• When Sarah Palin was just two months old, her family
moved to the 'Last Frontier' state of Alaska where she was
raised. 

• Alaska is definitely not a place for the faint-hearted
and Palin's school days often began with a moose hunt in the
Alaskan wilds. On most of the cold winter days, she used to go
ice-fishing and hiking with her father and siblings. Summers were
spent going on early morning runs and marathons with the whole
family.

• The family lived frugally with Palin's father working
over-time as a hunting and fishing guide as well as a bartender
to help make ends meet.

• Palin attended Wasilla High School where she was the
leader of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.

• She was the captain and point guard of the school's
girls' basketball team. When the school won the Alaska state
championship in 1982, Palin was nick-named 'Barracuda' for her
competitive streak.

• Her father Chuck remembers, "Sarah got a lot of stern
discipline from me and a lot of love, devotion and faith from her
mom. I'd push her a lot in sport and outdoor activities. I taught
her to believe she could do anything in the world she wanted to
do, if she put her mind to it."

• While her classmates graduated to take up teaching,
accountancy and police work, Palin had set her sights on public
recognition. She had strong ambitions to become a sport
commentator and television presenter.

• Palin had been an avid reader of loved books such as
'Old Yeller' and 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory'.
		

• Born of a Kenyan father and an American mother, Barack
Obama's childhood has been a mélange of diverse cultural climates
that helped imbibe in him a deep-seated respect for different
traditions.

• Obama talks thus of his multi-racial childhood, "my
father looked nothing like the people around me - that he was
black as pitch, my mother white as milk - barely registered in my
mind."

• Throughout his childhood years, Obama was known both at
home and at school as 'Barry'.

• Up to the age of ten, Obama lived with his mother Ann
Dunham, step-father and half-sister, in the populous Muslim
country of Indonesia. His childhood in Jakarta differed vastly
from his formative years in Honolulu under the care of his
maternal grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Armour Dunham.

• Obama attended the local schools and was a Cub Scout
while living in Jakarta, Indonesia where classes were taught in
the Indonesian language.

• In 1971, he moved to Hawaii to live with his
grandparents in their downtown apartment while attending the
prestigious Punahou where Obama remembers 'feeling like a misfit'
in his 'Indonesian sandals' and struggling with his racial
identity.

• Obama also proudly remembers "the opportunity that
Hawaii offered... became an integral part of my world view, and a
basis for the values that I hold most dear".

• Obama's first boyhood four-bedroom, single-storey home
can still be seen on the Kalaniana'ole Highway, in the Kuli'ou'ou
area between 'Aina Haina and Hawai'i Ka.i.