• Born of a Kenyan father and an American mother, Barack Obama's childhood has been a mélange
of diverse cultural climates that helped imbibe in him a deep-seated respect for different
traditions.

• Obama talks thus of his multi-racial childhood, "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."

• Throughout his childhood years, Obama was known both at home and at school as 'Barry'.

• Up to the age of ten, Obama lived with his mother Ann Dunham, step-father and half-sister,
in the populous Muslim country of Indonesia. His childhood in Jakarta differed vastly from his
formative years in Honolulu under the care of his maternal grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Armour
Dunham.

• Obama attended the local schools and was a Cub Scout while living in Jakarta, Indonesia
where classes were taught in the Indonesian language.

• In 1971, he moved to Hawaii to live with his grandparents in their downtown apartment while
attending the prestigious Punahou where Obama remembers 'feeling like a misfit' in his 'Indonesian
sandals' and struggling with his racial identity.

• Obama also proudly remembers "the opportunity that Hawaii offered... became an integral
part of my world view, and a basis for the values that I hold most dear".

• Obama's first boyhood four-bedroom, single-storey home can still be seen on the
Kalaniana'ole Highway, in the Kuli'ou'ou area between 'Aina Haina and Hawai'i Ka.i.

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