Katie Davis (missionary)

Katie Davis Majors is an American missionary and author who established a mission in Jinja, Uganda in 2007.[2] The work led to founding of a school and to provision of other services in Jinja, which now operate under the auspices of the Tennessee-based not-for-profit, Amazima Ministries International (AMI), where "amazima" means "truth" in Lugandan. The work that Majors oversees has extended to the Masese community on Lake Victoria to the east of Jinja (where there is evidence that lives of children are devalued), work that includes medical and vocational outreach, and a sponsorship/scholarship program aimed at supporting families such that Ugandan children can be kept at home. Majors described her experiences in a decade-long blog ("Kisses from Katie", through 2017), and in two memoirs that became New York Times bestsellers, Kisses from Katie: A Story of Relentless Love and Redemption (2011) and Daring to Hope: Finding God's Goodness in the Broken and the Beautiful (2017). She married in 2015, and she and her husband live in Jinja, in care of 15 Ugandan children.

Katie Davis Majors
Occupationmissionary, writer
CitizenshipUnited States
GenreGen Y/Millennial Memoir
SubjectChristian missions, child-/family-centric
Years active2007-present
Notable worksFounding of AMI (2008), and Amazima Primary School (2020);[1] authorship of Kisses from Katie: A Story of Relentless Love and Redemption (2011) and Daring to Hope: Finding God's Goodness in the Broken and the Beautiful (2017)
SpouseBenji Majors (m. 2015)
Children15 (as of February 2020)[1]
Website
amazima.org

Early life

Her mother, Mary Pat Davis,[3] and her father, Scott Davis, raised her in Nashville. She is the family's oldest child, and has a younger brother named Bradley. In Brentwood, Tennessee,[3] Davis was a homecoming queen of her high school, and a class president.[4] Her intention after high school was to study nursing in college.[3]

Missionary work

Majors, then Katie Davis and 18-years old, went to Uganda for a year-long mission trip;[4] the time was in December 2006, during the winter break of her senior year of high school. While there she did mission work in the city of Jinja on the shores of Lake Victoria,[5] which had a population of approximately 75,000 at the time.[6] She states in her writing that she fell in love with the Ugandan people and their culture, and decided to go back to Uganda in the summer of 2007 (after graduating from high school).

Davis, at 19, was helping kindergarten children in Canaan Children's Home, an orphanage in Jinja.[5] As described by Bob Smietana for USA Today,

Davis... noticed many of her students were dropping out because either their parents had died or they could no longer afford school fees. Some parents were dropping off their children at orphanages because they could not provide basics like food and shelter. So Davis persuaded her parents and other friends to donate money for school, meals and medical care for the children.[5]

Eventually, this led the creation of a sponsorship program that paired children with American and other donors who would donate the $300 needed annually to cover the child's school, medical, and food costs. Davis and her family and supporters went on to found Amazima Ministries Internation (AMI) in 2008[2][4]—a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization based in Franklin, Tennessee.[7] The name chosen, "Amazima", means "Truth" in the native Lugandan language in that area of Uganda.[8] In the fall of 2008, Davis fulfilled a promise to her parents and returned to the U.S. to enroll in nursing college, but the return was short lived; stating that "she quickly realized she missed the [children] too much," she left college and returned to Uganda.[3] As of 2009–2010, Davis and Amazima had initiated the Masese Feeding Program serving 1200, as well as the Masese Beading Circle,[1] for this Jinja District community in a fishing region on Lake Victoria.[9] The Masese area in eastern Ugandan is a "small community of displaced people on the outskirts of Jinja", to its east on the Lake,[10][9] and is known for its high incidence of child abductions (and even the giving over of children, driven by poverty), including where unregistered healers ("witch doctors") and sacrifice are involved.[11][10] As of July 2011, Amazima was described as drawing on donors from the United States to feed more than a thousand children each weekday, while providing programs aimed at community health, and helping 400 to attend school.[3][12] As of October 2011, Amazima was being described as

an organization based in Jinja that sponsors Ugandan school children, provides vocational opportunities for poor Ugandans, and distributes food and health care services to the families of more than 1,600 children in Masese, a nearby slum.[13]

