KOGELO (Kenya): If Barack Obama’s re-election campaign has lacked the magic of four years ago, there is one place where “the audacity of hope” still shines — Kogelo, the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it village in western Kenya where his father grew up.

Here, there is no talk of the US president losing to his Republican challenger Mitt Romney on Tuesday.

Motorbike taxi drivers, shop workers, and vegetable sellers say they are praying hard. But such is their faith in Kenya’s most famous honorary son that many are also already planning the post-election celebrations.

“We don’t think he will win. We know,” says Peter Evans, who drives a motorbike taxi, or boda boda.

George Ochieng, another driver relaxing along with Evans and other young men under a tree hung with weaver bird nests in the centre of the village, agrees. “We heard he killed Osama [bin Laden]. That was one thing he did,” says the 23 year old said, before another man chimes in with, “He promised us that.”

Sitting on a low wall nearby, Elizabeth Mola Odondo, who says her husband and the president’s father, Barack Obama Snr, were cousins, is equally adamant. “I’m not worried at all,” says the 60 year old. “I’m very confident.”

And if the unthinkable happened?

“It will be a bitter pill to swallow but we are praying day in and day out for him,” she says in the local Luo language, adding: “There is a big celebration coming.”

Elizabeth Mola Odondo Elizabeth Mola Odondo, 60.

Mola Odondo says she knows Obama’s stepgrandmother Mama Sarah, who still lives in Kogelo, and got to shake his hand when he last visited the village while a senator in 2006. She says Mama Sarah had no doubts that Obama would win again.

Mama Sarah is the third wife of Hussein Onyango Obama and she raised Barack Obama Snr here after his mother left. Obama married Ann Dunham from Kansas while studying in Hawaii.

Their son, Barack, was born there, but the couple separated when the child was two.

In his 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father, the president tells how he met Mama Sarah when he travelled to Kenya in search of his roots during his 20s, describing her as a large woman with a “smooth and big-boned” face and “sparkling, laughing eyes”.

Members of the Obama family said this week that the matriarch, who is now spike, did not plan to speak to the media — a police officer at her still-modest compound said she was sleeping when the Guardian visited.

Inside the green gates, where cows were feeding at a trough under the trees, is the grave of her stepson, who died in a car crash in 1982.

Mama Sarah’s son and the president’s half-uncle, Said Hussein Obama, says he is sure voters would give Barack Obama a second chance.

“Among his top achievements, he has restored the trust in, and dignity of America among the international community, which were severely damaged by his predecessor,” he says in an email.

He adds that the president has performed well considering what he has inherited from George W Bush, citing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the economic slump.

“[Obama] has brought honour and glory to a once sleepy village — he has placed Kogelo on the world map,” he says.

Residents agree. Beatrice Akoth’s hand glides elegantly through the air as the pregnant mother-of-six enumerates the benefits this fame has brought.

“There have been big improvements. There is water everywhere in the town. Before, the water was not clean. There’s electricity and roads. The children get a good education. Occasionally, they go to Mama Sarah’s and she provides maize and other food,” she says in Luo.

Said Hussein Obama says a medical centre, schools, a cultural centre and hotels have been built since his half-nephew was elected. “The ball is now in the court of the residents to make use of these facilities to help them grow.”

Other benefits are less tangible. In an automobile spare parts shop beside the dirt road leading to Mama Sarah’s home, Kelvin Otieno Ouma remembers the day in 2006 when Obama came to his school.

By arrangement with the Guardian