Who is this man? After almost three months in the White House, do we know any more about this president than we did before he took office? 

We, the American people, elected our 44th president last year, and have turned the world, as we know it, upside down. He promised change, and in some ways delivered – in some ways, not. But, that is not our focus today – we will cover that later. Right now, the question is what do we know about the man, himself?

Barack Hussein Obama was born at Kapiolani Medical Center for Women and children, in Honolulu, Hawaii, August 4, 1961. His mother, Ann Dunham, of Wichita, Kansas, was studying anthropology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, when she fell in love with Barack Obama, Sr., from Kenya, also a student, who was studying economy. Obama, Senior was from the Luo tribe, from Nyang’oma Kogelo, Nyanza Province, Kenya. They got married in Honolulu, February 2, 1961.

Barack (“blessed” in Arabic) was a precocious child, who developed a love for knowledge through books early in life. In 1964, when Barack was two, his parents divorced, and his father went back to Africa. His mother married Lolo Soetore, an Indonesian man, and took baby Barack to a village outside of Jakarta, Indonesia, So that he wouldn’t forget his mother’s native language, Barack took a correspondence class for English while he attended local Indonesian schools. He was known as Barry Soetoro, while attending Besuki Public School, and St. Francis of Assissi School. His teachers described him as a bright boy, mature for his age, and showing early signs of leadership, was well liked. In 1971, Barack’s sister was born, Maya Soetoro-Ng, nine years his junior.

At ten, Barack relocated to Hawaii, to live with his maternal grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Dunham, where he attended Punahou Public School, from the fifth grade, in 1971, to graduation, in 1979. The only contact he had with his father after the divorce, occurred when Barack. Sr. visited him in Hawaii in 1972, when Barack was eleven. He seemed to be a happy, upbeat, basketball-loving teenager, but underneath, he was struggling with his bi-racial heritage, and turned, for a short time, to marijuana, and other drugs. He calls this high school drug use his “greatest moral failure.”

After graduation, Barack moved to Los Angeles, where he attended Occidental College for two years, then transferred to Columbia University in New York City. His major was political science and he specialized in international relations. He graduated from Columbia in 1983. After four years, he moved to Chicago, IL, where he began his work in community organization. His father died in 1982, in a car accident, when Barack was twenty-one.

In 1988, Barack traveled to Europe, then Kenya, where he met some of his paternal relatives. He entered Harvard Law School, and was selected as an editor of the Harvard Law Review in his first year, and president of the journal in his second year. Barack graduated with a Juries Doctor (J.D.) magna cum laude in 1991, after which time, he returned to Chicago.

Barack joined the Sidley Austin law firm in June 1989, where Michelle Robinson became his advisor. They began dating later in the summer, and married on October 3, 1992. Their first daughter, Malia Ann, was born in 1998, then a second daughter, Natasha, in 2001. His mother died of ovarian cancer in 1995.

Barack served as professor at the University of Chicago Law School, teaching constitutional law, from 1992 to 2004. He was elected to the Illinois State Senate in 1996, reelected in 1998, and again in 2002. He resigned from the Illinois senate in 2004, after being elected to the U.S. senate. Barack resigned his U.S. senate seat on November 16, 2008 to run for the presidency of the United States of America. His mantra echoing across this great land, “Yes, we can!”

On November 4, 2008, Barack Obama defeated John McCain, 365 electoral votes to McCain’s 173, and became the first African American to be elected President of the United States. In his victory speech, he proclaimed, “change has come to America.”