Obama’s Kin Glued to the Radio in Kenya - NYTimes

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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/04/world/africa/04village.html?ref=world

NAIROBI, Kenya — The post-election mayhem consuming Nairobi and other parts of Kenya has not struck Nyangoma-Kogelo, the western village of tin shacks where many residents were instead fixated on the results of another vote on Thursday: the Iowa caucuses.

Nyangoma-Kogelo is the ancestral home of Senator Barack Obama, who was locked in a tight race with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and former Senator John Edwards for the top Democratic spot in the caucuses, the formal opening of the American presidential election.

“The situation here is good,” Senator Obama’s uncle, Said Obama, said in a telephone interview from the village. Referring to the Iowa caucuses, he said: “we are following what is going on in the U.S., though we have to rely on the radio.”

Senator Obama’s father, a goat-herder-turned economist, grew up in Nyangoma-Kogelo and was buried there in 1982 following a fatal car crash. When Senator Obama, Democrat of Illinois, visited Kenya in August 2006, he got a hero’s welcome here by residents who consider him a role model and a symbol of American opportunity and multiculturalism (his mother is white and from Kansas). Many wore ironed Obama T-shirts for the occasion.