Macon family looking for home after fire

Editor's note: The Reindeer Gang is an annual holiday feature about people and families in need. Donations to Keyonna Little's family can be made through Loaves and Fishes Ministry, 651 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. in Macon. For information, call 741-1007.

She cried that night after the kids went to bed.

"What do we do from here?" she wondered.

Keyonna Little's house, a $500-a-month rental, had caught fire that morning. Her 9-year-old daughter was in the kitchen cooking noodles and, by accident, left one of the electric stove's burners on before heading to school.

No one was home when the place went up. By then it was about 9 a.m. The children were all at school and Little was at work on the other side of Macon. She manages the McDonald's on Rocky Creek Road.

Her family has no car, and it took more than an hour to catch a ride back to east Macon to see what was left there on Sunnydale Drive.

"You know," Little says now, "when you're calling from Rocky Creek saying you need a ride all the way to the east side, a lot of people ain't gonna answer their phone."

One of her bosses finally gave her a lift.

The fire was out long before Little arrived home. The three-bedroom, one-bathroom house where she and her husband and five children lived was a mess.

The kitchen was ruined. Firefighters had ripped out cabinets to douse flames in the walls.

"Everything was black. The ceiling, the walls, the stove, the refrigerator, all that was burnt," Little, 33, says.

"It knocked us down."

Their clothes were about the only things worth keeping.

In the weeks after the September blaze, the family stayed in eastside motels. The Red Cross put them up at a Days Inn for three days. After that, they were on their own.

They moved to a cheaper motel in their old neighborhood near the main entrance to the Indian Mounds. Little says her children -- three sons and two daughters who range in age from 8 to 15 -- "hated that one."

A couple of weeks later, Loaves and Fishes Ministry provided them temporary housing in west Macon. Now they're trying to find a permanent home through a Section 8 program.

Little gets off work most days at 4 p.m. By the time she takes a bus to Fort Hill, where her children stay after school with kin, it is sometimes 7 or 8 at night before they can catch a ride home to west Macon.

Little's husband of 16 years, Larry Duehart, calls her "a will-do mom."

"She's very caring," he says.

Mark Jones, the family's Loaves and Fishes case manager, says the couple and their children are "so humble and don't ask for much."

"It's good to see such a good, intact family," Jones says.

They need furniture as they prepare to move into their new place: beds and dressers and chairs.

"They're so humble," Jones says. "They don't ask for much."

After it was repaired, they looked into moving back to their place that burned. The kids loved the neighborhood. Their friends were there and they wouldn't have to change schools.

The landlord, though, found a new tenant.

This story was originally published November 29, 2015 at 9:28 PM with the headline "Macon family looking for home after fire ."