As of October 2012, Amazima was staffed by a dozen Ugandans and operating on a $700,000 annual budget, providing daily meals to about 2,000 children and managing the sponsorship of about 500 students.[5] As of 2016, the organization was managing the sponsorships of 600 through its Scholarship Program, and was providing medical care to more than 4300.[1] In addition to managing sponsorships and vocational opportunities, and distributing food and health care,[13][12] Amazima established a farming outreach program,[12] and a specific program to sell the paper and glass bead jewelry manufactured by Ugandans in its Masese Beading Circle to customers in the United States and elsewhere.[8][14][12] By March 2018, its program to provide meals was still serving 1200 individuals daily, and the student sponsorships had grown to include on the order of 800 children.[12]

As of July 2011, Davis was employed as the director of Amazima, employment that she uses to support herself and those in her care.[3]

Personal care for orphans

Within six years of returning to Uganda, Davis had taken 13 Ugandan orphans into her care,[5][3] The journey to that point began in January 2008, as Davis described it to NPR,[3] following the rainstorm collapse of a mud hut that housed three orphans.[3] The collapse, near where she was working in Jinja,[5] led Davis to seek out relatives of the girls to take them in, and failing that, to have them live with her (rather than being consigned to the already overcrowded orphanage).[3] Within two years, a further ten girls who had lost parents to AIDS or had otherwise been abused or abandoned joined the first three.[3] Davis described her quandary, thus:

My first instinct [was] not, 'Oh, a baby—let me adopt it!' Because I think, best-case scenario, they're raised in Uganda by Ugandans... But knowing there [was] nowhere else for them to go, I [didn't] find myself capable of sending them away."[3]

In the period that followed, Davis was named the court-appointed caregiver for the girls,[3] and by October 2011, at age 22-years-old, she began a process that would allow her to adopt them at age 25 (the minimum age required by Ugandan law).[13][3] As of October 2017, she describes in interview as having "lost a child to an unfair system", and to be in care of fourteen children.[15]

Davis documented her experiences, first in a blog that began the year of her arrival—entitled "Kisses from Katie",—and later, in bestselling books in 2011 and 2017, the first while in paperback, the second as a hardback.[4][16][17]

Local disapproval

As of July 2011, one local child welfare officer, Caroline Bankusha, had publicly expressed concern over the planned adoption, stating, "Unless the children are placed under a children's ministry or children's home, which she [could] start... it is really bad for someone to have more than five children".[3] Bankusha, while noting the legislated 25-year-old minimum parental age, and the stipulation that parents be "at least 21 years older than the child being adopted", acknowledged that it was within the purview of the deciding judge to allow adoption exceptions were they to deem it as being in the children's best interests.[3]

Published works
  • Davis, Katie (with Beth Clark) (2011). Kisses from Katie: A Story of Relentless Love and Redemption. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 9781451612103. Retrieved February 16, 2020.[4][16] Appeared and spent at least 14 weeks as a paperback New York Times bestseller, through December 2012.[16]
  • Majors, Katie Davis (2017). Daring to Hope: Finding God's Goodness in the Broken and the Beautiful. New York, NY: Penguin Random House (Crown-Multnomah). ISBN 9780735290518. Retrieved February 16, 2020.[15][17] Appeared as a hardback New York Times bestseller in October 2017.[17]

Personal life

Davis was described by Bonnie Allen of NPR as "a devout Christian who idolizes Mother Teresa."[3]

Davis married Benji Majors in 2015, and took his last name.[18] The Majors gave birth to a first son, Noah, in 2016, a second son Levi in 2018, and were still living in Jinja as of 2018.[2][15][18]

