For many years, the four members of the impoverished Maano family of Mbahe outside Thohoyandou shared a single-room house – with all their belongings and foodstuffs squeezed in with them. None of them had any privacy and they had to take turns for taking a bath.
In 2019, the family was identified by the Sterkstroom Living Gospel World Mission Church at Malavuwe as a beneficiary for their housing programme, but as fate would have it, Covid-19 struck, and the house was never built.
They did not, however, forget about the family's need and four years later, the church finally delivered on its promise when it handed over a three-room house to the family.
The official hand-over ceremony took place on 18 December last year, marking it as the best Christmas ever for the family. The church president, Pastor Rembuluwani Kharivhe, and Pastor Ronald Makhadi of the local Malavuwe Living Gospel World Mission Church, did the honours for this special occasion. Also present was Vhavenda Vho-Muthabeni, Thulamela's acting mayor Tshivhangwaho Godfrey Makungo, and church and community members.
The family's eldest daughter, Mashudu, who is a member of the church, said the house had opened a new chapter in their lives. "This is the best thing to have ever happened in our lives. There was no privacy with us all packed in one room, but this has changed. Now we are living like any other family. We do not have enough words to thank the church for turning our lives around," she said.
Pastor Makhadi said that, every year towards Christmas, his church identified needy families to whom they donated food parcels, and at that time they had discovered the poor living conditions the Maano family had been subjected to. "We decided there and then to build them a house, but Covid prevented us from doing so at the time. We are so happy that we finally managed to build this spacious house for them. James 1 verse 27 says the religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world. We are doing exactly that. This is not the first house we have built, and we will continue to identify the needy and intervene," he said.