A Journey to Remote Kenya to Meet Granny Obama
Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 02.25.08 | 10:17 AM ET
Fascinating column Sunday from Nicholas D. Kristof, who visits a remote village in western Kenya to meet the elderly woman Barack Obama calls his grandmother. She’s illiterate and lives without electricity or running water. Among the wacky political highlights: “You might think that all Kenyans would be vigorously supporting Mr. Obama. But Kenya has been fractured along ethnic lines in the last two months, so now Mr. Obama draws frenzied support from the Luo ethnic group of his ancestors, while many members of the rival Kikuyu group fervently support Hillary Rodham Clinton.”
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Jim Benning is the editor and co-founder of World Hum.
MarilynTerrell 02.25.08 | 4:35 PM ET
A friend of mine took her two sons to Kenya the summer before last and visited the village where Obama’s grandmother happens to live. They enjoyed meeting the people who proudly showed them around the village and treated them with warm hospitality, but were surprised to find the villagers were not keen on Obama, who had visited earlier and had committed the unforgivable cultural faux pas of arriving without gifts.
Ling 03.02.08 | 9:56 PM ET
Don’t want to get political on this blog, but one of the highlights of Kristof’s article was that he was asked for money for an interview. Not that there’s anything wrong with that - After all, Angelina Jolie gets paid millions for giving access to her baby pics. Just trying to point out that at the end of the day, it’s all about money.
Simon K 03.30.08 | 8:02 PM ET
Most Kenyans support Barack Obama despite all the tribal issues of the past months he has been a unifying factor here and probably one of the few things we all agree on is thats its Obama time in America. We are really proud of his Kenyan heritage.