Obama's half sister bears witness to solid upbringing

— -- In the video on YouTube, Maya Soetoro-Ng is talking about the apartment her ailing grandmother has lived in for nearly 40 years, "the same apartment, by the way, where she helped raise Barack." She smiles. "That's our ranch, our Kennebunkport. A 550-square-foot apartment in Hawaii." She smiles again. "If those walls could talk."

Barack Obama has written reams about his life, but there's only one relative who knew him back when and is out on the campaign trail talking about it. She's his half sister Maya.

"A lot of people haven't read his books and want to feel connected to him," Soetoro-Ng, 38, tells USA TODAY. "He really was an extraordinary son and brother and he is an extraordinary father. And I want to encourage people to take in that human dimension. I do not feel as though it is at all unrelated to the kind of president he's going to be."

Obama and Soetoro-Ng (pronounced so-TOE-row-ing) are the children of Stanley Ann Dunham, a white woman with Kansas roots. Obama's father was black; his sister's was Indonesian. Soetoro-Ng, a high school history teacher, further stirred the ethnic stew by marrying Konrad Ng, a Chinese-Canadian professor at the University of Hawaii.

Soetoro-Ng traveled the country this summer and is slated to speak tonight at the convention. She resumed teaching this month — "we have our mortgage," she says dryly — but plans to take time off to stump for her brother.

Obama's mother, father and grandfather are deceased, and his grandmother is too ill to travel. It has fallen to Soetoro-Ng to fill in the picture of Obama and the women who molded him during childhood.

It is a vivid picture, defined in part by footwear. Soetoro-Ng told Obama volunteers this summer that their mother wore Birkenstock sandals, "hopped on the backs of motorcycles with women in rural credit programs all over the world" and "insisted that we engage in a life of service."

Their grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, was "the net beneath us," Soetoro-Ng says — and she wore 4-inch heels, at work and to inspect her husband's lawn-mowing.