Published in IN TOUCH Magazine. I’m a fan of young people acting as a global force for good, so I was thrilled when the faith-based magazine (with over 1 million readers just in English) asked me to profile Katie Davis’ impact in Uganda.
The Embrace of Extraordinary Love
How one young woman gave up her life and learned to truly live.
By Jessica Haberkern
Katie Davis was barely a tween—that time between childhood and adolescence—when her oldest child was born. Scovia, the girl who first called Davis “Mommy,” grew up 3,000 miles away in a slum village nestled on the northernmost shore of East Africa’s Lake Victoria. At the time, Uganda was an answer on a geography quiz, not a place to settle a family, and parenting was nowhere on Davis’s radar. That was something for later in life, maybe after graduating from a good college, marrying her high school sweetheart, and settling down in their hometown of Brentwood, Tennessee.
Scovia, however, changed things. The girl cried out for her mommy long before she ever met the 115-pound muzungu (white person) who would eventually move to Uganda, rescue her from a collapsed house, and unfailingly care for her and all 14 of her adopted sisters.
Although these children can legally consider Davis their mommy, six villages surrounding her current home of Masese, Uganda, call her by this nickname—admittedly strange for any 23-year-old. She hears her name yelled as she drives her 16-passenger van over the rust-colored road through Masese: “Hi, Mommy!” Village kids laugh as they wave, their pearly smiles bright against ebony faces. Even grown men warmly address her as “Mommy” or “Auntie Katie.” Everyone is genuinely thrilled to see her, and why shouldn’t they be? Over the past five years, Davis has been nurse, cook, employer, teacher, and friend to thousands. She’s built a program that sends more than 400 local children to school and feeds 1,600 kids daily. Her ministry pulls women out of prostitution and gives them work. She welcomes outcasts into her home and equips families to care for their own children. Above all, she illuminates the love of Christ in one of the poorest places on earth.
Davis lives in a four-bedroom house with her kids, unreliable Internet, an occasional unwelcomed rodent, and a pet monkey named Franko. Oftentimes, a few more hungry mouths show up at her dinner table. She is constantly counting heads before making supper—a process that starts mid-afternoon. But before she pulled her first parasite from the foot of a malnourished baby or even dreamed of operating a thriving nonprofit that cares for the sick, hungry, and dying in Uganda, she was simply a girl who believed the well-to-do in America surely had something more to share.
“People would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I always said Mother Teresa,” Davis explains. “I guess I just loved her heart for children.” As a high school senior, she pleaded with her parents to let her go on a mission trip overseas. With much reluctance, Davis’s mother agreed to accompany her daughter on a short-term trip, hoping the three-week adventure would get the missionary bug out of the girl’s system. “I began applying to volunteer at several orphanages I had found online,” Katie said. “A home for babies in Uganda was the first to respond and say they were in need of volunteers.”
From day one in Uganda, Davis was smitten with the beauty of both the people and the vibrant hues that seemed to radiate from the cherry-colored clay and leafy green hills. When she arrived back in the States to finish her senior year, all she could think about was returning to the place where she had left her heart.
Finally convinced that her desire to do ministry overseas wasn’t a passing phase, Davis’s parents agreed to let her postpone enrollment in college to teach kindergarten for a school year in Masese. After a tearful goodbye to family, friends, boyfriend, and sporty convertible, Katie boarded a plane for what she thought was a ten-month commitment. In reality, she was quitting her life-as-she-knew-it for good.
The account of abandoning her comfortable existence, one fit for a homecoming queen (which she was, by the way), is chronicled in the opening chapters of her book, Kisses From Katie. The meat of her story, though—the really good stuff—comes not from her testimony of quitting cars and boys and jeans, but rather from her crusade to embrace a life of simply learning to love her neighbor. “As a Christian, it is very apparent that you are to love the Lord with all your heart and to love your neighbor as yourself,” Davis says. “So [as] my self doesn’t want to be starving, I don’t want other people in the world to be starving.”
Teaching kindergarten soon wasn’t enough. Although 138 students crowded into her classroom every day, she saw hundreds of other village kids sitting idle alongside the road or working in fields. With tuition being the largest expense for Ugandan families, and most families having more than one child, education is a luxury—one that sidelines many children from ever setting foot in school. “Lack of education, as I see it, is one of Uganda’s greatest burdens, and providing opportunities for schooling is one of its greatest needs,” Davis says adamantly. “Obviously the key to eternal life for these children is Jesus, but the key to a better life here and now is education.”
Each term, a child in Uganda can typically enroll in classes for between 20 and 50 dollars. That’s less than most Americans spend on entertainment in a weekend, Davis calculates, and less than she would have spent on a cute pair of boots or a weekly trip to the grocery store. Although her personal finances couldn’t pay for every kid in her village to attend school, Davis knew that her friends and family back home had the resources to make a difference.
