For Kenyans, senator from Illinois has come home

N'YONGOMA-KOGELO, Kenya -- It's late Saturday afternoon, and Barack Obama is standing with his grandmother in front of her house, on the Obama homestead, just yards away from the graves of his father and grandfather.

Obama last visited the tiny compound 14 years ago, to bring his prospective bride, Michelle, to win his grandmother's approval before they wed. He returned as a U.S. senator, lionized in the land of his father, where he is regarded as a Kenyan.

"Everybody understood I am the senator from Illinois, not the senator from Kogelo," said Obama, whose grandmother fed him some chicken, cabbage and a traditional porridge in a visit that lasted less than an hour.

Perhaps not everyone.

The Kenyans talk of and make a distinction between "house" and "home." The almost native son in this patriarchal society may have a house in Chicago, but to the thousands of adoring people who turned out to see him on his first trip to Kenya since election to the Senate in November 2004 -- lining rural roads Saturday as his motorcade sped by -- his "home" is Kenya.

A little earlier in the day, Obama tried -- swimming upstream, it seemed, in a day of celebration and ceremony punctuated with songs and chants where the name "Obama" figured in the refrain -- to make it clear why he came.

"And one of the reasons I am here today, I don't come today, as was said, as a grandson of this community. I come here as a United States senator and a representative of the United States government," he said.

Obama's Kenyan swing started in Nairobi, the base for the Kenyan leg of an African tour that is official taxpayer-paid congressional business.

Obama is a member of the African subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He has been outspoken: criticizing the president of South Africa for its HIV/AIDS policies that discount modern medicines, and he told the Kenyan president to clean up a corrupt government.

While Obama had been traveling on U.S. military aircraft on the African visit that started last week in South Africa, he flew from Nairobi to Kisumu, a city on Lake Victoria's shore, on a commercial East African Airlines flight because he was flying with his wife, two daughters and other family members.

Some local Kisumu officials formed a receiving line at the airport, and one told him, "Your father was a very good friend of mine."

Obama barely knew his father, also named Barack Obama, who died in a car crash in 1982. Obama is the son of a Kenyan father and Kansas mother who raised him after the couple, who met while students in Hawaii, separated. The senior Obama went on to earn a doctorate from Harvard and eventually return to Kenya.

That the senior Obama several decades ago was able to move up from a rural area that on Aug. 26, 2006 appeared impoverished -- with unpaved dusty roads, subsistence farming, animals wandering on the road, little to no infrastructure, substandard housing and plagued with malaria and HIV/AIDS -- is as remarkable as the swift ascent of his son in U.S. politics.

Obama wrote extensively about the journey his father took -- and his quest to retrace his steps -- in his bestselling memoir.

Obama recounted the story, as he has done for U.S. audiences, while speaking to a packed crowd of perhaps thousands at a reception near the family home and the Sen. Obama Secondary School, where people chanted "Obama" and some hung from a tree.

"How remarkable it was, the journey that my father had taken," said Obama, "because he grew up around here." That his father could vault from taking care of goats to getting a Harvard degree "is a story of what is possible when a community comes together to support its children," Obama said.

On that theme, Obama sought to set an example by publically taking an HIV/AIDS test with wife Michelle at a mobile testing center in a province where the HIV/AIDS infection rate is 15 percent -- more than twice the 7 percent Kenyan national average.

"If a United States senator can get tested, anyone can get tested," Obama said. Behind a purple curtain partially pulled aside so people could see, the couple took blood tests and received "couples counseling," which Kenyan health officials are trying to encourage. The results were negative.

At a stop at an infectious-disease control clinic run by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Obama planted a tree and said he will seek more congressional support for fighting malaria, "as big as AIDS if not a bigger killer in sub-Saharan" Africa.

Earlier, Obama donated about $14,000 for a project run jointly with CARE to help support grandmothers who are raising grandchildren who are AIDS orphans.

At a Siaya CARE project ceremony featuring much singing and dancing, with Michelle Obama jumping in a singing and swaying clutch of grandmothers, Obama was briefed on the accomplishments of the program.

As the Obamas and their daughters sat and watched, one young boy sang a song for Obama. Thank you senator, he sang, "no more sleeping on an empty stomach."