Help from a friend ensured that a Fochville man received a proper burial this week.

According to a resident, Jacqueline van Wyk, her late husband, Nico van Loggerenberg, passed away on October 16, 2023.

“We were married for 15 years. My husband picked up a work-related ailment, reactive airway dysfunction syndrome, in 2012. He was never cured and was declared unfit to continue with his work as a painter. When my husband, who was our family’s only provider, passed away, I could not pay for a funeral, and he was buried by the state,” says Jacqueline.

As she had no income and their three children to take care of, Jacqueline could not make down payments on a gravestone and lost the money that she had already paid an undertaker.

“I did not know what to do and made enquiries about whether I could build a gravestone myself, but after two years I was still no closer to making a plan,” she says.

According to Jacqueline, she was talking to an old acquaintance of her husband, Thabo Ramile, who heads a group of people doing recycling at the Fochville waste transfer station near the traffic department.
“I told him with tears in my eyes that this thing of me not being able to give my husband a proper burial was eating at me, and he volunteered to build a gravestone out of sandstone and other building rubble. He then went to the graveyard with three of his guys to put up my husband’s grave. This gravestone is special and unique, just like my husband was. I don’t have words to describe how much this gesture meant to me. It really gave me hope again!”

“We were friends, and it is my job to help people. Everything I used for the gravestone was things that other people threw away,” says Ramile, who is known to many people as “Steyn Asgat.”

The action also made Ramile realise he can help other people tidy up their family members’ graves. People can contact him on 067 918 1992.