NAIROBI, Kenya -- I arrived in Kenya on Oct. 28 -- a week before Election Day in America -- to report on what Kenyans made of our presidential election. This East African nation has a special tie to President-elect Barack Obama: his father was from Kogelo, a village deep in the green hills of Western Kenya.

I spent two weeks in Kenya, reporting from Nairobi and Kisumu. The final days of the campaign found me reporting from the villages around Kogelo and from the Obama family compound. As a naturalized American, my assignment was a homecoming in many ways. I was born in Nairobi, where my family lived for many years before returning to our homeland, Uganda, where we lived before immigrating to America.

A big part of Mr. Obama's extended family still lives in Kogelo, a place that reminded me a lot of my family's home village in southwestern Uganda.

I arrived in Kogelo on a hot Saturday evening to find much of the village gathered at the soccer pitch of the Sen. Barack Obama Primary School. I wondered what life is normally like in Kogelo, without the interference of international TV crews.

"It's precious," Sadik "Bernard" Obama, our president-elect's half-brother, told me later that night as a group of reporters and some members of the Obama family sat down to drinks. "Where else in the world can you sit under such a beautiful night sky?"

Seated under that dark African night, with Sadik and others, I couldn't help but wonder: Would I be here if not for a Luo man named Barack Obama Sr.?

I touched down in Kenya around midnight. On the drive from the airport in the darkness of night, I was immediately stirred by the sounds of Nairobi.

Even at that late hour, the city was still very much alive with sounds of "matatu" -- minivan taxi drivers -- stuck in traffic, hooting and yelling at each other as they picked up passengers. Street hawkers were selling all kinds of merchandise, from Energizer batteries to "nyama choma," grilled chicken or beef on a stick. Music was sifting from open-air bars and restaurants in parts of town that were clearly still open for business.

Nairobi had changed significantly since 1997, the last time I was here. And much of what I had heard about the city in recent years is indeed true -- it is booming.

On Nov. 5, Kenya awoke -- well, not many people here slept that night -- to the realization that Mr. Obama, their native son, will be the 44th president of the United States. It was an electric jolt to a country that, as a whole, is booming in so many ways.

On election night, I, along with members of the Obama family and journalists from just about every major Western media outlet, spent the night watching election returns on a 19-inch TV screen in the compound of Grace Obama, the stepmother of Mr. Obama.

I was in the compound when CNN International announced at about 7 a.m., Kenya time, that then-Sen. Obama would be the next American president. The celebrations in Kogelo spread like a wildfire throughout the country. The election almost instantaneously changed the way many Kenyans say they now see themselves.

And even as much of the public celebration faded within a couple of days, there remains a continuous celebration in Kenya, where there is an undeniable sense that the former junior senator from Illinois has singlehandedly hoisted this country out of the doldrums and put it on top of the world again -- if not for the first time.

"You can just feel it in the air. We feel a sense of a new beginning, of possibilities," Meshack Nyakitare, a 30-year-old graduate student at the University of Nairobi, told me two days after the election.

Mr. Nyakitare is pursuing an M.B.A. in international finance. Seated on a concrete bench in front of the Jomo Kenyatta Library on the grounds of the expansive campus, he described the general mood of the country as "a rejuvenation of the collective spirit."

He had planned on spending the day in the library, but it was closed. Like all governmental institutions, the university was closed on "Obama Day," declared so by the national government.

"I can't really explain it. It's more than pride. It's a special feeling," said Mike Makube, an electrical engineer from Mombasa, whom I found seated under a shade tree in Uhuru Park, recovering from the previous night's celebrations. We had a cool breeze and a wide-angle view of Nairobi's skyline.

"For me, this election is about my two children," said Mr. Makube, 36. "I envision a bright future for them because the world now knows more about us as a people."

"I don't know where they will end up, but I feel like they now have a chance to pursue their dreams anywhere in the world. Barack Obama has opened the door of possibilities for us."

Standing under the shade tree with Mr. Mukabe, I found myself wondering how I would explain what I was seeing and hearing from the people I met in Kenya. It was surreal.

Almost everybody I talked to instinctively drew parallels of what Mr. Obama's victory meant for them, their families and for Kenya. For a moment, I found myself thinking it was as if Americans had just elected Mr. Obama the new president of Kenya.

"Obamania" was everywhere.

