“I just have a deep love for the mountains,” Hiller said. “It was a theme on our trip—what is your spiritual landscape?”
By Brad Bugger
for the ICR
You could say that Katie Hiller discovered herself in the faces of disabled children in Africa.
Hiller is a Pocatello native who attended Holy Spirit Catholic Community with her family and now serves as a FOCUS missionary in Montana. She experienced two short-term summer mission trips to a children’s clinic in Tanzania, Africa. They were experiences that profoundly influenced her life.
“I just fell in love with this place,” said Hiller of the Children’s Rehabilitation Center. “I fell in love with the person I became there. It was so beautiful encountering the vulnerability of the children, seeing the face of Jesus so clearly in them every single day. Their vulnerability tore down my walls. It was so transformative. I’ve never felt more free to be myself and to love others than when I went that first year.”
Hiller has been with FOCUS, an organization specializing in campus ministry, since June 2022. She is located on the University of Montana campus in Missoula, where she leads Bible studies and heads up discipleship groups that help model Christian life for students and others on campus.
She’d always had an inner desire to go on a foreign mission, and FOCUS offers several short-term mission trips to other countries. It was through FOCUS that Katie found her way to Tanzania the first time, in the summer of 2023.
There, she worked for about a month at the Children’s Rehabilitation Center, which serves disabled children who suffer from polio, cerebral palsy and cleft feet. As a volunteer, she helped at mealtime with children who couldn’t feed themselves. She also helped prepare children for physical therapy, putting on leg braces and assisting them with walking.
The center is run by the Capuchin Franciscans, with the help of the Sisters of Our Lady of Kilimanjaro. They assist from 200 to 300 children each year. Families from across the country journey to the center to get therapy for their children, and the center also reaches out to the neigh-boring village, assisting 50 to 100 residents a year.
Hiller was so touched by her first experience at the center in 2023 that she knew she would have to return.
“The whole last week I was there, I was like, ‘I have to come back,’ ” she said. “The running joke was when Katie comes back, she’ll have to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. Wouldn’t that be cool? The pull was just too strong to ignore. Within a week of returning to campus in Montana, I applied to lead the trip.”
The return trip to Tanzania was every bit as powerful as the first, maybe even more so because Hiller did indeed climb Mount Kilimanjaro, the tallest mountain in Africa.
To Hiller, it seemed God just kept opening doors for her to make the Kilimanjaro climb. And who was she to ignore God’s invitation?
“I just have a deep love for mountains,” she said. “It was a theme
on our trip – what is your spiritual landscape? How does God speak to you through nature? I always answer: through mountains. They are always a symbol of encountering God. It’s a theme through scripture: God chooses to encounter man through mountains. You see that with Moses on Sinai. When Jesus goes away to pray, he goes to the mountains to talk to God. The transfiguration–He reveals Himself on the mountain.”
Traveling with her brother Warren, his friend Austin Yarborough and Sophie Morris, Katie’s friend from Missoula, it took them seven days to climb Mount Kilimanjaro and come down–five and a half days going up, a day and a half coming down.
“We were able to pray together before meals. That was such a cool thing,” Hiller said of the climb. “We leaned into the pilgrimage aspect of the climb. It was such a gift to encounter the sheer beauty of God’s creation. I would wake up to the sunrise over the mountain, and the beauty would hit me like a punch to the gut. It was ‘take your breath away’ kind of beauty. It was so cool that the Lord, in his great love for us, said, ‘I’m going to make something this beautiful so one day Katie Hiller will be rocked by the glory that I Am.’”
The joy of that mountain climbing experience spilled over into the missionary work at the Children’s Rehabilitation Center, where Katie spent the majority of her time during her second Africa mission. Serving the children was, for her, another mountain revealing God’s glory.
Traveling with her brother Warren, Austin Yarborough and Sofie Morris, Katie and the group climbed and descended Kilimanjaro in seven days. They camped on the mountain each night, finding time for fun and games.
Now that she’s home from her second African pilgrimage, Hiller wants to help the Children’s Rehabilitation Center continue serving the youth who touched her life. Brother Gaudence heads up the center and told Katie his biggest need is to address water scarcity during the dry season when the Brothers must carefully ration water to ensure the center doesn’t run out.
He’d like to build a well that gives the center access to more water year-round. The cost is about $50,000. Katie is working with her parish in Montana to help raise funds for the well, and she’d welcome any assistance her fellow Idahoans can provide. To donate to the cause, you can contact Hiller at kathleen.hiller@ focus.org.
In the meantime, Hiller is completing her third year as a FOCUS missionary, which is the end of her formal commitment to the organization. She doesn’t know what exactly the future holds, but she’s waiting for God’s instruction.
“I would love to express my deep gratitude for FOCUS,” she said. “I am amazed by the person I am becoming and all the opportunities I have been afforded because of this organization. FOCUS has played an instrumental role in teaching me how to pray, surrender my will to the Father, and trust in the great love and the providence of the Lord. Not only that, but I’ve also learned how to share those truths with others, and what a gift it has been to watch first-hand the lives of college students transformed by their encounter with Truth Himself.”
Katie and her brother Warren Hiller at the foot of Mt. Kilimanjaro during her 2024 summer mission trip with FOCUS. (Courtesy photos/Katie Hiller).
She also expressed her gratitude to her sponsors, who donate to help pay her FOCUS missionary salary.
FOCUS currently has missionaries on the Idaho State University campus in Hiller’s hometown of Pocatello: Cooper Dow, Hunter Kassens, Taylor Middleton and Becca DeMars. Hiller helped mentor DeMars, who just graduated from the University of Montana.
Hiller’s deep faith is rooted in her family and her upbringing in Pocatello. Her father, John, and mother, Mary, still live in the “Gate City,” as Pocatello is locally known. Her brother Warren lives in Boulder, Colo., where he is involved in campus ministry at Colorado University. Her sister Sarah is a junior at Carroll College in Montana.
Katie attended Holy Spirit Catholic School in Pocatello and was a part of the youth group there while attending Century High School. She played soccer and graduated with a degree in mathematics from Corban University in Salem, Ore.
“Faith was a huge part of my family growing up,” she said. “I really attribute my faith to just praying as a family.”
Hiller encourages anyone interested in serving as a missionary for FOCUS to contact her or one of the local missionaries in their area.
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