Community Corner
Obama's Sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, Shares Memories of their Mother, Stanley Ann Dunham [PHOTOS]
Maya Soetoro-Ng, President Barack Obama's sister, and longtime Mercer Island residents reminisced and swapped stories about her mother, the late Stanley Ann Dunham, a graduate of the Mercer Island High School class of 1960.
Maya Soetoro-Ng, President Barack Obama's sister, and longtime Mercer Island residents reminisced and swapped stories about her mother, the late Stanley Ann Dunham, a graduate of the Mercer Island High School class of 1960.
Soetoro-Ng was the special guest of a ceremony Saturday celebrating a scholarship named in honor of her mother, an anthropologist remembered by her Mercer Island High School classmates as a witty and intelligent young woman.
Soetoro-Ng said that she and her brother, Barack Obama, were inspired by their mother, whose life brought her far from her birthplace of Wichita, Kansas and her alma mater of Mercer Island.
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"Many of the things I believe are from my mother, my brother has professed the same inheritance, and she was an incredible person," Soetoro-Ng said. "She was in many ways, a silly, funny, messy person. She wasn't always polished and she wasn't perfect. But she was extraordinary, and extraordinary is so much better than perfect."
Soetoro-Ng shared stories about her mother, including stories from Soetoro-Ng's childhood in Indonesia, when her mother decorated a tree for Christmas with construction paper, popcorn balls, Indonesian shadow puppets and boughs of red and green chili peppers.
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"It was such a beautiful tree, and it was such an inclusive tree," Soetoro-Ng said.
This year, the scholarship committee was able to issue two $5,000 scholarships in Dunham's name to Hannah Frisch and Sarah Bahn, announced scholarship fund chairwoman Dayna Cole. The scholarship winners were chosen for their academic achievements, and most importantly, for their contributions and volunteerism to the community.
Soetoro-Ng was also proclaimed an honorary Mercer Islander by Mayor Bruce Bassett.
"We claim you," Cole joked, as she introduced Soetoro-Ng to the assembled crowd.
Read Mercer Island Patch's profile of the Stanley Ann Dunham Scholarship Fund.
It was shortly after Dunham's graduation from Mercer Island High School that she met and married Barack Obama, Sr., while they were students at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. They married in 1961. Dunham later met and married her second husband, Lolo Soetoro, who is Maya Soetoro-Ng's father.
Dunham, also known by Ann Dunham Soetoro, lived and worked in Indonesia helping villagers develop self-sustaining economic programs using their skills in traditional crafts and toolmaking. In 2009, Soetoro-Ng wrote the forward to the book based on Dunham's doctoral dissertation, "Surviving against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia."
Soetoro-Ng has been an instructor at the University of Hawaii and published a children's book, "Ladder to the Moon," in which her mother is a character.
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