The Nobel Peace Prize 2009

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA…

“for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”

Photo: Pete Souza, Obama-Biden Transition Project, licensed by Attribution Share Alike 3.0
Barack Obama
USA
44th President of the United States of America
b. 1961

“His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population,” Nobel Committee.

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Courtesy of OBAMA FOR AMERICA

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OBAMA FAMILY TREE:

Supreme Court Justice

Obama’s distant cousin, Gabriel Duvall, was a member of the US House of Representatives, from the second district of Maryland. In 1811, he was appointed to the Supreme Court, where he sat until 1834. He was also a friend of Thomas Jefferson and the owner of 37 slaves

Farmers

Louisa Eliza Stroup Dunham and Jacob Mackey Dunham are the candidate’s great-great-great grandparents. A farmer in Tipton, County, Indiana in the 1870s, Jacob Dunham later owned restaurants and a confectionary in the Oklahoma Territory. He died in 1907.

Grandparents

Stanley and Madelyn Dunham pose with Obama’s mother Ann in a photograph probably taken in the 1950s. Born in Kansas, Obama’s maternal grandparents lived in four states before settling in Hawaii.

Mother

Though she has signed this sophomore yearbook photograph of herself “Stanley” — her parents named her Stanley Ann at birth — Obama’s mother was known as Ann for most of her life. After attending Mercer Island High School in Washington, she enrolled at the University of Hawaii, where she met Barack Obama, Sr.

Father

Born in Kenya, Barack Obama Sr. came to the University of Hawaii in order to study for a degree in economics. This photograph hangs on the wall of his stepmother’s house in Kogelo, Kenya.

Parents

Barack Sr. and Ann Dunham married in February, 1961 and Barack was born six months later. Their union did not last long, however. The marriage ended in divorce in early 1964.

The Young Obama

For the first six years of his life, Barack lived in Hawaii. In 1967, his mother remarried and the family moved to Indonesia.

Reunion

After the divorce, Barack Jr. only saw his father one more time, in Hawaii, in 1972, when this photograph was taken. The senior Barack then returned to Kenya, where he worked for a US oil company and the Kenyan government. He died in a car accident in 1982, at the age of 46.

Half Sister

Maya Soetoro, the daughter of Barack’s mother and her second husband, Lolo Soetoro, sits beside the young Barack, Ann and grandfather Stanley Dunham in this photograph taken in Hawaii the early 1970s. Ann came back to Hawaii to attend graduate school in 1974 and remained until 1977, when she returned to Indonesia.

Family Ties

When Ann returned to Indonesia, the young Barack remained behind in Hawaii, where he was raised by his maternal grandparents. He eventually attended Columbia University in New York, where this photo was taken in the 1980s.

Extended Family

On his father’s side, Obama has numerous relatives. He has made several visits to the home of his step grandmother, Sarah Obama, front row, second from right. He also has four half brothers through his father.

Kenya

Sarah Obama, now 86, still resides in Kogelo. In this photo, she and Obama pose together outside her home in 1995.

Michelle

Barack met his wife in the late 1980s, when the two worked at the prestigious Chicago law firm Sidley & Austin. They were married in 1992. Shortly thereafter, they spent a Christmas in Hawaii, where this photo was taken.

The Next Generation

Barack and Michelle have two children, Malia, now 10, and Sasha, 7.

The Story of Barack Obama’s Mother

By Amanda Ripley / Honolulu

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1729524,00.html#WordPress

Ann Dunham

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Stanley Ann Dunham in 1960

Born     Stanley Ann Dunham

November 29, 1942(1942-11-29)

Wichita, Kansas, USA

Died     November 7, 1995 (aged 52)

Honolulu, Hawaii, USA

Cause of death     Uterine cancer

Resting place     Pacific Ocean

at Koko Head, Oahu

Nationality     American

Ethnicity     White

Education     BA, MA, PhD [1]

Alma mater     University of Hawaii

Occupation     Anthropologist

Home town     Wichita, Kansas

Known for     Mother of US President Barack Obama

Indonesian anthropology

Spouse(s)     Barack Obama, Sr.

(1961–1964, divorced)

Lolo Soetoro

(1965–1980, divorced)

Children     Barack Obama (b.1961)

Maya Soetoro (b.1970)

Parents     Stanley Armour Dunham

Madelyn Payne Dunham

Stanley Ann Dunham (November 29, 1942 – November 7, 1995), mother of Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States, was an American anthropologist who specialized in economic anthropology and rural development. Dunham was nicknamed Anna,[2][3] later known as Dr. Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro,[1] and finally Ann Dunham Sutoro.[1] Born in Kansas, Dunham spent her childhood in California, Oklahoma, Texas and Kansas and her teenage years in Mercer Island, Washington, and much of her adult life in Hawaii and Indonesia.

