SHENZHEN, Nov. 11 (Xinhua)-- While US President Barack Obama has been focused on getting re-elected and reviving the American economy, his half-brother, Mark Obama Ndesandjo, has been trying to save a three-year-old Chinese girl's life.
"She got a very serious heart disease. It's so serious that the doctor says even a small infection could probably cause heart failure and she might die, and we haven't been able to find a doctor yet for her," Ndesandjo said.
Ndesandjo met three-year-old Qian Baohui five months ago during a visit to Angelmom, a Beijing-based NGO that cares for and raises money for chronically and terminally ill children.
"We hope we can find people who can take her to the United States or some place where she can get an operation to save her life," he said.
Ndesandjo, who has been living and working in China since fall 2003, has been doing what he can to evoke public attention to Qian's plight.
But this type of endeavor isn't new for the US President's brother. Since he arrived in China, he has embraced the culture and been engaged in charity work. He traces his deep concern for children back to a visit he made to a Chinese orphanage during his first weekend in China.
"There's a little baby -- I touched his hand with my finger, and he grasped it and would not let go," he said. "You know, I tried to pull my hand away, but I couldn't, and his big black eyes looked up at me, and at that moment I knew that baby wasn't thinking about whether I'm American, or yellow or white or pink or red -- he just wanted love. And at that moment, there was a connection." But it was the lose of his job that pushed Ndesandjo to a life in China, and well before his brother ascended to the presidency, he had decided he needed a fresh start.
"At that time, I wanted to do something different; when you lose your job, especially when a lot of people have in the financial crisis, you ask yourself, what do you want from your life?"
After spending 15 years working in corporate American in telecommunications and international marketing, he wanted a more enriching life, and he believed China offered a multitude of opportunities where he could pursue his goal of having music and charity as a major part of his life. So he sold his house and car and moved to Shenzhen, a booming southern city bordering Hong Kong.
Ndesandjo, a US citizen, was born in Kenya to Barack Obama Sr. and his third wife, Ruth Nidesand, a Jewish-American school teacher. His mother later divorced Obama and married a man whose surname Ndesandjo took. After finishing high school in Nairobi, he moved to the US to attend college, ultimately earning physics degrees from Brown and Stanford, as well as an executive MBA from Emory University.
He married a Chinese woman in 2008. A proud global citizen from a truly global family, Ndesandjo immersed himself in Chinese culture and the community. He has mastered the language, both spoken and written, and delved into Chinese calligraphy and poetry.
"To start to understand China, you cannot just speak it; you have to learn how to write and how to read," he said. "It's part of the very deep, very rich tradition you can get by reading books and writing calligraphy."
Ndesandjo is also an accomplished pianist who volunteers to give piano lessons to orphans in and around Shenzhen, and he travels throughout the country giving charity concerts, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for disadvantaged children, as well as victims of the Sichuan earthquake.
"If you can combine art and charity and give them to children, it is a wonderful gift that opens their minds and gives them confidence, and that is what I have been trying to do," he told Xinhua.
Ndesandjo published his unique cultural experiences in the semi-autobiographical novel "Nairobi to Shenzhen: A Novel of Love in the East" in both English and Mandarin in 2009.
Bridging cultural divides is a constant theme for him. He is now working to set up a foundation in Hong Kong to promote cultural exchanges among Kenya, China and the US -- three places he sees as home.
"I want to try to find a way in which people outside China can understand Chinese culture, people within China can know more about American culture, and also in Kenya, because you know I have family there, too.
Ndesandjo now calls Shenzhen his home and has clearly developed a strong sense of civic pride.
"Shenzhen is a city built on dreams. Deng Xiaoping came here about 30 years ago, and there were just some villages, and right now it's a metropolis of over 10 million people," he said. "There' s a time in your life when you want to just stay in one place. You can still travel, but you'll always have a place to come back to. And so far, that place is Shenzhen."
And despite the plethora of cultural differences, Ndesandjo has found some strikingly similar aspects.
"There' s an American dream, and there's also a Chinese dream, but at the very end of the day, they all have very similar things-they are about having a family, having a good job, or having an opportunity to express one' s inner self."
First alpine rail gets midnight maintenance
Sina Microblog
Tencent Microblog
Feedback
RSS
