Raphael Magaba

Ours is a dramatic turn of events that we shall live to tell the rest of our lives. They say twice bitten once shy. Having lost money twice in two housing schemes in Zimbabwe and with all the South African banks turning me down for any possible home loan on the particular property I wanted, all hopes of ever owning a property in our lives was dashed to the ground. "We have to settle down to being able to feed ourselves", I said this to my wife half willing to come to terms with what I was saying. That day the agent called me saying he wanted to talk to me. He introduced a new concept, 'The SA Home Loan'. Right away I fell for it and the agent said that he would turn in an application. Three weeks of waiting was just too short a period to get the positive results I had always wanted to hear for a very long time. Then came the rush to raise the deposit that I desperately wanted and I did this through the nose because hoping against hope that I would get a hundred percent bond. Then the bond was registered and the news was broken to me by the bond attorneys through an e-mail. Finally SA Home Loans had facilitated my being a home owner. We had a short family night prayer followed by a short celebration in our flat. We did not want anyone to know. Then the signing, it was all a dream come true for us. We told all our friends that we were moving out of the flat to a new location when a removal company had finished loading all our goods.