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Barack Obama In Mourning After His Step-Grandmother Sarah Passes Away In Kenya At 99 – ‘We Will Miss Her Dearly’

Former President Barack Obama and his family are in mourning right now after his step-grandmother Sarah passed away in Kenya. She was 99 years-old.

Obama took to Instagram to reveal to the world that she had passed away.

“My family and I are mourning the loss of our beloved grandmother, Sarah Ogwel Onyango Obama, affectionately known to many as ‘Mama Sarah’ but known to us as ‘Dani’ or Granny,” Obama wrote alongside a photo of him and Sarah. “Born in the first quarter of the last century, in Nyanza Province, on the shores of Lake Victoria, she had no formal schooling, and in the ways of her tribe, she was married off to a much older man while only a teen.”

“She would spend the rest of her life in the tiny village of Alego, in a small home built of mud-and thatch brick and without electricity or indoor plumbing,” he added. “There she raised eight children, tended to her goats and chickens, grew an assortment of crops, and took what the family didn’t use to sell at the local open-air market.”

“Although not his birth mother, Granny would raise my father as her own, and it was in part thanks to her love and encouragement that he was able to defy the odds and do well enough in school to get a scholarship to attend an American university,” Obama continued. “When our family had difficulties, her homestead was a refuge for her children and grandchildren, and her presence was a constant, stabilizing force.”

“When I first traveled to Kenya to learn more about my heritage and father, who had passed away by then, it was Granny who served as a bridge to the past, and it was her stories that helped fill a void in my heart,” the former president said.

“During the course of her life, Granny would witness epochal changes taking place around the globe: world war, liberation movements, moon landings, and the advent of the computer age,” Obama added. “She would live to fly on jets, receive visitors from around the world, and see one of her grandsons get elected to the United States presidency.”

“And yet her essential spirit—strong, proud, hard-working, unimpressed with conventional marks of status and full of common sense and good humor—never changed,” he concluded. ‘We will miss her dearly, but celebrate with gratitude her long and remarkable life.”

 

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The Associated Press reported that Sarah died at around 4am local time on Monday at the Jaramogi Oginga Odinga Teaching and Referral hospital in Kisumu, Kenya’s third-largest city.

“She died this morning,” said her daughter, Marsat Onyango. “We are devastated.”

“Mama was sick with normal diseases. She did not die of COVID-19,” added family spokesman Sheik Musa Ismail, who went on to say that Sarah tested negative for COVID-19 when she arrived at the hospital a week ago.

This piece was written by Mark Baker on March 29, 2021. It originally appeared in UpliftingToday and is used by permission.

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