Meet the Kenyan Barack Obamas preparing for their namesake's visit

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/24/kenyan-barack-obamas-vist-kisumu

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Five-year-old Barack Obama Oyoo wants to be president when he’s older – and it’s not really world peace that he’s after.

“When I’m president like Obama I’ll ride in big cars and big planes,” he says at his family’s small home in Kisumu on the shores of Lake Victoria, where the walls are decorated by giant posters of the US head of state flanked by the Kenyan and American flags.

A frenzy of excitement has gripped Kenya before the arrival of Barack Obama in the land of his father’s birth. But few will watch the visit with more expectation than the dozens of households in Kisumu – the largest city in the region where the US president’s father grew up – with a young Barack in the family.

In a society where a name is seen as a marker of future prospects, being called “Barack Obama” is a display of parental ambition.

“In my child I’m seeing President Obama,” says Dan Oyoo, a primary school teacher. “That name alone is like magic. When it is mentioned, it stirs something in me. I know he will go far. He’s not somebody to remain down here.”

Not far away at Dunga Beach, where schoolchildren in neat starched uniforms enjoy ice-cream and short, wobbly boat rides in the lake, class teacher Phoebe Akinyi Ong’udi calls most pupils by their first names.

“Don’t jump into the water, JoyFridah,” she yells. But five-year-old Barack Otieno Odhiambo and Barack Otieno Obama, six, must be summoned by their full names to avoid confusion.

The two boys glow when asked what they think about sharing a name with one of the world’s most famous men.

Barack Otieno Obama’s mother, Jasmine Ochieng, jokes that few people get lost when looking for her house in Manyatta, a sprawling, densely populated settlement of the city. “You simply say you want to go to Mama Obama’s house and you are directed here without a problem.”

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But she is more serious when reflecting on her son’s life. Her Barack faced grim odds when he was born on 31 July 2009. The baby was delivered in the lowlands of the Kenyan Rift Valley in Pokot, a land of craggy hills and breathtaking vistas where healthcare facilities are so basic that the infant mortality rate is more than double the national average.

American missionaries had arrived to work at the local healthcare centre hours before Ochieng was due and suggested a name to the mother later that night: why not name him Barack Obama, the man whose historic election as US president months earlier had attracted so much attention in Kenya? She enthusiastically agreed.

“My expectation is that Obama will excel in school and get to university. I want him to be a doctor because he has suffered poor health. When he becomes a doctor, he will uplift the economic situation of our family which is poor at the moment.”

Young Barack’s ambitions regarding the trip are more modest. “When Obama comes to Kenya, I want to see him come to Kisumu,” he says. “I will shake his hand with my own hand.”

Many parents of young Obamas say they hope to meet the president and tell him their stories – much as Tony Blair met young Kosovan Albanians named after him on a visit to Pristina.

“My dream is that my son Malcolm Obama becomes president one day so that he can help me and my young twins who are now only four months old,” says Rose Adhiambo Ochieng, a 26-year-old whose chef husband, Joanes Ochieng, is a big fan of the US leader. She says her son excels at school and expresses the hope her family will meet the president and get a scholarship for Malcolm.

“The name Obama makes me very proud,” says eight-year-old Malcolm. “When people call me Obama it means I can grow up to be like Obama, and I can help the people who call me Obama, and even other people.”

But he says he will settle for something else if he can’t be president and urges his famous namesake to help him attain his dream. “If I met Obama I’d ask him to educate me, and also to educate the rest of my family so that I become a doctor. And I will work hard, and help my nation.”

There is no shortage of young Barack Obamas in the sleepy village of K’Ogelo, where many families still live in cylindrical mud huts, getting by with maize and sorghum crops and a few domestic animals – much as the US president’s father, Barack Sr, must have done decades ago.

Two Obama dads, George Ochieng Onyango, a bicycle taxi rider, and Christopher Ouma Okello, a small-scale farmer, want the president to make time to see them and find ways to support young Kenyans.

George Ochieng says he recalls being served porridge at school by Sarah Obama, the president’s step-grandmother. He sees the remarkable rise of the Obama family, in which a father move from modest beginnings herding goats in K’Ogelo to studying in America and fathering a future president in one generation, as “biblical”.

“Whenever a parent is advising a child,” Oyoo says, “they will always refer to President Obama: ‘Do you see how Obama started from a humble background, and do you see where he has ended up?’ So we usually tell the children to follow his footsteps.”