For OrphanAid Africa's Chief, a Life-Changing Journey MY parents came from a working-class area in the north of England. Being bohemians at heart and wanting to follow the sun, they quit their jobs in London in the mid-1960s and moved to the Mediterranean coast. I was conceived on the Italian Riviera, in Lerici. My father, a painter, felt that Italy was already overexploited so they moved to Spain. I was born in Barcelona but we lived in a nearby beach town with bad roads and worse water. Eric Don-Arthur Lisa Lovatt-Smith is the chief executive of OrphanAid Africa, based in Ghana. HAS JUST READ "Powder Necklace," by Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond MOST PROUD OF Winning the Clarins Most Dynamic Woman award in 2012 My mother, who raised me alone since I was 4, had been a hairstylist and colorist back in London. She was determined to stay in Barcelona; she taught swimming and English. We were so poor that we once went without electricity for three weeks because Mum couldn't afford an electrician. When I was 6, she elected to give me up for a year for informal fostering to a lovely affluent British family living in Barcelona. She came to see me every day until she could afford to take me back, but that couple and their children truly became a second family to us both. I excelled academically at the private school where I was on scholarship, but I was not popular and spent a lot of time alone writing. In my last year there, I won a Vogue magazine writing competition. The award was a summer internship at Vogue's British edition. I moved to London, and for the next 18 years Vogue was my university, my grad school and my post-doc. In 1986, Anna Wintour made me assistant to the arts editor, a talented guy named Patrick Kinmonth. I stuck to him like glue. He knew everything and everyone so I had to keep up. Then Anna promoted me to picture editor; I was all of 19. About a year later, I left British Vogue to open an art gallery in Milan. But representatives of the Vogue family convinced me to help start Spanish Vogue as fashion director. In the early 1990s, Vogue offered to let me continue overseeing Spanish Vogue's fashion coverage from Paris. While working in Paris, I met and fell in love with a photographer. At around the same time, I became a foster parent to Sabrina, a girl of Moroccan-Algerian background who was 5 when I met her. Following my breakup with the photographer, Sabrina and I moved to Barcelona. When Sabrina was 17, we went to Ghana to volunteer in an orphanage for two weeks. To say it changed my life is an understatement. When we got there, I saw questionable practices that I felt very strongly needed to change, and with the money I had accumulated, I believed I could make a difference. I went back to Barcelona, sold my house and car, put some other things in place and went back to live in Ghana. We established OrphanAid Africa in 2002. It's a nonprofit that helps children. Many of them have been separated from their families by poverty, the H.I.V.-AIDS epidemic or the exodus from rural to urban areas. We now employ 50 people at our campus in the village of Ayenyah, northeast of Ghana's capital city, Accra, and three other workers as fund-raisers in Europe and the United States. Our staff includes social workers, teachers, psychologists and other mental health professionals. Last year, we served close to 4,500 children in Ghana. Colleagues from my years in the luxury and fashion industries have helped support these children's needs. Now I live in a tiny village in a mud hut with three dogs and my two youngest adopted children. Vogue was fun, but this work is fulfilling. As told to Perry Garfinkel.