Lolo Soetoro

Lolo Soetoro started his career as a geologist under Indonesian Army Topographic Service. After returning to Indonesia in 1965, he served as a colonel in the Indonesian armed forces, working for General Suharto, the second President of Indonesia.

He met single mother, Ann Dunham, at the East-West Center while both were studying at the University of Hawaii. After a couple years of dating, the two got married on March 15, 1965 in Hawaii.

Following his marriage to Dunham, he became the stepfather of a three-year-old Barack Obama. The couple later gave birth to a daughter named Maya Kasandra Soetoro on August 15, 1970.

Soetoro Martodihardjo, who went by the Javanese nickname, "Lolo" Soetoro, was born on January 2, 1935 in Bandoeng, West Java, Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). His father, Martodihardjo, was an employee of a mining office from Yogyakarta.

He was ninth of ten children of his parents. During the Indonesian National Revolution, the Dutch army burned down their house, killing his father and his eldest brother. He was able to flee to the countryside with his mother.

He attended Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta, from where he earned his bachelor's degree in geography. Following graduation, he started working as a civilian employee of the Indonesian Army Topographic Service.

In 1962, he earned scholarship from the Indonesian Army Topographic Service for graduate study in geography at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. In September that year, he started to attend the East–West Center in Honolulu, Hawaii, and completed his M.A. degree in geography in June 1964.

Barack Obama was registered as Barry Soetoro, an Indonesian citizen, at the Santo Fransiskus Assisis School in Jakarta, which led many to believe that Lolo Soetoro had officially adopted him. After Obama decided to run for presidency in 2007, conservatives used this information to question if he had ever officially changed back his citizenship to become an US national.

During Obama's presidential campaign, stories of him spending four years during his early childhood halfway across the world in a Muslim Indonesian household started to make headlines. Once his religious beliefs were questioned, citing the fact that most of his stepfather’s relatives were devout Muslims, his campaign aides formally stated that he “was not raised a Muslim, and is a committed Christian”.

In 2006, Obama had mentioned in his second book, ‘The Audacity of Hope’ that he was not raised in a religious household and thus did not develop his religious views until he was an adult. Lolo Soetoro himself was described in a 2007 article in ‘Chicago Tribune’ as “more of a free spirit than a devout Muslim, according to former friends and neighbors”.

Lolo Soetoro’s most remarkable achievement is perhaps the impression he left on a young Barack Obama, who had been deeply influenced by his stepfather’s character. Obama later recorded in his 1995 memoir, ‘Dreams from My Father’, how his ideas shaped him when he was young, stating that his stepfather gave him “a pretty hardheaded assessment of how the world works”.