There will be hundreds of thousands of revelers in Washington to celebrate Barack Obama’s inauguration, but only one person whom the president-elect calls “Granny.”

Sarah Obama, 86, will fly from her native Kenya to attend the inaugural festivities, the Kenyan government announced on Tuesday.

Sarah Hussein Onyango Obama isn’t actually related to the next president by blood — she was the third wife of Barack Obama’s paternal grandfather. The two must speak through an interpreter as she knows only a few words of English.

But they formed a close bond when he first visited Kenya in 1988.

Her face was “smooth and big-boned, with sparkling, laughing eyes,” Obama wrote in his autobiography, Dreams From My Father.

Sarah Obama will attend a pan-African celebration the night of the inauguration. It’s not the first time she’s been to Washington: she came in 2004 to celebrate her step-grandson’s inauguration into the U.S. Senate.

Obama saw a lot more of his other grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, when he was growing up in Hawaii. She died on Nov. 3, the day before he was elected president.

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Photo credit: Reuters/Thomas Mukoya (Sarah Obama at a news conference in November)