The American election and "The President" -- as most people took to calling Mr. Obama in open conversations on the streets or on popular midday radio talk shows, and in bars and nightclubs -- seemed to become the default topic of discussions, much like the weather in some parts of the world.

I met Brian Laval, 42, an independent film producer, one night over pints of Tusker beer at Zam Zam, a small drinking joint in Westlands, one of the posh sections of Nairobi. "This is Kenya," he said with a sense of wonderment. "We are coming into a certain awareness of ourselves and Obama is just a part of that."

The public celebration and much of the exuberance around Mr. Obama's election, however, belies the reality of what is actually happening in Kenya these days, particulary in the wake of the violence that shook this country after its own presidential election last year.

For the most part, Nairobi, much like Kenya itself, feels like it's just awakening from social, political and economic paralysis. Kenyans are generally anxious that the violence which engulfed their country, from late December until Feb. 18 of this year, following a hotly contested presidential election, is not quite behind them.

On a purely surface level, Nairobi seems to be on a slow, but steady, recovery from the economic devasation much of the country suffered because of a tribal and political power struggle. The conflict essentially pitted the tribes and political coalitions of Western Kenya against those in the eastern part of the country.

But the city, with its notorious traffic jams, seems to be back to its old self.

The logistics of getting around downtown Nairobi can be a nightmare. More and more people drive -- and yet the city's road infrastructure has clearly not kept up with the pace at which Kenyans can afford to buy cars.

From early morning and through much of the day, Nairobi is almost impossible to maneuver by car. Matatus and private drivers spend the day seated in traffic jams that could be described as a choreographed car dance.

With the exception of government offices and much of the central business district, parts of Nairobi are open for business round-the-clock: grocery stores, gas stations, drug dispensaries, nightclubs, fast-food restaurants.

About a quarter of Nairobi is a 24-hour city. Given the rate at which it's growing, most city dwellers expect it to be a fully functional 24-hour city within a decade or so.

"What you're seeing today is Kenya at its best. We have everything right here in Nairobi," said Mr. Laval, my Tusker drinking friend, who recently produced a film about the post-election violence period.

"We have a very cosmopolitan city with a mix of ethnicities that much of the world often doesn't associate with an African country like Kenya," he added.

Mr. Laval is the son of a French mother and an Irish father who settled in East Africa generations ago. Citing his own family's story, he said ethnic integration is one of the untold stories of Kenya in the last few decades.

"There are more and more Kenyans like me today," said Mr. Laval, who speaks fluent Swahili and a few other native languages.

For all its ethnic diversity, however, Kenyans sense the growing income disparity between the rich and the poor in Nairobi, Kisumu and Mombasa.

In downtown Nairobi, for example, the opulence is not hard to miss on any given night. The scene at the malls, supermarkets, coffeeshops, restaurants and nightclubs in all the trendy and upscale parts of town -- Westlands, Hurlingham, Ngong Road, Kileleshwa -- feels much like what happens in an American city like Pittsburgh on a nice Friday night.

You don't have to look very far, however, to see how the other side lives. You can find them in small brick and sometimes tin houses in Kibera, arguably one of the biggest slums in all of East Africa, seated in a valley just off Ngong Road, or in places like Buru Buru, Kariobangi and Eastliegh, on the east side of Nairobi, which is home to much of the city's Somali community,

For years, Nairobi was notorious for its street gangs, which terrorized city dwellers and tourists to the point that the country's vaunted tourism industry started to suffer for it. The city took on a new nickname: "Nairobbery."

But the reduction in crime -- particularly street crimes like stabbings, shootings and murders -- is also one of the other untold stories of Nairobi in recent years.

"You can now go through certain parts of Nairobi, which were once impassable because of street gangs," said Chris Oduor, who lives in Kariobangi on the south side of the city.

"The government has really taken a tough approach to the street gangs, which terrorized us for many years. There was a time when you couldn't even walk around town with a cell phone in hand," Mr. Oduor, 24, recalled.

Now the Kenyan government seems to be taking on yet another corrosive crime that has tainted its image for years: corruption of government itself.

On his first official trip through Africa in 2006, as a senator, Mr. Obama, startled much of Kenya's political elite when he challenged the government to do more to deal with its own problem of corruption in the higher echelons of government.

"Corruption is such a big part of our government culture. We have to learn how to break out of it somehow," said Mr. Nyakitare, the University of Nairobi student, recalling the thesis of Mr. Obama's public lecture at the school two years ago. "I hope that our political leaders can learn something about the transparency that he talked about."