Dunham studied at the University of Hawaii and the East-West Center and attained a bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. in anthropology

Professional life

Dunham returned to graduate school in Honolulu in 1974, while raising Barack and Maya. When Dunham returned to Indonesia for field work in 1975 with Maya, after three years in Honolulu, Barack chose not to go, preferring to finish high school in Hawaii while living with his grandparents.[29]

Having been a weaver, Dunham was interested in village industries, and she therefore moved to Yogyakarta, the center of Javanese handicrafts.[35] In 1992 she earned a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Hawaii, under the supervision of Prof. Alice Dewey, with a dissertation titled Peasant blacksmithing in Indonesia: surviving and thriving against all odds.[36] Anthropologist Michael Dove described the dissertation as “a classic, in-depth, on-the-ground anthropological study of a 1,200-year-old industry”.[37] Dunham’s paper challenged popular perceptions regarding economically and politically marginalized groups, and countered the notions that the roots of poverty lie with the poor themselves and that cultural differences are responsible for the gap between less-developed countries and the industrialized West. According to Dove, Dunham

found that the villagers she studied in Central Java had many of the same economic needs, beliefs and aspirations as the most capitalist of Westerners. Village craftsmen were “keenly interested in profits,” she wrote, and entrepreneurship was “in plentiful supply in rural Indonesia,” having been “part of the traditional culture” there for a millennium…Based on these observations, Dr. Soetoro concluded that underdevelopment in these communities resulted from a scarcity of capital, the allocation of which was a matter of politics, not culture. Antipoverty programs that ignored this reality had the potential, perversely, of exacerbating inequality because they would only reinforce the power of elites. As she wrote in her dissertation, “many government programs inadvertently foster stratification by channeling resources through village officials,” who then used the money to further strengthen their own status.[37]

Dunham then pursued a career in rural development championing women’s work and microcredit for the world’s poor, with Indonesia’s oldest bank, the United States Agency for International Development, the Ford Foundation, Women’s World Banking, and as a consultant in Lahore, Pakistan. She mingled with leaders from organizations supporting Indonesian human rights, women’s rights, and grass-roots development.[29] While at the Ford Foundation, Dunham worked with Peter Geithner, father of Tim Geithner (who later became United States Secretary of the Treasury in her son’s administration), to develop the Foundation’s microfinance programs in Indonesia.[38]

Illness and death

In late 1994, Dunham was living and working in Indonesia. One night, during dinner at a friend’s house in Jakarta, she experienced stomach pain. A visit to a local physician misdiagnosed her symptoms as indigestion.[1] Dunham returned to the United States in early 1995 and was examined at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City and diagnosed with uterine cancer. By this time, the cancer had spread to her ovaries.[14] She moved back to Hawaii to live near her widowed mother and died on November 7, 1995 at the age of 52.[29][39][40] Following a memorial service at the University of Hawaii, Obama and his sister spread their mother’s ashes in the Pacific Ocean at Lanai Lookout on the south side of Oahu.[29] Obama scattered the ashes of his grandmother (Madelyn Dunham) in the same spot on December 23, 2008, weeks after his election to the presidency.[41]

Obama touched upon his mother’s death in a 30-second campaign advertisement (“Mother”) arguing for health care reform. The ad featured a photograph of Dunham holding a young Obama in her arms as Obama talks about Dunham’s last days worrying about expensive medical bills.[40] The topic also came up in a 2007 speech in Santa Barbara:[40]

I remember my mother. She was 53 years old when she died of ovarian cancer, and you know what she was thinking about in the last months of her life? She wasn’t thinking about getting well. She wasn’t thinking about coming to terms with her own mortality. She had been diagnosed just as she was transitioning between jobs. And she wasn’t sure whether insurance was going to cover the medical expenses because they might consider this a preexisting condition. I remember just being heartbroken, seeing her struggle through the paperwork and the medical bills and the insurance forms. So, I have seen what it’s like when somebody you love is suffering because of a broken health care system. And it’s wrong. It’s not who we are as a people.[40]

Personal beliefs

In his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father Barack Obama wrote, “My mother’s confidence in needlepoint virtues depended on a faith I didn’t possess… In a land [Indonesia] where fatalism remained a necessary tool for enduring hardship… she was a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism.”[47] In his 2006 book The Audacity of Hope Obama wrote, “I was not raised in a religious household… My mother’s own experiences… only reinforced this inherited skepticism. Her memories of the Christians who populated her youth were not fond ones… And yet for all her professed secularism, my mother was in many ways the most spiritually awakened person that I’ve ever known.”[48] “Religion for her was “just one of the many ways — and not necessarily the best way — that man attempted to control the unknowable and understand the deeper truths about our lives,” Obama wrote.[49]

Maxine Box, Dunham’s best friend in high school, said that Dunham “touted herself [then] as an atheist, and it was something she’d read about and could argue. She was always challenging and arguing and comparing. She was already thinking about things that the rest of us hadn’t.”[5] However, Dunham’s daughter, Maya Soetoro-Ng, when asked later if her mother was an atheist, said, “I wouldn’t have called her an atheist. She was an agnostic. She basically gave us all the good books — the Bible, the Hindu Upanishads and the Buddhist scripture, the Tao Te Ching, Sun Tzu — and wanted us to recognize that everyone has something beautiful to contribute.”[28] “Jesus, she felt, was a wonderful example. But she felt that a lot of Christians behaved in un-Christian ways.”[49]

In a 2007 speech, Obama contrasted the beliefs of his mother to those of her parents, and commented on her spirituality and skepticism: “My mother, whose parents were nonpracticing Baptists and Methodists, was one of the most spiritual souls I ever knew. But she had a healthy skepticism of religion as an institution.”[1]

OBAMA’S NATION OF HOPE:

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