pssst....post-card from a ship was January/February, 1961 remember...
she wasn’t coming back, she was going going going...IMO
Mombassa port was originally used in the 1500 by the Portugese....then the Dutch and then English....finally on their own.
It was part of the original Spice routes because of it’s natural deep harbour.
I hear ya. I’m trying to figure out if Susan Blake was lying or not about her time with Ann in late-Aug 61 ... or if Ann attended ANY classes that first semester at Univ of Wash in late-61.
"pssst....post-card from a ship was January/February, 1961 remember... she wasn’t coming back, she was going going going...IMO"
I remember a mention of a her sending a post card from a ship, too. I first went looking in the Google cached "Obamafile" trying to find the family history pages which wasn't working out too well. Along the way, I hit the link for the live page rather than the cached copy and surprise! the site is back up which I did not know. (Great news - great resource)
This mention of a post card are to be found on the OBAMA FAMILY PAGE :
Under "Anna Visits Seattle":
On at least one occasion, very shortly after the birth of Barack Obama Junior, friends of Anna recall her visiting them in Seattle with her new born baby, Barack Obama Junior. Susan Blake, another high school classmate, said that during a brief visit in 1961, Dunham was excited about her husband's plans to return to Kenya "We all had June Cleaver as our role models, and she was blazing new trails for herself," said Blake, a former Mercer Island city councilwoman. Blake recalls that Dunham, who was calling herself Ann Obama at the time, visited her at her house in Mercer Island during the last week of August, 1961. She left Honolulu just as soon she had clearance from her doctor to travel with her new baby. He was just 3 weeks old. She had sent a postcard that she would be in town, and was staying with a friend of her mother's. She drove out to my house in her mother's friend's car, and we spent the entire day together. She was very excited about her new life, and her husband. She was nuts about him, crazy in love. I was under the impression that he had left Honolulu before Barack's birth, that he had gone to Harvard already for his studies, and that Ann was on her way to join him there. She planned on raising her son, getting a job, and attending school, she told me. Her husband would head back to Kenya after graduating from Harvard to join the newly formed government, and she would take her place beside him. It was all very exciting, a dramatic change in her life in the one year since she had graduated from high school.
This is Mary Toutonghi's account from Anna's time on Seattle's Capitol Hill. (this link sheds no light on the post card matter)
It is difficult to keep the myriad of details straight in all this, but I seem to remember a mention of the post card sent by Ann from a ship in one of the other interviews with this woman, the one in which she hung up on the investigator. It is possible that what we are remembering is her mentioning the post card and then an FR poster conjecturing that it might have been sent from a ship.
NOTE: It is interesting how many outside or off site links on the ObamaFile pages now go to something different. A newspaper link now shows a page of classified ads; a missionary web site with an anecdotal from Obama's early years - the whole site is gone - just 2 examples. Busy Obots.