Miami gave us our first extended family lesson in the difference between a travel terminal and a place where human beings can live. We arrived with baby Keilah and tried to keep ourselves moving forward. We had technical skills, a marriage, a strong willingness to work and ideas already circulating internationally. Yet there were days when the most immediate question was where three people could safely sleep.

For a period we slept at Miami airport. I remember the benches interrupted by metal armrests, the night watches of security staff and the peculiar way a beautiful modern building can permit a traveller to buy almost anything while offering a family no unpriced place to recover. There were hotels and short-stay facilities nearby, each with its own business model. We began asking whether the arrangement of seats, rules and policing had become entangled with an economy that treats a resting body as a missed sale. We did not need to suppose an individual guard hated us. The guard had a job inside the operating rules of the building.

I was detained for about a week. Sher remained at the airport caring for Keilah, who was roughly seven months old. She has told me how she cried through that week. I would not pretend that this was a pleasant family holiday. But even here the larger record includes victory. A wife kept the family going, an infant was loved, and we came out together. Other people helped us, including a Mexican family who welcomed us and gave us restaurant cleaning work. We saved what we could and continued to build our digital businesses.

America had already taught me publishing during the college years. Now it taught us about owning an audience. We worked on websites, global courses, logos, multilingual communication and the foundations of a family media house. Sher began developing a way to gather the family’s many activities beneath a common identity. A course, a video, an article, a family photograph and a business enquiry could reinforce one another. A global audience did not need our family to have a television studio or a publicist in every capital. It needed us to learn how to publish well.

The Miami experience later became the first outline of our LuvYou Care-Port. Imagine arriving with a baby and finding a clean sleeping place, bathing, healthy food, nappies, infant supplies, quiet family rooms, transport information and people able to recognize your capabilities. Imagine those provisions arranged for living people rather than as opportunities to collect revenue. We include family relief and parental recovery because we know how badly an exhausted mother needs them. We include the ability to contribute because I never stopped being an engineer merely because I lacked a local employer.

A civilization has failed a very simple examination when a capable family can find more places to spend money than places to sit, sleep and regain its strength. We took the examination paper home and wrote a different answer.