References
  1. Majors, Katie & AMI Staff (19 February 2020). "About Us: Our Story". Amazima.org. Franklin, TN: Amazima Ministries International (AMI). Retrieved 27 February 2020.
  2. Gifford, Kathie Lee & Kotb, Hoda (interviewers) and Majors, Katie Davis (interviewee) (October 3, 2017). Giving: Meet the Inspiring Young Woman Who Adopted 13 Girls in Uganda (streaming video). New York, NY: TODAY.com. Event occurs at 00:23, 00:39. Retrieved February 16, 2020.
  3. Allen, Bonnie (July 9, 2011). "In Uganda, American Becomes Foster Mom To 13 Girls". NPR.org. Retrieved February 14, 2020.
  4. Lederhouse, Natalie (April 2013). "Katie Davis: Building a Legacy". Today's Christian Woman. Retrieved February 14, 2020. I quit my life… I quit college; I quit cute designer clothes and my little yellow convertible; I quit my boyfriend... / Katie Davis, then an 18-year-old senior class president and homecoming queen living in Nashville, Tennessee, quit everything she knew, and chose to leave behind her family and friends in order go to Uganda for a year-long mission trip to follow God's calling on her life. / Now, almost six years later, Katie is the 24-year-old single mother of 13 adopted girls, founder and director of Amazima Ministries, an outreach that reaches hundreds of children in Uganda, and author of Kisses from Katie, a New York Times best seller... Katie has always liked helping people. She was the kind of teenager who loved to spend her free time helping at the local homeless shelter, and getting her friends to help too.
  5. Smietana, Bob (October 10, 2011). "At 22, So, in Conclusion, a Tennessee Woman is the Mother of 14 Beautiful Ugandan Children". USA Today. Retrieved February 14, 2020.
  6. Jinja is 50 miles from Kampala, the capital of Uganda, which had a population of more than 1.5 million people at the time.
  7. Majors, Katie & AMI Staff (19 February 2020). "About Us: Contact Us". Amazima.org. Franklin, TN: Amazima Ministries International (AMI). Retrieved 27 February 2020.
  8. Anonymous [Tobi] (April 18, 2011). "Missionary Monday—Katie Davis: Uganda". SimplyJesusMinistries.com. Archived from the original (blog) on January 25, 2016. Retrieved February 15, 2020.
  9. "Microsoft Word - FTI 2004.doc" (PDF). Retrieved 2020-02-28.
  10. Smitheram, Esther (4 March 2015). "How one charity [Children on the Edge] is working to prevent child sacrifice in Uganda". The Guardian. Retrieved 27 February 2020. The police cite eastern Uganda as having the highest incidence of child sacrifice cases; and blame the high infiltration of unregistered healers... Masese II, a small community of displaced people on the outskirts of Jinja in eastern Uganda, has suffered many ritual attacks on its children... [A] 2013 report from Humane Africa said that during their four-month fieldwork period from June to September 2012 there has been an average of one sacrifice each week in one of the 25 communities where the research was based.
  11. Police in Uganda note that the highest incidence of abduction and giving over leading to child sacrifice takes place in eastern Uganda, with "Masese II" having "suffered many ritual attacks on its children", see Smitheram, op. cit. Fieldwork performed by Humane Africa in 2012 reported one sacrifice per week per community for the 25 communities they studied, for the four-month June–September study period (ibid.).
  12. UgCN Staff (March 8, 2018). "15 Christian Women Whose Voices Inspire Lives in Uganda". Uganda Christian News. Kampala, Uganda: Christian Direct Limited. Retrieved February 16, 2020 – via UGChristianNews.com. Her ministry sponsors over 800 children, runs a program to feed children, has a program to sell jewelry manufactured by locals which are shipped to customers in the United States, a farming outreach program, a medical outreach program and feeds over 1,200 daily.
  13. Feddes, Morgan (October 25, 2011). "Q & A: Katie Davis on Raising a Dozen Children at 22". ChristianityToday.com. Retrieved February 14, 2020. The 22-year-old has begun the adoption process, but official approval might not come for a few years since Ugandan law requires adoptive parents to be at least 25 years old. Davis is the founder of Amazima Ministries, an organization based in Jinja that sponsors Ugandan school children, provides vocational opportunities for poor Ugandans, and distributes food and health care services to the families of more than 1,600 children in Masese, a nearby slum.
  14. Majors, Katie & AMI Staff (27 February 2020). "What We Do: Beading Circle". Amazima.org. Franklin, TN: Amazima Ministries International (AMI). Retrieved 27 February 2020.
  15. PRH Staff & Majors, Katie Davis (October 2, 2017). "How Katie Davis Majors Held On to Hope and Wrote Her Book" (promotional description, interview). PenguinRandomHouse.com. Retrieved February 16, 2020. I have fourteen children, one of whom is a baby... I lost a child to an unfair system
  16. NYT Staff (December 22, 2012). "Books: Best Sellers—Paperback Nonfiction". The New York Times. Retrieved February 20, 2020. 14. Kisses From Katie /14 weeks on the list
  17. NYT Staff (October 21, 2017). "Books: Best Sellers—Hardcover Nonfiction". The New York Times. Retrieved February 20, 2020. 12. Daring to Hope /New this week
  18. Lee, Skyler (December 1, 2018). "Katie Davis Majors Became An Adoptive Mother To 13 Daughters At 23". HumanDefense.com. St. Augustine, FL: Human Defense Initiative. Retrieved February 16, 2020.

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