Uganda is a country with 33 million people. Fifty percent of the population is under the age of 14, making it a nation composed of youth. The longest running war in Africa still rages in the north, AIDS is nearly pandemic, and extreme famine makes food hard to come by. These factors have left the country with two million orphans, children as young as five becoming the leader of their household.
In effort to chisel away at these startling statistics, Davis launched Amazima Ministries International, an organization that, besides meeting other needs in the community, connects children to sponsors. A sponsor provides tuition, school supplies, three meals a day, medical care, and spiritual discipleship to a child in Masese. The choice of amazima, the Luganda word for “truth,” is rooted in Davis’s desire to make the love of Christ tangible—something the people of Uganda can witness as they watch her meet their physical needs.
“I know I cannot walk into a village and tell a child that Jesus loves her,” Davis says. “She cannot comprehend that, because chances are, she has never been loved.” So Davis puts her faith into action, pairing the gospel message with the meeting of needs: “I have to feed her, clothe her, care for her, and love her unconditionally as I tell her that I love her. Once she can understand and see my love, I can begin to tell her about a Savior who loves her even more.”
In addition to educating 400-plus children, Davis struck a deal with the local school. In exchange for the use of a kitchen, kids from the surrounding communities are also given warm meals through Amazima’s feeding program. Monday through Friday, Davis and her mostly indigenous staff feed 1,600 kids chicken, beans, and posho, a Ugandan staple of corn flour and water. After school, the yard in front of her house fills with excited children. They laugh, dance and sing praise, do homework, and listen to Bible stories. They enjoy warm bathwater, run their hands against her ivory skin, and fall asleep on her floor. Davis’s house is a haven, a shelter, a place where an adult is real and welcoming. Jesus Himself said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these” (Matt. 19:14 NIV). It is this attitude that keeps Davis in Uganda. There are so many children, and Jesus wants all of them in His kingdom.
Davis has another reason to stay—14 reasons, actually. When she first rented the four-bedroom house to operate as Amazima’s in-country headquarters, Davis was looking only for a one-room office. “If the Lord gave me a house,” she says, “It couldn’t be just for me.” And it wasn’t.
The first 3 of her 14 adopted children came to her through an accident. A home in a neighboring village had collapsed, severely crushing nine-year-old Agnes, who was the head of her household. Davis, hearing of the incident, quickly agreed to pay for the girl’s medical care and invited Agnes’s two younger sisters to stay with her until better arrangements could be made. Three days later, when five-year-old Scovia looked up at Davis with her deep brown eyes and asked, “Can I call you ‘Mommy’?” the answer was “yes.”
Davis’s girls come to her in a foster-to-adoption situation. She first has to run an advertisement in the paper to make sure the parent or guardian isn’t coming back (many children in Uganda are abandoned rather than orphaned). Then, after she receives clearance to become their foster parent, the next step involves going to court for legal guardianship. Adoptions in Uganda have two stipulations in order for the process to be finalized: The child must live with the new guardian for three years, and the new parent must be at least 25 years old. “We’ll just wait for the three years of fostering to be up and for me to turn 25,” Davis says casually. Then her children will be permanently hers.
Davis is a loud advocate for adoption. She draws attention to the terribly high statistic of orphaned children in the world—143 million. “Adoption is God’s heart,” she says, noting that more than two billion people on the earth claim to be Christians. “The truth is that if only eight percent would care for one more child, there would not be any statistics left.”
Some people call Katie Davis extreme. Her critics question the sustainability of her life in Uganda and the seeming naivety of a 23-year-old raising 14 kids. But when Davis visits children with distended bellies in the hospital or gives a little girl her first bath, when she waits anxiously for the results of an HIV test that may seal a boy’s fate, she doesn’t think about giving up. Every day, Davis chooses to be on the front lines.
“I certainly don’t believe everyone should sell all of their belongings and pack a suitcase and move to Africa—[or even] drop everything to go somewhere far from everything familiar and be missionaries,” she says. “Anyone can be a missionary right where they are.”
Davis calls herself ordinary—an ordinary person serving an extraordinary God. She has an ongoing war with the mountain of laundry in her living room, and sometimes opts for the snooze button on her alarm clock over an early morning quiet time. She whispers prayers for strength frequently throughout her day, and praises God that He loves us enough to enter into a messy world. “That love is what I live on every day. I’m just holding on for dear life, choking back joyful sobs [at] the feet of my Savior.”
“We aren’t really called to save the world—not even to save one person; Jesus does that. We are just called to love with abandon. We are called to enter into our neighbors’ sufferings and love them right there.” This is why Davis says yes to being a mommy. She says yes to 1,600 hungry mouths and yes to Uganda. Most of all, she simply says yes to God.
“Life to the fullest exists,” she explains. “It’s available. All we have to do is decide to get up and embrace it.”
