By IANS,
Washington : President Barack Obama’s half-sister Maya Soetoro-Ng is moving her family from Hawaii to Washington to spend a few months in the capital, a media report said Thursday quoting White House officials.
The extended stay means that the siblings will live in the same city, at least for a while, for the first time in years, the New York Times reported.
Soetoro-Ng, 38, has quit her job as a high school history teacher. Her husband, Konrad Ng, a professor at the University of Hawaii, will become the scholar-in-residence at the Smithsonian Institution’s Asian Pacific American Programme here next month, it added.
Museum officials say Ng will stay in Washington till December when he will return with his family to Hawaii. There, he will complete his year-long term as resident scholar.
The family is not expected to move into the White House, though they are very close to the Obamas, the Times noted.
“Maya made many trips to Chicago and elsewhere throughout the campaign, and she and her brother have a great relationship,” said Alan S. King, a lawyer in Chicago who is a friend of Obama.
King said he believed Obama would be “very happy to have Maya and her family close by”.
The siblings, who share the same mother, Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro, spent several years together in Indonesia and in Hawaii before Dunham decided to return to Indonesia with Soetoro-Ng while Obama remained in Hawaii with his grandparents.
But Soetoro-Ng has said they two have stayed connected.