Earlier this week, I was in Washington, D.C., and attended the Environmental and Clean Energy Inaugural Ball on Tuesday night. While there were no Daryl Hannah or Glenn Close sightings — two celebrities scheduled to attend –  there were a few folks who are “famous” in the energy advocacy circles and part of the administration, including General Wesley Clark; Director, Office of Transportation and Air Quality, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Margaret Oge; and EPA Director Lisa Jackson. However, on the second part of my two-city, two-continent, two-country business trip this week, I met U.S. President Barack Obama’s half brother Abon’go Malik Obama, owner of RockStone of Afrika Siaya Electricals, who was sitting at the end of my row on Qatar Airways to Doha.

Gracious, warm and confidently soft spoken, Obama shared his ideas for a sustainable irrigation system in Kenya, as part of The Barack H. Obama Foundation, which he founded in memory of his father, who passed away in 1982. With solar panels and battery packs, we should be able to do something, Obama told me, as flight attendants patiently waited for us to finish chatting before closing the plane doors and finalizing security checks.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 23rd, 2009 at 1:39 pm and is filed under Out and About. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.