At the age of 23, Obama Sr. enrolled at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, leaving behind a pregnant Kezia and their infant son. He had already turned away from Islam and become an atheist by the time he moved to the United States.[3] On 2 February 1961, Obama Sr. married fellow student Ann Dunham in Maui, Hawaii[14] though she would not find out that her new husband was already married until much later.[15] Obama Sr.'s and Dunham's son, Barack Obama II, was born on August 4, 1961. Dunham left school to care for the baby, while Obama Sr. completed his degree. He graduated from the University of Hawaii in June 1962 (and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa[16]), leaving shortly thereafter to travel to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he would begin graduate study at Harvard University in the fall.[15] Later that summer, Dunham and the year-old baby Barack stopped to visit her friends in Mercer Island, Washington, the Seattle suburb where she had grown up,[15][17][18] before joining Obama Sr. in Cambridge. However, mother and son soon returned to Seattle, where she enrolled at the University of Washington.[17][15] Dunham, missing her family, then moved back to Hawaii[17] and filed for divorce in Honolulu in January 1964. Obama Sr. did not contest, and the divorce was granted.[14] He visited his son only once, in 1971, when Barack was 10 years old.[15]
While at Harvard, Obama Sr. met an American-born teacher named Ruth Nidesand. She followed him to Kenya when he returned there after he received a master's degree (AM) in economics from Harvard in 1965.[19] Nidesand eventually became his third wife and had two children with him before they divorced.[20
