In Kenya Over Dinner
It was a big family reunion when President Obama arrived here in Kenya today. Obama, who is visiting his father’s homeland for the fourth time but for the first time as president, sat down with three-dozen members of his Kenyan family for dinner at his hotel. He sat next to his half-sister Auma and step-grandmother Sarah Obama, who was the third wife of the president’s paternal grandfather.
She’s affectionately known to many as Mama Sarah, but to President Obama, she’s just Granny. When Obama first visited Kenya in 1988, Auma picked him up at the airport in a sputtering baby-blue Volkswagen Beetle that was missing a muffler. Tonight, it was a much different scene as the president treated Auma to a ride in the presidential motorcade on his fourth visit to Kenya.
President Barack Obama embraces his sister Auma Obama and is greeted by Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta as he arrives aboard Air Force One at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport
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Today, they rode in The Beast. What a life!
President Obama is met by his sister Auma.She once picked him up in her battered light blue VW Beetle when he came alone at the same airport
This is the Kenya I knew when I spent two years there, from 1992 to 1994, working with the Jesuit Refugee Service. Of course it’s wrong to generalize about a people or a country, and Kenya encompasses men, women and children from a stunning variety of ethnic backgrounds speaking dozens of indigenous languages (most also speak Swahili and English), but perhaps positive generalizations are okay. Nearly to a person, the Kenyan men and women I knew were warm, welcoming, friendly, upbeat, clever, playful, helpful, and, most of all, hopeful. I adored living there, loved working and living among them, and enjoyed learning Swahili (and even a little Maasai)…For Kenyans the visit of President Obama, a man with deep Kenyan roots, is of enormous significance and a cause for celebration.
Family is of inestimable significance for Kenyans, and nearly everyone knows what tribe you’re from, and the location of your family’s shamba (loosely translated as “farm” but a larger word meaning homeland). It’s especially easy for Kenyans to figure out what ethnic group Barack Obama hails from. He is obviously a Luo, as evidenced by the “O” that begins his last name. Luo names are ones like Odhiambo, Omondi, Okello, Onyango, Otieno. When I living in Kenya, the Jesuit vocation director for East Africa was a florid-faced, white-haired, Irishman named Sean O’Connor who, like me, loved his adopted country. Sean loved to joke with the East Africans when they asked where he was from, that of course he was a Luo. “Can’t you tell from my name?” he would say. “It’s Oconnor, after all.” During the president’s trip to Kenya, I hope that the media covers the following: the way that Kenyans often make do with so little; the way that they are able to live among a welter of cultures and languages; the stunning beauty of their land; their deep pride in their heritage; their great love of country. So with my friends (marafiki) in Kenya, I say to the President, “Karibu Kenya, Rais Obama!”
The Obama Diary 
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