Dismay and prayers in Obama's Kenyan village

KOGELO, Kenya (Reuters) - Villagers in Barack Obama's ancestral Kenyan home expressed disappointment on Wednesday as his rival Hillary Clinton won key votes to revive her campaign for the White House.

Victories for Clinton in Ohio and Texas snapped Obama's winning streak and kept alive the New York senator's campaign to win the Democratic Party nomination.

"We feel bad, but we all hope he will succeed in the end," carpenter George Oduor, 25, said in Kogelo, the small village northwest of Kisumu town that was home to Obama's late father.

"We don't want Hillary," he told Reuters as children headed to class at the nearby Senator Obama Secondary School.

Born in Hawaii to a white American mother and Kenyan father, he is adored by many Kenyans the way the Irish idolized former President John F. Kennedy in the 1960s -- as one of their own who succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

"We want Obama to win ... he is clever. God has blessed him with a good brain," Alice Onyango, a 56-yr-old nun in a white headdress, told Reuters.

The hard-fought duel now moves to Wyoming and Mississippi next week and then Pennsylvania on April 22, with Clinton still trailing Obama in the pledged delegates who will pick the nominee to run in the November presidential election.

"All we can do is pray and thank God," Obama's 85-year-old step-grandmother, Sarah Hussein Onyango Obama, told Reuters TV.

(For more about the U.S. political campaign, visit Reuters "Tales from the Trail: 2008" online at blogs.reuters.com/trail08/)