Before the White House, Barack Obama was Barry, a schoolboy in Jakarta
From age six to ten, the future 44th president lived in Jakarta, enrolled as Barry at a Catholic primary school and then a state one, and grew fluent in Indonesian. His mother topped up those lessons with English homeschooling, and his Indonesian stepfather gave him a blunt education in how the world works.
He was born on August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, making him the only president born outside the contiguous United States. His mother, Ann Dunham from Wichita, Kansas, was 18; his father, a 27-year-old Luo scholarship student from Kenya, had met her in a Russian class at the University of Hawaii. They divorced in 1964, and his father returned to Kenya, visiting his son only once, at Christmas 1971, before dying in a car crash in 1982.
Dunham then married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian geography student, and in 1967 followed him to Jakarta with her son. In 1971 the boy went back to Honolulu to live with his grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Dunham, and attended the private Punahou School on a scholarship until 1979. He kept the nickname Barry until a trip to Kenya in 1980. When his mother returned to Indonesia for anthropology fieldwork in 1975, he chose to stay behind; she later earned a doctorate and died in Hawaii in 1995.
College took him to Occidental in Los Angeles, where his first public speech urged the school to divest from apartheid South Africa, and then to Columbia, where he studied political science and English literature. From 1985 to 1988 he worked as a community organizer on Chicago's South Side, helping start job training, tutoring and a tenants' rights group. He turned down a full scholarship to Northwestern's law school for Harvard, where he became the first Black president of the Harvard Law Review, a milestone that won him a book contract. The result, Dreams from My Father, appeared in 1995.
He taught constitutional law in Chicago, served in the Illinois Senate and then the US Senate, and won the presidency in 2008, serving two terms until 2017 and receiving the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.
Source: Barack Obama
