“Every day we should thank God that we are blessed with a mother, even if we seldom see her, or no longer live with her. ”
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Watch Divine power of a Mother
It is his belief that the divine power of his mother ‘Stanley Ann Dunham, ’ led to his presidency of the United States of America. .
“Everyday we should thank God for being blessed with a mother, even if we seldom see her, or no longer live with her, or if she is no longer on this earth.”
“My mother had always given me the courage to believe in myself, and encouraged me to listen to my heart, no matter what others are saying.
“I think God calls all of us to fill different roles at different times” … Barak Obama
Biography of Obama’s mother, A Singular Woman, traces Dunham’s life and the relationship she had with her son, whose rise in the political world came largely after her death in 1995. But he has said he largely thanks his mother for the values that led him to the work he now does. In 1990, Barack Obama became the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. A year later, he was approached by a literary agent, who asked if he would be interested in writing an autobiography about his life. Obama said yes, and in 1995, his book Dreams from My Father was published. As the title suggests, it focused mainly on the relationship he had with his father, Barack Obama Sr. When articles about the book started coming out, they referred to his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, as simply “a white anthropologist from Kansas.”
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“He credits her with impressing upon him the importance upon one’s duty to others — perhaps that the best thing that one can do is to give opportunities for others,” Scott tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross. “And her work in many ways foreshadows his. There was a period in 1979 where she was working in what her boss described to me as ‘community development in Java.’ That’s five years before he becomes a community development person in Chicago.”
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After spending more than 23 years of her life in prison, Danielle Metz is a free woman and honor-roll college student at Southern University. After being blessed with clemency in 2016 by then President Barack Obama, the 50-year-old mother from New Orleans is making the most of her second chance and inspiring others to do the same. In a personal note, Obama told Metz he is “so proud” of her, reported USA Today.
Metz was sentenced to three life sentences plus 20 additional years in 1993 when she was only 26-years-old for being a part-time drug courier for her husband, Essence reported. Like many non-violent Black and brown offenders during that era, the weight of the punishment was excessive for the crime.
But thanks to President Obama’s gift of freedom Metz is now on Southern U’s Dean’s List with a 3.75 GPA and studying to become a social worker. She recently spoke on a re-entry panel at the Essence Festival alongside the city’s mayor Latoya Cantrell and others.
Jamarlin talks to family wealth advisor Tunde Ogunlana, CEO of Axial Family Advisors, about estate planning and Snoop Dogg’s comment that he doesn’t need a will (“I don’t give a f— when I’m dead. What am I gonna give a f— about?”). They also discuss the growing college debt bubble, whether more free tuition will help solve the problem, and why MBAs are like the bachelor’s degrees of 30 years ago.
In an interview with USA Today, Metz expressed her immense gratitude to the 44th President of the United States. “You don’t know what you did for me,” she said she wanted to tell him. “I’m finally coming into my own. I made the honor roll.”
After coming across the story, Obama sent Metz a note of his own with some very encouraging words.
“I am so proud of you, and am confident that your example will have a positive impact for others who are looking for a second chance. Tell your children I say hello, and know that I’m rooting for all of you,” Obama wrote to Metz.
USA TODAY
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After making the dean’s list, Barack Obama wrote Danielle Metz a letter, wishing her all the best going forward. http://bit.ly/2JBBSkf
Obama sends letter to prisoner he freed, who made the dean’s list: ‘I am so proud of you’
President Obama granted clemency to Danielle Metz in 2016. After she made the dean’s list in college, she wished she could thank him. Now, she has.
usatoday.com /
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In 1960, Dunham’s family moved to Hawaii, where she enrolled in college. It was in Hawaii that she met a Kenyan student named Barack Obama. Three months pregnant with their child, she married him in 1961. Obama Sr. stayed in school in Hawaii, and Dunham returned to Seattle with her newborn baby, Barack. She returned to Honolulu in 1963; she and Obama divorced in 1964. In 1966, Dunham married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian man studying in Honolulu on a student visa.
Obama was largely raised in Hawaii for the first six years of his life, but in 1967, he moved to Indonesia with his mother to join Soetoro, who worked as a surveyor for the Indonesian government and then a consultant for Mobil. Dunham taught English, worked in rural development and consulted on microfinance projects. Obama attended local schools in Jakarta. He also, at her insistence, took English correspondence classes and regularly woke up before dawn to go over his English language skills.
“She believed that he deserved the kind of opportunities that she had had [like] the opportunity to a great university,” Scott says. “And she believed that he would never get that if he didn’t have a strong English-language education. So at a certain point, she decided she wasn’t serving his interests well by keeping him in Indonesia and in Indonesia schools.”
Four years later, Obama moved back to Hawaii to live with his grandparents while his mother stayed in Indonesia with her second husband and daughter Maya Soetoro-Ng. It was a complicated decision — and one that most people don’t give her credit for, Scott says: – Obama decided not to return to Indonesia with his mother. In 1985, she wrote a list of her long-range goals, which included “finish[ing] her dissertation, making a salary of 60K, los[ing] weight … and having constructive dialogue with Barry” — a nickname used for the junior Barack Obama.
Scott says she doesn’t know of any problems between Obama and his mother, but there were some indications that his mother felt some sadness about the physical distance between them. “At different moments in her life she is upset, and at one point, in his senior year of high school in Hawaii, she goes back just to be with him because she realizes it’s the last year of his childhood,” she says. “Later, one friend describes her as wistful about his decision to move to Chicago and root himself in Chicago and emphasize the sort-of black part of himself. So I think there was a theme — and this is just snippets of little things I’ve stumbled upon — that she had a kind of longing for a closer relationship with him.”
“She was juggling a number of things: She wanted her son to get a good English-language education, which wasn’t available to her in Indonesia. She had an Indonesian daughter and an Indonesian husband at the time. She needed to be able to work to pay for the education she wanted for her son and her daughter. In order to work, she was going to need some kind of advanced degree. So she was juggling a lot of things.” In 1972, Scott says, Dunham rejoined her son in Hawaii and stayed there during his middle school years. She returned to Indonesia to do anthropological field work shortly after he entered high school.
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To dignify mothers in a much more meaningful way led to the birth of “PROUD OF MY MOM” as a symbol of the ‘Ultimate Love For Moms’.
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