NAIROBI, Kenya — Malik Abon’go Obama yearns for the days when he and his half brother were closer.

Two decades before Obama became U.S. president, Malik fulfilled a pledge to their father to bring his sibling home to their village in western Kenya. Barack visited the house of Barrack Hussein Obama Sr. for the first time and met other relatives, including his stepgrandmother, Sarah Obama.

Malik Abon’go Obama looks back fondly at the days when he and his now-famous half brother were close.

During the 1988 trip, Malik says he would take his “down-to-earth,” then-teetotaling half brother into the bush in search of chang’aa, the illicit alcohol whose name translates as “kill me quick.”

These days, they aren’t so close. Malik, 57, says he’s never been invited to the Obama family home in the U.S. And he’s still waiting to be told by Obama that he’ll be visiting the land of his father’s birth this month. The Kenyan presidency said the visit on Friday won’t include a trip to Kogelo, 193 miles northwest of the capital, Nairobi.

“From what I hear, he is coming now as the president of the United States,” Malik said. “He should have at least informed us as his family.”

Although the government has denied it, there is speculation in Kogelo that Obama will travel there. Ogito Odipo, a 67-year-old miller, said he heard on the radio that Obama would come to the village for four hours.

With more visitors knocking at the door of Sarah Obama, the government has paved the road from the city of Kisumu 43 miles away to her gate, and had connected the village to the electricity grid.

Mama Sarah Obama Road, near her home, has a primary and secondary school named after Senator Barack Obama, while a new hotel was built this year to accommodate visitors.

Sarah Obama, 94, lives across the road from Malik on 2 acres of land where her husband Hussein Onyango Obama and Barack Hussein Obama are buried. The homestead has free-range chickens and cattle roaming around and is littered with mangoes.

“Obama is coming as guest of the state and to see people of Kenya, not me,” she said.

Malik, who no longer drinks alcohol, reminisces about the days when he and Obama would listen to music by Congolese artists like Franco and Mario, or when he served as best man at Obama’s wedding.

“I would like for us to just sit down and have a vanilla ice cream or a strawberry fruit cake, just to have a nice dinner, nice steak, Caesar salad, sit down and enjoy each other,” Malik said. “I really don’t know my nieces, Malia and Sasha, and they don’t know my children either.”

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