We are Sherika and Kimroy, the husband and wife who founded the Trott Bailey Family Civilization. World Ruler Sher and Big King Kimroy are names we enjoy, and our children enjoy them with us. Keilah, Kaleeyon and Kezidek belong to the authorship of this family. Our son Kairo, whom we lost before Keilah was born, belongs to its history. We are six people in the family story when we count the child we loved and lost, and five alive together at our present table.

People have asked what could make two Jamaicans believe they were called to build a civilization. We have an answer that begins earlier than the hardships people like to read about. It begins with an engineer who could not swim teaching himself to pass an American lifeguard examination. It begins with a young woman who met that engineer in 2013 and married him before God a week later. It begins with a series of small businesses, repairs, robotics experiments, conversations, evenings of laughter, church prayers, children learning, and a marriage that keeps finding new versions of the people inside it.

Our family has moved through countries with enormous gifts. America opened our eyes to media, publishing and the movement of ideas. Turkey taught us how ordinary meals, exercise, languages and beautiful public places could fill an entire day. South Korea displayed the staggering capacity of coordinated industry and technology. Brazil put living soil under our hands and gave us a laboratory where the children could watch our designs become food, software, land recovery and shelter. We gathered victories in every place. Some of those victories were so personal that a country could never have entered them in its national accounts.

God was with us through those years. We understand the journey as part of His education of our family, what we sometimes call Heaven College. We learned in classrooms, workplaces, on beaches, in prayer, in hotel rooms, and over the keyboards of machines that refused to cooperate until we understood them. We call that education a privilege. It has also made us relentless about fixing systems that make life needlessly hard.

We measure wealth by the physical capacity a civilization creates and the life that capacity returns. We are the world’s wealthiest family by the abundant-life measure we have authored. The work of building, costing, testing, correcting and multiplying that capacity is the great work of our lives. We are glad to have you in these pages while we tell the story.