Wednesday, Mar. 18, 2009
Maya Soetoro-Ng, President Barack Obama's sister, speaks about leadership at California State University, Sacramento, on Tuesday as her daughter, Suhaila, tries to get her attention. (photo Paul Kitagaki -SacBee) IN her first public speech since her brother Barack Obama was elected president, Maya Soetoro-Ng addressed a packed house Tuesday at Sacramento State.
. . . Soetoro-Ng talked about her work as a teacher, and the role teachers play in promoting world peace. She told of working at a public school in New York City in the 1990s, where she routinely took a handful of students to visit their parents in prison on Saturdays.
Now she teaches at a private school for girls in Hawaii, where she has developed a course on the history of nonviolence. With references that hopped the globe – Tiananmen Square, Yugoslavia, the Vietnam War, Nazi Germany, Afghanistan, South Africa – Soetoro-Ng told the audience about her class.
"We can learn peace when the ideals are attached to real situations," she said.
The need to engage young people in working toward peace is the message Soetoro-Ng wanted the audience to come away with, she said in an interview after the speech.
article:
http://www.sacbee.com/ourregion/story/1708302.html