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When Barack Obama first met his Auntie Zeituni at an airport in Kenya in 1988, his late father's sister told him, "Welcome home," and kissed him on both cheeks. Obama was on a pilgrimage to the land where his African father lived apart from Obama's American mother.

Zeituni Onyango then told Obama's older half-sister, Auma, "Make sure he doesn't get lost again."

What does that mean? Obama asked. As he wrote in his compelling memoir, "Dreams from My Father," Onyango answered, "Don't get lost" is a common expression: "Sometimes it has a more serious meaning. Let's say a son or husband moves to the city, or to the West, like our Uncle Omar, in Boston. They promise to return after completing school. They say they'll send for the family once they get settled. At first they write once a week. Then it's just once a month. Then they stop writing completely. No one sees them again. They've been lost, you see. Even if people know where they are."

Twenty years later, a week before Obama was elected president, the London Times -- not an American news organization; perhaps U.S. journalists were too busy scrounging for dirt on GOP running mate Sarah Palin's family -- found Onyango living in Boston public housing in violation of a 2004 deportation order. At the time, Obama announced that he was unaware that his aunt, whose bid for political asylum was rejected, was living in America. And: "If she is violating laws, those laws have to be obeyed."

In a move perceived as preventing Onyango's deportation, the Bush administration ordered a stop to any deportations before the election without White House approval.

On Wednesday, April 1, Onyango appeared before an immigration judge who ordered a February 2010 re-hearing for her argument against deportation. As I read the Washington Post story, I had to ask: Who got lost?

Zeituni and Auma were pivotal characters in the memoir that made Obama's mark on the world. How could he not know where his aunt was living? True, his aunt was not family in the way I know family -- people you've known since your birth or theirs. Perhaps I was guilty of amplifying the bond I saw in the book.

Indeed, Obama plainly addressed the gulf between him and his African relatives, including the seven half-siblings whom his father sired with three other wives. When he met a grandmother, she demanded cash. It was his Aunt Zeituni who then told him how relatives and friends had looked to his Harvard-educated father for handouts. "And you must learn this from life," she said. "If you have something, then everyone will want a piece of it. So you have to draw the line somewhere. If everyone is family, no one is family."

During the 2008 campaign, conservative pundits waged a satirical campaign to help support half-brother George Hussein Onyango Obama after media reports that he lived in a shack outside Nairobi on $1 per month.

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