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A year after the presidents inauguration, Ms. Obama created her own foundation the Mama Sarah Obama Foundation to raise funds to build an educational campus in her village and to sponsor scholarships for young Kenyans, particularly girls, who would otherwise be denied schooling.

I help the orphans and widows, especially the young girls who have been orphaned by their parents dying of H.I.V., she told NPR through a translator in 2014, when she won an Education Pioneer award at the United Nations. I am their sole parent right now, so I help pay school fees and also get them the things they need, like sanitary towels, books, necessities like a pencil, school uniforms. Thats what I do.

But there were risks in her ties to the president as well. After the killing of Osama bin Laden by Navy SEALs in 2011, ordered by Mr. Obama, the Kenyan police tightened security in her village for fear of reprisals from a local affiliate of Al Qaeda. Even after Mr. Obama left office in 2017, those precautions were maintained.

Mr. Obamas own security arrangements prevented him from visiting the ancestral village.

When the president made an official visit to Kenya in 2015 the first sitting American president to do so his African relatives had to meet him in the capital, Nairobi. About three dozen members of his extended family, including his stepgrandmother, joined him at his hotel for dinner around long banquet tables.

During that trip Mr. Obama spoke at an indoor arena, where he was introduced by his half sister Auma Obama, who had met him during his first visit to Kenya three decades earlier. She told the audience that a Kenyan had said to Mr. Obama, Dont get lost, but that there was no way he would.

Ill tell you that because he was with me he fit right in, she said.

Hes not just our familia, she added. He gets us. He gets us.

Abdi Latif Dahir contributed reporting.

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Sarah Onyango Obama, Ex-Presidents Stepgrandmother, Dies ...