My wife and I just returned from an 18-day journey (the word in Swahili is safari) to Kenya and Tanzania. We saw breath-taking vistas of nature at its most beautiful and heart-tugging scenes of poverty that are difficult to imagine given our lives spent as citizens of a land of plenty. But as I continue to re-live our initial visit to Africa, one aspect of the experience continues to stand out ... the unqualified joy that we saw in the faces of everyone we met when they learned that we came from the Land of Obama.
During our trip we visited the parks and preserves known as Masai Mara, Lake Nakuru, and Amboseli in Kenya, and the Serengeti, Lake Manyara, Ngorogoro Crater, and Tarangire in Tanzania. The landscape is stunning, the acacia, baobab, and flame trees a new and wonderful discovery, and the array of magnificent animals -- from lions and leopards to elephants and giraffes to zebras and wildebeasts to baboons, vervet monkeys, and dwarf mongooses -- all roaming free in their natural habitats enough to make us think we had somehow managed a miraculous return to Eden. (This is not a commercial, but I would also like to say that we had an excellent experience with an American-based tour company, one I will be happy to recommend by name if you get in touch.)
But we also went out of our way to make a pilgrimage to the small village of Kogelo in western Kenya, the ancestral home of President Obama. Thanks to the intercession of our Kenyan hosts, we had the extraordinary opportunity of meeting, and spending about fifteen minutes with, President Obama's grandmother (actually the third wife of his grandfather), the 87-year-old woman known as Mama Sarah. She speaks very little English, and we speak almost no Luo or Swahili, so our conversation required translation. But we quickly learned that she is a very funny and passionate woman who wants nothing more than to use her new influence to improve the lives of her fellow villagers and fellow Kenyans and fellow citizens of the world. When my wife expressed her hope that President Obama will change the world, Mama Sarah replied, "You elected him, and now he must change the world!"
The other people we met in Kogelo were very happy to meet two Americans who had gone out of their way to bring greetings to those who had helped to give us our great new president. But that was true wherever we went in Kenya, and in Tanzania as well. We soon learned that "Obama" was the magic word guaranteed to bring smiles to the faces of everyone we met. When asked where we were from, we eagerly replied, "We come from the United States, the land of President Obama," and every time the response was the same ... smiles, laughter, gestures of thumbs-up, a hearty handshake or a clap on the back. We would say to Kenyans, "Thank you for our wonderful new president!" and they would say, "Thank you for electing him!" We came to see that, from their perspective, the fact that the US would elect as president a man who looked like them was pretty phenomenal.
And from our perspective, the love we saw reflected in the faces of our hosts was phenomenal as well. It did feel quite wonderful to be representatives of our country, particularly after making trips abroad over the past eight years in which we felt called upon to apologize for the actions of our country. We had brought along a number of "Obama '08" campaign buttons with us, and we gave them as gifts to many of the warm people we met on our journey, all of whom immediately pinned them to their shirts and beamed with pride and happiness, emotions reflected in our eyes as well.
Just north of the border with Tanzania, within sight of the majestic peak of Kilimanjaro, we spent some time with a wood carver who had fashioned the beautful African mask we bought as a small souvenir of our visit. He, too, smiled broadly at the mention of our president's name. He clasped my hand and said to me, "Because of Obama, you and I are now brothers!" At that moment, I was never prouder to be an American.