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A mother’s unconventional life reflected within Obama

Daily Times Monitor

Trained as an anthropologist, Barack Obama’s mother worked in Indonesia and Pakistan and encouraged her children to respect their absent fathers

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, Obama 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 Obama, according to a report published in The New York Times.

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 micro-credit to the world’s poor.

The report says that Soetoro had high expectations for her children. In Indonesia, she would wake her son at 4 am for correspondence courses in English before school. She brought home recordings of Mahalia Jackson, speeches by Martin Luther King, and when 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 her life.

“She felt that, somehow, wandering through uncharted territory, we might stumble upon something that will, in an instant, seem to represent who we are at the core,” said Maya Soetoro-Ng, Obama’s half-sister.

According to the report, Soetoro, who died of ovarian cancer in 1995, was the parent who raised Obama, the Illinois Democrat running for president. He barely saw his father after the age of 2. Though it is impossible to pinpoint the imprint of a parent on the life of a grown child, people who knew Soetoro well say they see her influence unmistakably in Obama.

They were close, her friends and his half-sister say. Yet he has also made some different choices - marrying into a tightly knit, African-American family rooted in Chicago’s South Side, becoming a churchgoing Christian, publicly recounting his search for his identity as a black man.

According to the report, in a campaign in which Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, has made liberal use of his globe trotting 96-year-old mother to answer suspicions that he might be an antique at 71, Obama, who declined to be interviewed for this article, invokes his mother’s memory sparingly. In one ad, she appears fleetingly - porcelain-skinned, raven-haired and holding her toddler son.

But, in interviews, friends and colleagues of Soetoro shed light on a side of her that is less well known. “She was a very, very big thinker,” said Nancy Barry, a former president of Women’s World Banking, an international network of micro-finance providers, where Soetoro worked in New York City in the early 1990s. “I think she was not at all personally ambitious, I think she cared about the core issues and I think she was not afraid to speak truth to power.”

The report says Soetoro’s parents were from Kansas - her mother from Augusta, her father from El Dorado, a place Obama first visited in a campaign stop in January. Stanley Ann - her father wanted a boy so he gave her his name - was born on an army base during World War II. The family moved to California, Kansas, Texas and Washington in restless pursuit of opportunity before landing in Honolulu in 1960.

In a Russian class at the University of Hawaii, she met the school’s first African student, Barack Obama. They married and had a son in August 1961, in an era when interracial marriage was rare. Her parents were upset, Obama learned years later from his mother, but they adapted.

The marriage was brief. In 1963, Obama left for Harvard, leaving his wife and child. She then married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian student. When he was summoned home in 1966 after the turmoil surrounding the rise of Suharto, Stanley Ann Soetoro and Barack followed.

Her second marriage faded, too, in the 1970s. She wanted to work, one friend said, and Lolo Soetoro wanted more children. He became more American, she once said, as she became more Javanese.

According to the report, Soetoro was back in Honolulu by 1974, a graduate student and raising Barack and Maya, nine years younger. Barack was on scholarship at a prestigious prep school, Punahou. When Soetoro decided to return to Indonesia three years later for her field work, Barack chose not to go.

Fluent in Indonesian, Soetoro moved with Maya first to Yogyakarta, the center of Javanese handicrafts. A weaver in college, she was fascinated with what Soetoro-Ng calls “life’s gorgeous minutiae.” That interest inspired her study of village industries, which became the basis of her 1992 doctoral dissertation.

She became a consultant for the United States Agency for International Development on setting up a village credit programme, then a Ford Foundation programme officer in Jakarta specialising in women’s work. Later, she was a consultant in Pakistan; then she joined Indonesia’s oldest bank to work on what is described as the world’s largest sustainable micro-finance programme, creating services like credit and savings for the poor. After her diagnosis, Soetoro spent the last months of her life in Hawaii, near her mother. (Her father had died.) She died in November 1995, as Obama was starting his first campaign for public office.

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