Obama's grandmother to help fight tsetse fly

Nice to see that she's trying to do good also.

ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama's step-grandmother will use her newfound celebrity status to help eradicate the tsetse fly, an insect that causes sleeping sickness, the African Union (AU) said Monday.

Sarah Obama, 87, was given a spray pump and enough insecticide to treat 3,000 animals -- which like humans can be infected by the insect -- by an AU team that visited her village of Kogelo in western Kenya last month.

"Mama Sarah very much appreciated the gift and ... vowed in her local language that she will be the goodwill ambassador in her area to eradicate tsetse flies," the AU said.

(snip)

Some 37 African countries are affected by tsetse and sleeping sickness or trypanosomiasis.

Obama's Kenyan stepgrandmother to attend ball

By GottaLaff

A feel-good post about the woman P.E. Obama calls "Granny":

President-elect Barack Obama's Kenyan stepgrandmother will be among the millions of people in Washington for the Inauguration [...]

Sarah Obama, the stepmother of Obama's Kenyan-born father, will join representatives from the Kenyan government, African Union and African diplomats for an unofficial inaugural ball on Jan. 20 [...]

Obama was not especially close to his African family although he last visited them on a 2006 trip to Kenya. [...]

In "Dreams from My Father," Obama described meeting Sarah Obama during his 1988 trip to his father's homeland, earning a handshake as a greeting and awkwardness as they struggled to communicate.

"Our mutual vocabulary exhausted, we stared ruefully down at the dirt until (half-sister) Auma finally returned," Obama writes in "Dreams from My Father."

"And Granny then turned to Auma and said, in a tone I could understand, that it pained her not to be able to speak to the son of her son."

Sarah Obama lives in a house in the western Kenya village of Kogelo without electricity and speaks only the local Luo language and some Swahili.

Imagine how proud she must be. We are, and we're not even related.