Childhood of US President Barack Obama

BARACK Hussein Obama, the first African American to be elected as a President of the United States, now is a famous people all over the world. This is not because of his position as a US President, but is due to the fact that he is a historical US President.

This is because of his nature, he is a African American who now show the world that America is a nation for people of all color, it’s a matter of time which now confirmed.

President Obama was born August 4, 1961 in the state of Hawaii, US and he is a native citizen of the United States of America. He was born at the Kapi'olani Medical Center for Women & Children in Honolulu, Hawaii.

His mother is a European American from Wichita, Kansas and his father is a Luo from Nyang’oma Kogelo, Nyanza Province in Kenya.

Obama's parents met in 1960 in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, where his father was a foreign student on scholarship. They married on February 2, 1961. But they separated when Obama was two years old, and they divorced in 1964.

This situation led Obama's father to returned in Kenya and saw his son only once more before dying in an automobile accident in 1982.

After that Obama attended local schools in Jakarta, such as Besuki Public School and St. Francis of Assisi School, until he was ten years old.

He then returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Armour Dunham, while attending Punahou School from the fifth grade in 1971 until his graduation from high school in 1979.

Of his early childhood, Obama has recalled, "That my father looked nothing like the people around me, that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk, barely registered in my mind."

In his 1995 memoir, he described his struggles as a young adult to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage. He wrote that he used alcohol, marijuana and cocaine during his teenage years to "push questions of who I was out of my mind."
At the 2008 Civil Forum on the Presidency, Obama identified his high-school drug use as his "greatest moral failure."

Some of his fellow students at Punahou School later told the Honolulu Star-Bulletin that Obama was mature for his age, and that he sometimes attended college parties and other events in order to associate with African American students and military service people. Reflecting later on his formative years in Honolulu, Obama wrote: "The opportunity that Hawaii offered — to experience a variety of cultures in a climate of mutual respect became an integral part of my world view, and a basis for the values that I hold most dear."

Following high school, Obama moved to Los Angeles, where he studied at Occidental College for two years.He then transferred to Columbia University in New York City, where he majored in political science with a specialization in international relations. Obama graduated with a B.A. from Columbia in 1983. He worked for a year at the Business International Corporation and then at the New York Public Interest Research Group.

After four years in New York City, Obama moved to Chicago, where he was hired as director of the Developing Communities Project (DCP), a church-based community organization originally comprising eight Catholic parishes in Greater Roseland (Roseland, West Pullman and Riverdale) on Chicago's far South Side. He worked there for three years from June 1985 to May 1988.

During his three years as the DCP's director, its staff grew from one to thirteen and its annual budget grew from $70,000 to $400,000. His achievements included helping set up a job training program, a college preparatory tutoring program, and a tenants' rights organization in Altgeld Gardens. Obama also worked as a consultant and instructor for the Gamaliel Foundation, a community organizing institute. In mid-1988, he traveled for the first time to Europe for three weeks and then for five weeks in Kenya, where he met many of his paternal relatives for the first time.

Obama entered Harvard Law School in late 1988. He was selected as an editor of the Harvard Law Review at the end of his first year, and president of the journal in his second year.During his summers, he returned to Chicago where he worked as a summer associate at the law firms of Sidley & Austin in 1989 and Hopkins & Sutter in 1990. After graduating with a Juris Doctor (J.D.) magna cum laude from Harvard in 1991 he returned to Chicago.

This is a short story of President Obama, during his childhood period.

This article prepared by Mkombe Zanda with the access of international websites as a sources of information. (http://www.google.com/, http://www.bbc.co.uk/, http://www.cnn.com/ and Obama Wikipedia