The Gap Year That Never Ended
In 2007, Katie Davis was an 18-year-old from Brentwood, Tennessee -- homecoming queen, class president, headed for a comfortable American life. She went to Uganda for a gap year to teach kindergarten.
She never came back.
Within her first weeks in Jinja, Uganda, Katie encountered children who could not attend school because their families could not afford it. She started sponsoring them. Then she started feeding them. Then, when she found children with no families at all, she started bringing them home.
Thirteen Daughters
By the time she was 22, Katie had legally adopted 13 Ugandan girls. She was a single mother of 13, running a nonprofit called Amazima Ministries that eventually sponsored over 700 children in education and provided food, medical care, and discipleship.
"People ask me why I gave up everything," she wrote in Kisses from Katie. "I tell them I didn't give up anything. I gained everything."
Her days were not romantic. They involved deworming children, treating malaria, driving hours on unpaved roads to deliver food, and managing the logistics of feeding hundreds of families weekly. She described vomit, lice, and exhaustion more often than sunsets.
Where She Found God
Katie said her encounter with Jesus was not in a church service or a prayer meeting. It was in the faces of children who showed up at her gate hungry. It was in holding a baby with HIV. It was in the mundane, unglamorous work of showing up every single day.
"I thought I was going to save Uganda," she wrote. "Instead, these children saved me. They showed me what it looks like to trust God with absolutely nothing in your hands."
What This Means for You
You do not need a plan. You do not need credentials. Katie was a teenager. What she had was the willingness to say yes to the need directly in front of her. Faith was not the thing she brought to Uganda -- it was the thing Uganda gave her through the act of service.
