Tich and Joan Smith share their story of God bringing each of them through tragic situations and leading them to launch a ministry - a village which rescues children, restores lives, and raises young leaders.

Tich and Joan Smith

Emily: Tell me a bit about your background, up to the moment that you first met each other.

Tich: I was born in South Africa in the apartheid era, and grew up in a white privileged family in Johannesburg. I was blessed with a little bit of sporting talent, I played cricket for South Africa and rugby for our local province. Life was good. I came to England to play for Middlesex for a season and then decided that I'd go home.

After I finished playing sport I ended up in a home for alcoholics and drug addicts. Just before I went into this home my wife decided that she had had enough and Peter Pollock, a former cricketer for South Africa led me to the Lord. I gave my life to Jesus, came out of that home and life didn't go great. In fact it got worse. I ran away from the debt that I'd created and went to Johannesburg. Then I felt God speak to me, telling me to face the debt, and pay it back, which I did. It was at that time that Joanie and I met and we got married shortly after that.

Joan: I was doing life like everybody else, I had two kids and a husband. I was married to a professional golfer. We travelled a lot in Europe and the UK on the golf tour in the 70s. Then in 1990 my husband went fishing up the road from where we lived in Durban and he didn't come back. We spent a week searching for him and eventually found his body. He'd been murdered, hijacked for his vehicle. So I felt like life came to an end for me at that point. My kids were still at school, I was 40 years old and kind of didn't want to be here anymore.

Tich was helping me with my insurance and you know how they say "Beware of the insurance salesman." Well, I didn't! A year later we were married. When we came together we had four teenagers between us so all hell broke loose in the house. At that time we were just doing life: mortgages, school fees. We were dealing with all of those things and we weren't thinking too much about the orphaned children or the poor.

Emily: So you got married, and you had fresh dreams of things that were ahead of you. What were some of the first things you did as a married couple?

Tich: We had the four children to bring up and that was time consuming. Joan was a professional golfer, we played a lot of golf together and I paid off the debt that I'd accrued through my gambling addictions. Then I cried out to God one day and said "Surely there's more to life than this," I was on a mission trip back to Durban. I prayed in tongues for two hours and then I said "Lord speak to me." He said to me so clearly, "Build a village where the children will come to know Him as their Father. Create jobs for rural communities that will sustain their families and the Government will come and see why it works and we can point them to the cross."

It seemed like a ridiculous vision. We'd never been too involved with the poor, we'd never been to the poor communities. We were happy as we were, and God downloaded this vision. I got back home and shared with Joan and that's how the journey started.

Joan: I thought he'd lost his mind actually. We had built a house in Fancourt, a golf estate in the Cape, and the plan was to spend six months there and six months here in Durban. We live on the beach in Durban so it was quite a good retirement vision and dream. So when Tich said we were going to build a village for orphan children and create jobs for the poor in rural communities, that wasn't on my radar!

Emily: As you started to journey through the different stages and know that God had definitely put this on your hearts, tell me about LIV, what it stands for and what it means for you.

Tich: When we got the vision, we tried to do it in our own strength. We started a building company, which we thought would build the village. We realised that it wasn't God's plan, and it was a bit of a disaster. But by the grace of God we didn't lose any money and closed that business. Then some years later we heard of some children that were starving in the community and Joan went and started to feed these children. There were 30 of them under three, and that, basically, was the beginning of the journey.

Joan: I didn't have much of a vision beyond giving peanut butter sandwiches to a few kids under a tree once a week. But when I saw the need of these children, so many of them neglected and starving, I realised that a few peanut butter sandwiches wasn't going to make much difference. So we started going every day.

I think we needed that time to learn to work with a different race. We were all South Africans, but because of the apartheid era we'd never mixed. So it was important for us to learn how to serve and not be arrogant and tell people what to do and what they need, but instead to listen.

Tich: I think God also humbled us. There's a lot of distrust between the different races in South Africa. We had death threats, and it was really difficult initially. They wanted to know why we were in the communities, what we were doing, and what we wanted to get. It was hard to explain that we'd just come to serve. But eventually we had 600 children on the Back to School programme and we were running sports events. We had teams in the soccer league, after school care for the children, we had 30 crèches, early childhood development centres, and we were feeding 2,000 children every day. Then we planted the church. We were doing church 24/7.