Maureen Ngoepe was 21, terribly alone, three months pregnant and a black South African woman wandering scared through the wretchedness of apartheid.



She found her way inside a church one day in 1989 and was sobbing in despair when a mysterious woman appeared before her. She had not seen the woman before. She has not seen her since.



The woman told her not to worry, the baby would be fine, a boy, and she should name him Gift because he will be a "Gift from God."



On Jan. 18, 1990, Mpho Gift Ngoepe was born in South Africa, and how a Sotho tribesman from the most rudimentary of means eventually found his way to Bradenton to play baseball is one of the more unlikely stories in professional sports.



Ngoepe is currently a switch-hitting shortstop for the Bradenton Marauders, a Class A affiliate of the Pittsburgh Pirates, and he is the only black South African ever to sign a pro baseball contract. He is also the only player on his team who speaks English, Spanish, two dialects of Sotho, Afrikaans and Zulu -- and was raised by a single mother inside a cramped baseball clubhouse.



"It was very small," Ngoepe, now 22, said. "But you know, it was a happy place to live in.



"It doesn't matter how big the house is, it just depends on what you make of it."



His first name of Mpho means "Gift" in Sotho and his middle name means the same in English. His last name is pronounced en-WEE-pay.



After he was born, his mother went searching for work in Johannesburg and he was left to live with his grandparents in a mud hut for the first two years of his life.



His mother, meanwhile, did find work -- at a baseball clubhouse for an amateur team called the Randburg Mets. Randburg is a suburb of Johannesburg, and because of apartheid the area was white at the time.



Baseball is hardly popular in South Africa -- there are no professional leagues -- and the Mets players raised money to build a small wooden clubhouse at their field by selling food from their cars.



In exchange for cooking, cleaning and running the cash register for games, Maureen was allowed to live in a 7-by-9- foot room inside the clubhouse. She had a sink, a heater, a hot plate and a bucket for a chair.



Not that she complained. In fact, the Mets even gave her a nickname: "Happy."



"My mother fought her way," Gift Ngoepe said. "She taught me everything I needed to know about life."



When Ngoepe was 2, he drank a bottle of cooking oil at his grandparents' house and became violently ill. That is when his mother brought him back to live with her in the baseball clubhouse.



"It wasn't supposed to be me," he said. "It was supposed to be my older brother moving in with her, but I got sick and I ended up living with her, and that's how I started baseball."



A new perspective



At one point, Gift and his mother, stepfather and brother shared the tiny room in the clubhouse. He may have slept on a wooden floor, but his front yard was the best a boy could hope for. It had chalk lines and bases the color of white clouds.



"Every morning I'd get up, I'd unlock the gate, and there was the field," Ngoepe said.



At night the family sang and danced in the tiny room, while homeless people slept on the baseball field outside.



During the day he learned how to play the game. He was a child, not even 10, and he often played against 30-year-old men.



But he learned fast, and by 16 he was already representing his country in tournaments as far away as Cuba.



"I remember telling a lot of people when I was young that I'm going to make the major leagues some day," Ngoepe said.



"That would mean a lot," said Pat Hagerty, the long-time clubhouse manager at Pirate City who has developed a close friendship with Ngoepe.



Ngoepe's first season of pro baseball was in 2009 with the rookie-league Pirates in Bradenton, and Hagerty was one of the first people he met in America.



Hagerty didn't know what to think when Ngoepe began spending all his time in the clubhouse, helping him fold towels and hang uniforms.



Hagerty would even find Ngoepe curled up inside the laundry hampers sometimes, fast asleep to the whir of the dryers.



And when Ngoepe was not folding towels or hanging out in Hagerty's office, he was wandering around the clubhouse, always swinging a bat.



Ngoepe soon began calling Hagerty, who is the father of three, "Dad."



"Knowing where he came from, and seeing the scenes where his mother's from and what he did to survive, it's given me a new perspective on life," Hagerty, 51, said. "Everyone likes him. I haven't found a bad bone in his body."



Being made to fold towels is a punishment for players, but Ngoepe doesn't see it that way. He still helps out in his current clubhouse, at McKechnie Field.



"It's pretty amazing where he came from," said Mark McKnight, clubhouse guy for the Marauders. "He's never upset and he's always got a smile on his face. He's awesome. He'll always stick out to me."



Ngoepe's mother still lives in the clubhouse in South Africa with her youngest son, Victor, and when Ngoepe returns home for the winter, he lives with them.



Only now he has his own room with a bed and a couch and a few signed balls. One of those is from his mother, who wrote on it, "I'll be there for you even if you are far away."



Ngoepe promised his mother that one day he would build her a house, his gift to her, and a few years ago construction began. He used his signing bonus of $15,000 from the Pirates to build it, and everything is nearly done.



The house is large, with five bedrooms, a dining room, a kitchen, and extra space for singing and dancing late into the night.