Early struggles of President-elect Obama

It’s all history now. Barack Obama Jr. becomes the 44th president of the USA.
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But did you know the new US president was a “Cinderella man” who struggled against great odds from early boyhood before he reached the peak of his career?
Barack came from a broken family. He was only two years old when his parents Barack Hussein Obama Sr. from Kenya, and mother Ann Dunham, a white American from Kansas, separated and later divorced.
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He saw his father only once after the divorce and before he died in a car accident in 1982 at age 46.
His mother got married to Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian. When his mother moved to Indonesia, Barack went along and for four years studied in grade school there: two years in a Muslim school and two in a Catholic school.
Ann Dunham, his mother, decided to send him back to Hawaii to be raised by his maternal grandparents.
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His mother’s marriage to Soetoro didn’t last long although they sired a girl name Maya. It ended in divorce and shortly afterwards Lolo died in 1987 of complications from a liver ailment because as Todd Pordum wrote in his article “The Making of Obama” in the June 2008 “Reader’s Digest,” “he became more and more like a Westerner” whose “big thing were Johnny Walker Black and Andy Williams records.”
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Looking back, Barack Jr. said that while his “mother was the most positive influence in my life,” the men in his life were a disappointment. “They made an awful lot of mistakes,” he once said. Barack admitted to using alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine during his teenage years.
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Later, however, as he decided to make something of his life, he gave up those counter productive traits and focus on his studies and career as a lawyer and eventually as a politician.
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So it was an uphill climb for the young Barack from the very beginning. Another blow struck when his mother died of ovarian cancer in 1995 three years after she saw him marry Michelle Robinson, a lawyer. This left him a complete orphan.
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What we can learn from Barack Obama Jr. now President-elect of the USA was his relentless determination to pursue his goal but to do that he resisted to wallow in self-pity over his broken family and bitter past. Above all, he had to get rid of his negative traits and destructive use of alcohol and drugs.
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This required a lot of self-discipline. As one writer put it, “If you don’t have discipline, you don’t even deserve to dream.” For instance, if you aspire for a high position, say, in politics, but persist in being a gambler, drinker, womanizer, don’t ever bother to dream because your negative lifestyle will drag you down to the sea like a millstone tied around your neck.
I guess this is what the Lord meant when He said: “Unless you reform, you will come to perdition.”
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TODAY’S HUMOR. CLASSMATES? Have you been guilty of looking at others your own age and thinking, “Surely I can’t look that old”?
I was sitting in the waiting room for my first appointment with a new dentist. I noticed his DDS diploma, which bore his full name.
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Suddenly, I remembered a tall, handsome, dark-haired boy with the same name had been in my high school class some 40-odd years ago. Could he be the same guy that I had a secret crush on, way back then?
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Upon seeing him, however, I quickly discarded any such thought. This balding, gray-haired man with the deeply lined face was way too old to have been my classmate. Hmmm ... or could he?
After he examined my teeth, I asked him if he had attended Ilocos Norte High School. “Yes, yes, I did. I was in the A Section,” he gleamed with pride.
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“When did you graduate?” I asked. He answered, “In 1963. Why do you ask?” “You were in my class!” I exclaimed. He looked at me closely and asked, “Were you one of our teachers?”
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GOD BLESS--the following latest donors to our poor seminarians scholarship program: Ms. Josephine Olano, West Covina, USA; Florencia Myers; Rodolfo Sudaria, San Jose, CA; Rebecca O. Aluyen, CA; Ed Matias, Arizona, USA; Anonymous.

Story from http://www.philippinenews.com