Barrack Obama’s mother Ann – New York Times article.

In this sound bite political world we live in, it is sometimes difficult to get a real feel for the candidates and what makes them tick. My oldest sister was best friends was Barrack Obama’s mother Ann and she is god-mother of Barrack’s niece. I had the pleasure of meeting Ann in Jakarta, Indonesia way back in 1982. My sister Georgia McCauley who is quoted in this article sent it to me today because she feels it is the best article she has seen so far that accurately portrays her friend Ann. I hope you enjoy it.

“In the capsule version of the Barack Obama story, his mother is simply the white woman from Kansas. The phrase comes coupled alliteratively to its counterpart, the black father from Kenya. On the campaign trail, he has called her his “single mom.” But neither description begins to capture the unconventional life of Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro, the parent who most shaped Mr. Obama.

Kansas was merely a way station in her childhood, wheeling westward in the slipstream of her furniture-salesman father. In Hawaii, she married an African student at age 18. Then she married an Indonesian, moved to Jakarta, became an anthropologist, wrote an 800-page dissertation on peasant blacksmithing in Java, worked for the Ford Foundation, championed women’s work and helped bring microcredit to the world’s poor.

She had high expectations for her children. In Indonesia, she would wake her son at 4 a.m. for correspondence courses in English before school; she brought home recordings of Mahalia Jackson, speeches by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And when Mr. Obama asked to stay in Hawaii for high school rather than return to Asia, she accepted living apart — a decision her daughter says was one of the hardest in Ms. Soetoro’s life.” Click here to read the rest of this article.