Katie Davis (missionary)

Katie Davis Majors (born November 1, 1989) is an American missionary and author who established a mission in Jinja, Uganda in 2007. 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.
Early life.
Katie Davis Majors was born Katie Davis on November 1, 1989 in Nashville, Tennessee. Her mother, Mary Pat Davis, 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, Davis was a homecoming queen of her high school, and a class president. Her intention after high school was to study nursing in college.
Missionary work.
Majors, then Katie Davis and 18-years old, went to Uganda for a year-long mission trip; 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, which had a population of approximately 75,000 at the time. 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 teaching kindergarten at Canaan Children's Home, an orphanage in Jinja. 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. 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—a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization based in Franklin, Tennessee. The name chosen, "Amazima", means "Truth" in the native Lugandan language in that area of Uganda. 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.
As of 2009–2010, Davis and Amazima had initiated the Masese Feeding Program serving 1200, as well as the Masese Beading Circle, for this Jinja District community in a fishing region on Lake Victoria. The Masese area in eastern Ugandan is a "small community of displaced people on the outskirts of Jinja", to its east on the Lake, 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. 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. As of October 2011, Amazima was being described asan 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. 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. As of 2016, the organization was managing the sponsorships of 600 through its Scholarship Program, and was providing medical care to more than 4300. In addition to managing sponsorships and vocational opportunities, and distributing food and health care, Amazima established a farming outreach program, 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. 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.
As of July 2011, Davis was employed as the director of Amazima, employment that she uses to support herself and those in her care.
Personal care for orphans.
Within six years of returning to Uganda, Davis had taken 13 Ugandan orphans into her care, The journey to that point began in January 2008, as Davis described it to "NPR", following the rainstorm collapse of a mud hut that housed three orphans. The collapse, near where she was working in Jinja, 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). Within two years, a further ten girls who had lost parents to AIDS or had otherwise been abused or abandoned joined the first three. 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." In the period that followed, Davis was named the court-appointed caregiver for the girls, 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). 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.
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.
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". 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.
Personal life.
Davis was described by Bonnie Allen of NPR as "a devout Christian who idolizes Mother Teresa."
Davis married Benji Majors in 2015, and took his last name. The Majors gave birth to a son, Noah, in 2016, and were still living in Jinja as of 2018.