NYANG'OMA, Kenya, Oct 17 (AFP) - A victory for Barack Obama in his battle for the US senate in the state of Illinois could spell hope for his ancestral Kenyan farming community, fractured by AIDS, years of poverty and illiteracy, villagers hope.
The brick walls of the house of Obama's grandmother, Sarah Obama, are decorated with an assortment of faded photographs of her late son, Barack Hussein Obama, a poster in Arabic writing and a Massachusetts University certificate.
"This is my grandson, he is a great young man," Sarah said as she flipped though a photo album. In one picture, Obama dances with his grandmother.
"After he wins the (November 2) election, the village wants him to build a school and a clinic," said the old woman.
"When he came here in 1989, when his father died, the village was amazed by his humbleness and grasp of Luo culture, despite living in the United States and Indonesia for the better part of his life," recalled Obama's uncle, Saidi Obama.
Forty-two-year-old Obama, a dapper legal scholar, also returned to Nyang'oma village in the early 1990s to research his autobiography.
"There is even a plan to name Kolego Secondary School after Barack's name," said Saidi, standing outside a mosque in the town of Siaya.
"I will pray for him, just like everybody here is doing. We believe that he is our salvation," he added.
In the Siaya district village of Nyang'oma, where Sarah lives, everybody claims some form of relationship with Obama.
Mary Akinyi, a widowed mother of three, and some of her friends singled out problems they would present to Obama if he wins and returns home for a visit.
"If Barack Obama wins, our problems are over," predicted Akinyi, adding that poverty and disease, particularly AIDS, had reduced several families to destitution.
"A lot of people have died of AIDS and we need help. If Obama can help, okay," Akinyi added.
"Everybody believes that Obama is going to win. I can tell you honestly that I had a dream that he will win overwhelmingly," barefooted Maria Oloo added in the local language, Dholuo.
Oloo, in her 70s, also believes that she will be condemned to a permanent pauper's life if Obama fails to haul her and her household from grinding poverty.
Sarah Obama is herself reluctant to speak about AIDS, for reasons she does not disclose, but knows Obama will at some time step in.
"Obama is generous, just like his father. He can't stand by and see other people suffering," she said.
"But for now, they (people with AIDS) will die," Sarah added with a sigh.
John Ochieng, a flamboyant taxi driver in the nearby the city of Kisumu, which lies on the banks of Lake Victoria, said Obama would take Africa to the top of the US agenda.
"He is a democrat, bright like (former US president Bill) Clinton, articulate like Martin Luther King and good-looking like (film star) Denzel Washington. He will make sure Africa and its problems are taken to the top of the US government, the IMF and the World Bank," Ochieng said.
Obama's grandmother, wearing a flowing red dress and an Islamic burqa headdress, concurred, insisting that sheer hard work and tenacity had sent her grandson to record heights.
"I know him very well, he is hard-working and respectable. Africa will benefit from him," said Sarah, who knew every detail about Obama and his American wife.
New mothers in the region have taken to naming their babies Barack Obama.
One grade four pupil at Kolego Primary School told AFP that his parents advise him to work hard like Obama.
Just like his late father, who was an economist, Obama took undergraduate studies at Columbia University in New York, followed by a law degree at the prestigious Harvard Law School.
"He told me that he would use his Ivy League education to assist Africans and anybody in need," uncle Saidi added.
If he is elected, Obama would be the only African-American in the US Senate and just the third to hold a seat there since the Reconstruction era after the Civil War of 1861-65.
Hussein Obama went to study in the United States in the early 1960s after he benefitted from former US president John F. Kennedy's programme that offered scholarships to students from developing nations that were emerging from colonialism.
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