Man shares hope, faith he found amid despair

http://www.seattlepi.com/swift/402816_mary09.html

IT WAS A blind man who gave Terry Masango hope -- and hope that kept him from suicide.
Masango, the oldest of five children whose alcoholic father spent his money on beer and his anger on his family, grew up in "abject poverty" in the poorest ghetto of Harare, Zimbabwe.
"Sometimes we had two meals (a day), sometimes one," Masango says. "My father would come home drunk and cause problems for everybody. If he got angry, he would beat up everybody."
When Masango was 8, his mother packed up the children and went to live with her parents. He was 9 when his father's brother took him to live with his paternal grandmother.
Almost a year later, his mother came to find him. Shocked by his appearance -- "There was little to eat," he says -- she reunited with her husband hoping for better times for the family.
It didn't happen.
By 16, Masango was desperate.
"If you answered, you were wrong," he says. "If you didn't answer, you were wrong. It drove me crazy. I was filled with anger, pain, bitterness -- and contemplating suicide."
That week friends headed to church camp lent him money to attend. A respite from torment, he thought. But it would prove much more than that.
"There was a blind man teaching," Masango says. "I remember his message: It was about hope. He talked as if he knew what I was going through. I accepted his message. I said, 'I'll try this. If it doesn't work, I'll kill myself.' "
Back home, nothing had changed -- except Masango. Growing up a member of Salvation Army church, he'd "gone through the motions" of faith, he says. Now, he embraced it. He joined a group of students who met before school to pray, sought out good men who became surrogate fathers and eventually became a youth leader and taught Sunday school.
After high school, he got a job in a bank and brought his siblings to live with him.
"So, at 19 I was a parent," he says. "For the next six years they lived with me until I married and moved out, and left them in the house I'd rented."
He'd met his wife, Rutendo, at a wedding in 1997. Both felt drawn to the ministry. In 1999, six months after they married, they sold their house and furniture to attend the Salvation Army's School for Youth Leadership in Australia.
The next year they were sent to Spokane to help with a summer camp. One Sunday, Masango was asked to preach.
"I was walking down the aisles like we do back home," says Masango. "The people loved it and immediately offered me a job."
When training was finished, they returned to Spokane to work there. In 2004, the couple went to California to attend the Salvation Army's College for Officers Training.
"On the day we graduated in June 2006, we were told we were coming to Renton," Masango says. He and Rutendo are now captains of the Renton Corps of the Salvation Army, an operation that includes a large food bank and social service center. "We immediately looked it up on the Internet. I'd never seen a food bank that large."
It has been eight years since he and Rutendo were last in Zimbabwe. Her parents are dead. His mother has never seen their children, now 2 and 7. That will change in July, when he and Rutendo lead a 15-person mission trip from the Renton Salvation Army to Zimbabwe.
"If my mom had not returned to get me, I would not have the life I have today," he says, choking back tears. "Her love gave me hope and a reason to live. I've told people they're going to have to pull me off her lap.
"However," he says, laughing. "I think she'll push me off to hold her grandchildren."
Masango asked leaders of his old church in Zimbabwe what they needed. The answer: brass band instruments to replace the ones that were already old back when Masango played.
"We're hoping to get donated instruments to take with us," he says.
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