A long journey that will end at White House

It is a long way from Hawaii to the White House, but perhaps nowhere seems as distant from the world's most powerful address as the cheerless Chicago housing estate of Altgeld Gardens.

Barack Obama will complete a remarkable and implausible odyssey when he swears the oath of office on the marble steps of the Capitol in Washington, on January 20, to become America's 44th President - and the first black person to hold the country's highest office.

There were many stops and detours on this journey, but after a restless and transient youth, it was in the predominantly African-American South Side of Chicago that the President-elect found a home, a purpose and a family.

He arrived in a beat-up Honda Civic to take a $10,000 (Dh36,738)-a-year job as a community activist.

He was an idealistic 24 year old, fresh out of college; but in Chicago, he acquired the organisational skills and coolness that were to form the backbone of his presidential campaign.

The South Side was also where he met and married Michelle Robinson, a Chicago native from a working-class family, who had studied at Princeton and Harvard before returning to work as a lawyer.

Barack Hussain Obama Jr was born in Honolulu on August 4 1961, six months after the marriage of his mother, Ann Dunham, a free-thinking, young white woman from the plains of Kansas, to a young Kenyan Muslim.

Two years later, his father left his new family to pursue another degree at Harvard, before moving home to Kenya.

His abandoned wife then married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian student, and moved to Jakarta with six-year-old Barack and Maya, his half sister.

After four years, she sent her son back to Hawaii to go to high school and be raised by her parents.

After school, he studied at Occidental College in Los Angeles, before transferring to Columbia University, New York, to major in political science.

It was there that he saw an advertisement for the directorship of the Developing Communities Project, a church group working in the bleak parts of Chicago's South Side.

Brilliant orator

After three years at the Developing Communities Project, his frustration at the lack of progress, combined with a discovery about the father who abandoned him, prompted him to go to Harvard Law School and pursue a career in politics.

At Harvard, Obama became a black president for the first time, of the Law Review.

Obama is famous for his oratory, but perhaps the most important speech of his career was barely noted at the time.

In 2002 he declared his opposition to the Iraq war, a stance that was to give him a crucial advantage over Clinton in their contest for the party's nomination.

Two years later, Obama's much admired unifying address to the Democratic National Convention brought him to national prominence.