Free The Other Barack by Sally Jacobs Page B

ardent advocate of education, had offered to let her appear on stage, Mooney jumped at the chance.

    Mooney made good use of her few minutes, explaining to the impatient crowd how easy it could be to learn how to read and write and exactly how her classes were taught. Although her appearance prompted much fluttering in the U.S. Consulate office and a reprimand in one of the local papers—both parties were distraught at the impropriety of her appearing on stage with such a high-profile politician—her mission had been accomplished. Her words that day turned the tide in her favor, and the numbers in her classroom tripled the following week. During her two-year stay in Kenya, Mooney would change the course of hundreds of Africans’ lives, but none so completely as that of a young man named Barack Obama. In a matter of months Mooney not only helped give focus to his wandering ambition, but at a time when many doors seemed closed to him, she provided the critical assistance that ultimately put him on a plane to America, thus planting the seed of a political upheaval to come a generation later.
    They had crossed paths several times in the city, for Obama often attended Mboya’s afternoon addresses. But one afternoon, not long after her appearance at Makadara Hall, Mooney happened to visit the cramped office of the Indian law firm where Obama worked as a clerk typist taking dictation. This time they began to talk. Eager to staff her Spartan office on Ribeiro Street in the heart of Nairobi, Mooney observed that Obama was both fast and accurate at the keyboard as he worked. She promptly offered him a position as her secretary, and Obama started work for her a few days later.
    Mooney was a colleague of world-renowned literacy expert, Dr. Frank C. Laubach of New York, who had recommended her for the Kenyan post and helped to fund the project. After paying Obama for several months out of her office expense fund, she turned to Laubach for the money to pay him on a more regular basis. Mooney was impressed with his performance. In a letter, she asked for $100 a month “for salary for Barack O’Bama for six months if possible,” she wrote, adding an Irish twist to the spelling of his name. 1
    Laubach agreed. And early in 1959 Mooney wrote to thank him. “Thank you so much for the secretarial help,” she wrote to Laubach. “Barack is a whiz and types so fast that I have a hard time keeping ahead of him. I think I better bring him along and let him be your Secretary in the USA.” 2

    Obama could not have had less in common with his new boss. Sara Elizabeth Mooney, known as Betty, was the granddaughter of the cofounder of the Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas. Single, she had spent virtually all of her life teaching. At age thirty, she met Laubach, a congregational minister and the father of a global literacy program known as “Each One, Teach One,” a method by which each new reader teaches another person what they have learned, thus passing on the new skill one person at a time. Inspired by his personal faith in God and messianic zeal, Mooney committed herself to literacy. For eight years she worked in India, first running a mission boarding school and then teaching in an adult literacy center. Before accepting the post in Kenya, she spent two years as the supervisor of a literacy training program at the Koinonia Foundation in Baltimore, Maryland, at the time a Christianbased training center for literacy workers. Laubach served as president of the board of Koinonia.
    A straightforward woman with a tight cap of brown curls, Mooney was prone to prim cotton dresses and flat shoes. A “spinster” in the jargon of the day, family members believed she had long ago given up on the idea of marriage. She was a deeply committed Christian who believed that God had brought her to Kenya on a “literacy safari,” 3 as she described it, to empower people to read. She said