About 6 weeks before departing our home for this trip, we witnessed Barak Obama sworn in as the 44th president of the United States. This was a day that history will long remember, but I’m not sure that anything could have prepared us for the level of Obama fever we encountered here in Africa.

In every country we’ve been in, Barak Obama has come up in conversation. In Colombia a bike repair man told me he had a friend in America, Obama. In Kenya I was told where I could find the Obama family and what tribe he hailed from by the man who cut my hair. In Guatemala, despite efforts by the local priesthood to tell people that Obama had started swine flu personally on his recent trip to Mexico City, many people just wouldn’t believe that ‘their’ Obama could have done anything like that.

It doesn’t end with people though. We have every product and building imaginable with the name ‘Obama’ on it. We’ve used Obama pens, eaten in Obama restaurants, shopped in Obama stores, and even ridden on buses with the familiar “yes we can” scrawled on the back with a photo of our president. I’m not sure there has ever been a time in history (maybe in Western Europe immediately following WWII) where American travelers have been greeted by such enthusiasm everywhere they’ve gone. I just saw an election advertisement, for the recent elections in Sudan, where the only English on the sign was the familiar: “Change: Yes We Can!”