In today's (March 14, 2008) edition of the New York Times, there is a wonderful portrait of Barack Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro. We know almost nothing about her, except that she married Barack's Kenyan father at the age of 18 and later married an Indonesian and moved to Jakarta. There is not much written about her in Obama's first book, Dreams From My Father. From what we know of Obama's character, it is not entirely surprising to learn what an incredibly accomplished and caring person she was in her own right. Now we know a lot more!
Link to NYTimes: http://www.nytimes.com/...
Here are some excerpts from that article:
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, he 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 Mr. Obama.
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 microcredit to the world’s poor.
Obama seemed crushed by the fact that he was not by her bedside when she died in Hawai of ovarian cancer. He has alluded to her last illness in some of his ads, speaking of her anxiety of meeting her medical bills. Yet, for Obama, the photograph of the scattering of his mother's ashes remains his most important keepsakes:
Some of what he has said about his mother seems tinged with a mix of love and regret. He has said his biggest mistake was not being at her bedside when she died. And when The Associated Press asked the candidates about "prized keepsakes" — others mentioned signed baseballs, a pocket watch, a "trophy wife" — Mr. Obama said his was a photograph of the cliffs of the South Shore of Oahu in Hawaii where his mother’s ashes were scattered.
Above all, for Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro, her work among Indonesian poor people became her life's passion. This is well captured in the New York Times article:
Fluent in Indonesian, Ms. Soetoro moved with Maya first to Yogyakarta, the center of Javanese handicrafts. A weaver in college, she was fascinated with what Ms. 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 loved living in Java," said Dr. Dewey, who recalled accompanying Ms. Soetoro to a metalworking village. "People said: ‘Hi! How are you?’ She said: ‘How’s your wife? Did your daughter have the baby?’ They were friends. Then she’d whip out her notebook and she’d say: ‘How many of you have electricity? Are you having trouble getting iron?’ "
She became a consultant for the United States Agency for International Development on setting up a village credit program, then a Ford Foundation program officer in Jakarta specializing in women’s work. Later, she was a consultant in Pakistan, then joined Indonesia’s oldest bank to work on what is described as the world’s largest sustainable microfinance program, creating services like credit and savings for the poor.
There is much, much more in the article. I, for one, am grateful that someone at the New York Times has finally given a fuller picture of a little known, yet extraordinary American woman.