Sasha's Heart and Soul

I can't help noticing the gentle character that Sasha seems to be becoming. I think that's because it's such a contrast to her forceful mother and sullen older sister.

Below are photos of the Obama family's visit to Hawaii in January, which included Obama's half Indonesian, half sister (their mother is Ann Dunham) Maya Soetoro-Ng, her Chinese-Malaysian-Canadian husband and their two daughters. The photos show the families visiting the East-West Center in Honolulu, where there was an exhibition on the anthropological field work of Dunham.

Apparently, the East-West Center is where Ann Dunham met Lolo Soetoro, Maya Soetoro's father, while they were both graduate students at the center (Dunham lived in Hawaii on and off from 1959 until her death in 1995), and from where Dunham received her grant to do her PhD work from 1973-1978. She was doing field work in Indonesia from 1975-1978. Dunham would marry Soetoro in 1965, and give birth to Maya in 1972 in Indonesia. She would divorce Soetoro in 1980. [Source: Wikipedia]

This whole American/Indonesian/Hawaiian/Chinese/white/black/Asian family amalgam is a lot to wrap around for a ten-year-old, but Sasha seems to take it all in stride.

I've arranged the photos in some kind of sequence where Sasha picks up and carries her cousin, showing a concerned reaction to something her young cousin says.





The above photos show Obama's family,
along with his sister's family, visiting
the East-West Center in Honolulu
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Ann Dunham with Indonesian village women, from the
poster for the East-West event "Through Her Eyes."

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I wonder what Sasha will grow up to be, after her strange multi-cultural, multi-racial and multi-national roots, albeit with a father who as president is decidedly black, and a mother who wrote in her undergraduate thesis that as a black person, she felt that she would never be able to fully participate in the "white cultural and social structure" that is America?

Will Sasha become a cosmopolitan world traveler? Will she start a charity for poor Third World children? Will she study world poverty and/due to American imperialism? Will she write a book (or a PhD thesis) on growing up black in the White House? It's too early to say. I think, though, that it is a safe bet that she will grow up liberal (even leftist), which will cloud the decisions she makes about her position in the world.