“Obama, Obama!” she said. “Our most powerful cousin!”

Even some Kenyans — including a few extra police officers who’d already closed down the side street leading to central Nairobi’s Kenyatta Avenue, started taking pictures and videos on their cellphones. She saw them. She kept dancing and singing.

Across the street, the message was bigger and more corporate, but still exultant: a building-wide, three-story banner from Pioneer Holdings (Africa) Ltd. with a giant photo of Obama making a point at a news conference, captured between images of a Kenyan and a waving American flag: “Welcome Home President Obama!”

“Relax, Mr. President. We’ll build you a Kenyan home for free!” reads a sign along the highway from the airport. Obama, pictured from behind, looks on in the picture at a wooden frame under construction, his thumb up.

“President Obama, welcome to Tusker Country,” says another, from the country’s biggest, most popular beer.

He’s the president of the United States. But to many here, he’s “our son,” to the point that there’s a rumor going around among some that Obama will return after he’s done in Washington to run for president here and clean things up in his father’s country.

“He’s not just our familia — he gets us. He’s one of us,” said the president’s half-sister, Auma Obama, introducing him at his Sunday morning speech to the Kenyan people at Safaricom Stadium on the outskirts of town. “But we have to share him with the world, because he’s not just ours.”

She told the crowd about Obama’s first trip to Kenya, in 1988, when she picked him up at the airport in her rundown car.

“You all saw it on Friday, he returned the favor. He gave me a ride from the same airport in what is called the Beast,” she said, referring to the presidential limousine that’s a source of endless fascination for Kenyans.

“I am proud to be the first American president to come to Kenya,” Obama said when it was his turn to speak. “And of course I’m the first Kenyan-American to be president of the United States. That goes without saying.”

The first time he came, the airline lost his luggage. This time, he looked out at a crowd of 5,000 who went wild when he entered the stadium and tried to keep him from leaving, chanting, “Obama! Obama! Obama!”

That’s about as close as he got to letting himself be embraced by the homecoming.

“I can’t come here and just go up country and visit for a week and meet everybody,” he said wistfully during a news conference with Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta on Saturday.

But that hasn’t dampened the mood.

“He is from here!” shrieked the woman dancing in the street, excited, insistent. “His village, just five hours away.”

Over at the Kenya National Theater on the other side of town, they’re putting on a musical version of the story of Obama’s roots and how he became president of the United States.

Well, almost. “Dreams From a Father,” based on Obama’s autobiography, “Dreams From My Father,” is (like the title) a near-exact take on the original.

It kicks off with an overture of “Take the A Train.” On stage, a giant Shepard Fairey HOPE poster hanging over the stage. Obama’s father is a stern but true guide, with one incident in the book — when he switched off “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” — expanded to Obama swearing off the tube for life: “Obama doesn’t joke / and watch the TV / he just reads and reads / reads and reads / chewing up books / like an inchworm / he reads and reads.” The Obama character realizes as he graduates from law school that he could get a job at any private firm that would give him enough money to buy a Jeep if he wanted, but instead gets into community organizing after leaving Harvard. As a teenager, the narrator recounts, Obama was “excelling in basketball as much as academics.”

The Michelle Obama character, more faithfully, tells him not to run for president because “politics is dirty.”

But no, Obama says to her, he has to.

“We must make the first step to do something,” Obama, played by a young actor with short dreads, declares. “Yes we can. Yes I can.”

“And, oh boy, did he shake the American political scene,” the narrator says, as the cast launches into a 20-plus person interpretative dance number, smacking their feet on the floor as they land.

That’s the kind of folk hero the president of the United States is here, in a country where an industry of children’s books has made “Yes We Can” into a motto of personal empowerment and possibility.

Obama picked up that theme himself in his speech Sunday to the Kenyans, encouraging them to see the opportunity in the country today that his father had to go to America to find 50 years ago.

“Yes you can — realize your dreams right here, right now,” Obama said.

“The whole phenomenon of a black man becoming the president of the most powerful country in the world was something to behold,” the musical’s creator, George Orido, said in an interview. He said he’d been thinking about this play for some time but only finished when he heard in April that Obama would be coming to Kenya. It’s a sequel to a musical he wrote when Obama was first elected in 2008.

“Everyone wants to have a piece of him,” Orido said.

That includes so many members of his family — about three dozen of them — who met him at dinner on Friday night. Obama later admitted that not only did he not know who all of them were, but “there were lengthy explanations in some cases of the connections.”

Obama’s relationships with his Kenyan family haven’t always been great. He and his half-brother Malik (Roy) were the best men at each other’s weddings, but they’ve fallen out of touch in recent years. Before Obama arrived, Malik complained to the Kenyan media that he’d first heard about the trip not from the president himself, but from news reports.

Contacted by POLITICO, Malik Obama responded by email, “I will talk to you for $10,000.”

He made it to the dinner and the Safaricom Stadium speech.

“Dreams From a Father” ends with Obama literally running (in slow motion) for president, knocking over opponents and obstacles, and then an almost verbatim recitation of his victory speech in Chicago’s Grant Park on election night 2008.

The characters on stage cheer, but the young actors are clearly cheering themselves as well, still caught up in the glory of Obama’s election.

Of course, winning that night was precisely what kept him from coming back to Kenya for so long, Obama said Saturday — and from bringing along his wife and daughters for a visit that would be more meaningful than this high-security two-day visit, which often put him in helicopters rather than driving on his almost all-official-business trip, and White House staff on a sundown curfew.

A year and a half from now, that will change, Obama said.

“One of the challenges of traveling and visiting Kenya is that I’m much more constrained now than I will be,” Obama said. “And I think that you can anticipate not only me being back, but probably more important for everybody, Michelle being back, and Malia and Sasha coming back, because they have a great love for this country and its people and its beauty.”