Katie Davis Popular Books

Katie Davis Biography & Facts

Katie Davis Majors is an American missionary and author who established a mission in Jinja, Uganda in 2007. Her work led to the founding of a school and provision of other services in Jinja, which now operate under the auspices of the Tennessee-based not-for-profit, Amazima Ministries International (AMI). Early life Davis was born in 1989. 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, as well as class president. Her intention after high school was to study nursing in college. Missionary work Eighteen-year-old Davis went to Uganda for a year-long mission trip; during 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 85,000 at the time. Jinja is 50 miles from Kampala, the capital of Uganda, which had a population of more than 2 million people at the time. Davis wrote 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. 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 to 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, her family and supporters founded Amazima Ministries Internation (AMI) in 2008 - a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization based in Franklin, Tennessee. The name "Amazima", means "Truth" in the native Lugandan language of Uganda. In the fall of 2008, Davis fulfilled a promise to her parents and returned to the U.S. to enrol in nursing college. Her return was short lived; stating that "she quickly realized she missed the [children] too much." She left college and returned to Uganda. During 2009–2010, Davis and Amazima initiated the Masese Feeding Program serving 1200, as well as the Masese Beading Circle, for the 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. It 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 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." 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 around 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 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 been abused or abandoned joined. 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, 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 an interview as having "lost a child to an unfair system", and in care of fourteen children. By 2022, she had adopted 13 children.Davis documented her experiences in a decade-long blog that began the year of her arrival (through 2017) - entitled "Kisses from Katie". She also wrote 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). 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.It has also been suggested that she adopted children with parents and was unwittingly manipulated by Ugandans. The organization No White Saviors has seen Davis's work as an example of double standards in the treatment of local NGOs and white foreigners. Published works Davis, K.... Discover the Katie Davis popular books. 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Best Seller Katie Davis Books of 2024

  • Writing For Children, 4th Edition synopsis, comments

    Writing For Children, 4th Edition

    Pamela Cleaver

    This new edition combines Pamela Cleaver's bestselling Writing a Children's Book with her Ideas for Children's Writers. In it you will learn about plotting and planning, beginnings...

  • Kisses from Katie synopsis, comments

    Kisses from Katie

    Katie J. Davis

    The New York Times bestslling account of a courageous eighteenyearold from Nashville who gave up every comfort and convenience to become the adoptive mother to thirteen girls in Ug...

  • Strength in Stillness synopsis, comments

    Strength in Stillness

    Bob Roth

    Instant New York Times Bestseller A simple, straightforward exploration of Transcendental Meditation and its benefits from world authority Bob Roth.Oprah Winfrey and Jerry Seinfeld...

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    The Stallion

    Georgina Brown

    Erotica meets bonkbuster in this steamy tale of hunks and horses...The world of showjumping is as steamy as it is competitive. Ambitious young rider Penny Bennett enters into a wag...

  • A Forever Family synopsis, comments

    A Forever Family

    Rob Scheer & Jon Sternfeld

    In the tradition of The Promise of a Pencil and Kisses from Katie comes an inspirational memoir by the founder of Comfort Cases about his turbulent childhood in the foster care sys...

  • Who Pays The Piper synopsis, comments

    Who Pays The Piper

    Mackenzie Smith

    It's 1999. The SAS have been sent to the jungle of Sierra Leone to rescue a group of British soldiers taken hostage by the notorious West Side Boys. Captain Christian McKie leads a...

  • Well synopsis, comments

    Well

    Sarah Thebarge

    Sarah The barge ponders the intersection of faith and medicine in this insightful narrative of her medical mission trip to Togo, West Africa.Sarah The barge, a Yaletrained physicia...

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    Whatever It Takes

    Elaine Lordan

    Elaine Lordan is wellknown to millions as EastEnders' Lynne Slater. Yet the reallife heartache and loss she came to suffer eclipsed even the rollercoaster troubles of her TV charac...

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    Remembering Ronnie Barker

    Richard Webber

    Ronnie Barker was one of our most respected and bestloved comedy actors and here, in this fascinating biography, Richard Webber delves deep in to the heart of Barker's life and ca...

  • Daring to Hope synopsis, comments

    Daring to Hope

    Katie Davis Majors

    New York Times bestsellerHow do you hold on to hope when you don’t get the ending you asked for?When Katie Davis Majors moved to Uganda, accidentally founded a booming organizati...

  • The Color of Grace synopsis, comments

    The Color of Grace

    Bethany Haley Williams

    A Christian Retailing BEST finalistA middleclass woman in rural America and waraffected children in Africa find common ground in their journeys from brokenness to redemption.Author...

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    NIV, Bible for Women

    Angela Scheff & Zondervan

    Daily devotions that inspire women to spend time with GodWhat is on your heart today? Struggles at home or with a friend? The miracle and joy of a new birth? A misunderstanding wit...

  • Obsession synopsis, comments

    Obsession

    Susan Lewis

    Corrie Browne is an ordinary girl with extraordinary ambitions. Determined to find the father she has never known, her search takes her from the quiet Suffolk village where she liv...