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Mama Sarah told us: "He is very enthusiastic about his relatives here. He keeps on sending people to find out how we are faring."

And whether or not he wins the Senate seat, the 43-year-old Harvard University trained lawyer is expected back in Alego to build his "Simba" (a young man's hut) in line with Luo traditions.

Barack has deep roots here. He once told me he has two homes - Kenya and the United States, she says happily.

Ever since the news of Obama's Kenya connection was known, Mama Sarah has been receiving a stream of visitors. They now average about five a day.

Most of these visitors are journalists, both foreign and local (like ourselves), who have turned the home upside down while tracing Obama's roots.

To cater for these many uninvited guests, the family is putting up a guest house just next to a house built for his father's first wife, Keziah Obama.

Keziah, who hails from Kendu Bay in Rachuonyo district, lives in Britain with three of her four children.

One of her sons, Malik Obama, is a frequent visitor to the USA but is currently in Kenya though he had travelled to Nairobi when we visited.

While she welcomes visitors, Mama Sarah is getting a little fed up with the disruption they have caused in her life.

The day before the Sunday Nation team arrived, she had played host to a crew from CNN.

Lamented Mama Sarah as we prepared to interview her: "I can't live here in peace. I have been talking to visitors for several hours a day. I have been interviewed a thousand times and I am tired."

Tracing Obama's home was a simple task. The home, located some 60 km from Kisumu town, is well known in Alego. Almost every villager you meet is ready to offer a tip on how to access the home.

To reach the home, one turns off the Kisumu-Siaya road near Ng'iya shopping centre and drives towards Obama's village market, Nyang'oma-Kogello. From there the home is just a stone's throw-away.

By local standards it is a vast well kept compound with Sarah's battered brick house sitting imposingly at the far end.

Two cemented graves, one for Barack Obama Snr and the other for his father Mzee Hussein Onyango Obama, who was born in 1870 but died in 1975.

The Obama family are among the few Muslims in the locality.

The prospective Senator's grandfather was called Hussein Onyango Obama. He worked as a cook and spent most of his working life in Nairobi.

According to Mama Sarah, Obama Jr used his two trips to Kenya to try to unravel his roots. He spoke to many villagers and relatives through an interpreter.

The candidate's best-selling autobiography, Dreams from my Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, was compiled with information gathered from relatives and villagers in Alego.

The story revolves around Obama's quest to find out more about his father, described by many as a brilliant economist who returned from the United States to take up a civil service job in Kenya. He was was later killed in a road accident in 1982, just when he was poised to take up a top job at the Central Bank.

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According to the family, Obama's father travelled to America to study at the University of Hawaii in 1959. While there, he worked for an oil company and married his second wife, a white woman, named Anna Toot, and their union produced Barack Obama Jr.

Obama's book says Obama Snr left his family in Hawaii after winning a scholarship to study in Harvard when his son was two years old.

The marriage later broke up after Anna's father opposed it, according to Mama Sarah.

"Anna's father was furious about the marriage and threatened to have Obama Snr expelled from the university. Our son sent us letters, pleading that we intervene to save the marriage," remembers Sarah.

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