The following extracts are taken from Chapter Two of Obama's Dreams from My Father. In 1967, the young Barack moved to Indonesia with his mother and remained there until 1971 when he was sent to live with his grandparents in Hawaii.

It had taken me less than six months to learn Indonesia's language, its customs, and its legends. I had survived chicken pox, measles, and the sting of my teachers' bamboo switches.

The children of farmers, servants, and low-level bureaucrats had become my best friends, and together we ran the streets morning and night, hustling odd jobs, catching crickets, battling swift kites with razor-sharp lines – the loser watched his kite soar off with the wind, and knew that somewhere other children had formed a long wobbly train, their heads towards the sky, waiting for their prize to land.

With Lolo [Obama's stepfather], I learned how to eat small green chill peppers raw with dinner (plenty of rice), and, away from the dinner table, I was introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy).

That's how things were, one long adventure, the bounty of a young boy's life. In letters to my grandparents, I would faithfully record many of these events, confident that more civilising packages of chocolate and peanut butter would surely follow.

But not everything made its way into my letters; some things I found too difficult to explain. I didn't tell Toot and Gramps about the face of the man who had come to our door one day with a gaping hole where his nose should have been: the whistling sound he made as he asked my mother for food. Nor did I mention the time that one of my friends told me in the middle of recess that his baby brother had died the night before of an evil spirit brought in by the wind – the terror that danced in my friend's eyes for the briefest of moments before he let out a strange laugh and punched my arm and broke off into a breathless run.

There was the empty look on the faces of farmers the year the rains never came, the stoop in their shoulders as they wandered barefoot through their barren, cracked fields, bending over every so often to crumble earth between their fingers; and their desperation the following year when the rains lasted for over a month, swelling the river and fields until the streets gushed with water and swept as high as my waist and families scrambled to rescue their goats and their hens even as chunks of their huts washed away.

The world was violent, I was learning, unpredictable and often cruel. My grandparents knew nothing of such a world, I decided; there was no point in disturbing them with questions they couldn't answer.