Following God’s message
LIV Village founder not deterred after locals trash sanctuary
TICH Smith is sticking to his guns. The community – some of whom trashed facilities established for their own benefit next to the children’s sanctuary he and his wife, Joan, started five years ago – has always been as much in their hearts and on their agendas as LIV VIllage itself.
“‘Build a village for orphans and vulnerable children and provide jobs for local, rural families. Then the government can see why it works and it can point to the cross. This was God’s message to me during a six-hour car trip,” the former South African cricket and rugby star told The Independent on Saturday.
He said he felt sticking to his guns and following his divine message was the right thing to do because “Jesus returned my life to me” after he spent time in a home for alcoholics and drug abusers, saddled with gambling debts.
Smith said he understood the hurt and pain the people of Cottonlands, near Verulam, and other communities across South Africa felt living in the aftermath of apartheid.
“Poverty is a terrible thing. People are hurting,” he said, adding that the massive gap between rich and poor made it worse.
Where apartheid had rubbed salt into the wound was that it had broken up families, keeping wives and children in the homelands and leaving the men to find work in the cities, he said.
“I can’t comprehend (white) South Africans who don’t feel for black history. The way we treated them. It was an absolute disgrace. How would we have reacted if it had been the other way around?
“We no longer have a fatherless generation, it’s now a family-less generation.
“I believe in the reconstruction of families.
“I consider how much my parents sowed in my life, like I’ve sown in my kids’ lives.
“Communities like these have had not one hour of it sown into their lives.”
So, in spite of the more than R1.5 million damage caused during the recent protest, the Smiths will return to business as usual.
However, they will do so with even more wisdom than even their eight years of working and living in the poverty of the Amaoti informal settlement community, near Inanda, had taught them before they started LIV Village.
“I think we hadn’t communicated and negotiated closely enough with the community,” Smith said.
“We thought we were helping them so everything was okay, but we need closer working relations. It’s a lesson we’ll be taking forward with us. It would be impossible to run this community if we did not have good relations. We thought we had good relations.”
Joan Smith added: “It’s like fynbos fires down in the Cape. It was like walking in such a fire, which the fynbos needs. Out of it comes growth, development and beauty. The world just sees the fire but it’s the cycle of life.”
And if it had to happen again?
“I will build it again until I have a working relationship with the people,” Smith said.
“My heart is in being part of the solution in this country.
“I believe it is now in the hands of the ‘haves’, not by giving money, but by sowing value into their lives.”
He said businesses should do business differently and think not only of their bottom lines.
“They must also go above the line and employ extra people so that they can learn and develop themselves, give them integrity, value in life. They must make them feel worthy – no handouts. Self worth is what they want.
“If you just spend time with them they feel worthy.”
Smith added that although it was difficult, progress in negotiations with the Cottonlands community had already given him and his wife hope.
“We are heartbroken, but excited by negotiations and about the possibility of moving forward.”