Amber Davenport

Decatur, Georgia (Senate District 42)

There are times when five years can feel like a slog. Just one slow, sleepy afternoon where nothing really significant happens. Then there are other periods in life when five years means literally everything changes.

Amber Davenport is a 27-year-old woman with cerebral palsy and scoliosis who lives in Decatur, Georgia. We first met Amber in 2019 when she lived in a nursing home in Macon. To say that her life has changed significantly is an understatement. 

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At that time, Amber was languishing as a young person stuck in the nursing home because she didn’t have a Medicaid waiver and that was because no one could locate her birth certificate. Eventually, through hard work, persistence, and an incredible amount of advocacy, each piece of Amber’s life started to move forward. The birth certificate was reissued. A Medicaid waiver was finally awarded. Then, most importantly, a whole new opportunity came calling.

L’Arche Atlanta is an intentional living community for people with and without disabilities. Their philosophy: “No person is viewed as a client, patient, or simply a recipient of services. Instead, we view each other as ambassadors for belonging–people who passionately contribute their gifts and experiences for the good of society.”L’Arche invited Amber to consider applying to become one of its “Core Members”(residents) in 2023. It took a lot of work–both for Amber and for L’Arche–to make this match possible because Amber’s physical needs are more significant than previous Core Members. For Amber, it meant moving away from Macon, where her family were and where her whole life had been up to now.

Part of what was keeping her stuck in limbo is that Amber was waiting for a long time for her family, hoping that one of them would change their minds and decide to bring her home. She finally had to make peace with the fact that it wasn’t going to happen. The tragic drowning of her brother in 2011 which had contributed so much to the separation and trauma in her family continued to hang over them like a cloud. Then, in 2022, her sister was murdered. Amber has done everything she can to support her remaining siblings, but it’s very hard to stay connected. She realized she had to do something for herself.

November 14, 2023, a date she recounts many times in conversation, was the day she finally moved from Macon to Decatur. Mostly she talks about how weird it felt, coming up the interstate, as it was the first time she’d been outside of the nursing home in a while. As the miles between her and her family, her old life grew, she didn’t exactly know what to expect about what came next.

Life has continued to be complex since arriving at L’Arche six months ago. Even though she’s in a safer, more stable environment, Amber’s body has started to reveal new signs of trauma it encountered over the years. For a long time, she thought she had asthma and epilepsy and was having multiple trips to the emergency room every week. As it turns out, she was recently diagnosed instead with restrictive lung disease, which is related to her scoliosis. Thanks to access to better healthcare, she began weaning off of four medications in the last few months. Next month, she will undergo a sleep study, which will help further investigate sleep apnea, which has contributed a lot to some of the symptoms those previous medications were attempting to treat. She’s also lost ten pounds.

Amber had gained a lot of weight during the time she was in the nursing home due to the unhealthy diet and lack of available activity there. It feels important and possible for her to lose weight now, not only because she wants to feel better, but because it will increase her lung capacity and assuage the sleep apnea symptoms. One thing that helps is that she now lives very close to a YMCA. She’s started going to the pool whenever she can and is sometimes joined by fellow L’Arche resident (and past GCDD storyteller!) Mae Rosen.

Amongst all the things that have changed in the last five years, one that hasn’t changed is Amber’s voracious reading habit, especially fantasy and sci-fi. When she’s not headed to the pool, Amberis headed to the library. Whereas she used to depend on people bringing her books or just having to read the same ones over and over again, now she can go to the library whenever she wants to stock up on more. Right now she’s reading Hunted, the sixth book in a series about time shifting Druid gods and goddesses.

In 2019, Amber talked about how much she’d like to go to college to study to be a veterinarian tech assistant, how much she liked dogs and wanted to spend more time with animals in general. That dream persists. At L’Arche, many of the staff bring their dogs around to visit, which helps Amber stay connected with her dream. Her favorite breed? Pitbull terrier. Why? “Because they’re resilient,” she says with a big smile that teases some secret knowledge she might be talking about herself, too. 

Whereas Amber used to awake in the wee morning hours in order to get any personal care from nursing home staff, these days, she sleeps in until about 7:30, letting the smart device controlled by her voice wake her up. She also commands it to turn the light next to her bed on and off, or even tells it to change colors to purple (her favorite). But, hands down, its best function is to play music on demand. “Amber kind of lets us know what mood she's in by her musical choices,” says Mathew, a staff community member at L’Arche. “If it's a hard day, we might listen to some Demi Lovato. If it's a good day, it might be some country music.”

When she looks at the arc of her life, all that’s shifted, Amber reflects, “If I can do this, anybody can.” It’s that sort of personal freedom and power–everything from what time she wants to wake up to what and when she wants to eat to how she wants to spend her time on any given day–that Amber is still living into. As she told us in her first story, the late, great Stan Lee said it best, “With great power comes great responsibility.” 

Writer: Shannon Turner, Photographer: Sydney Foster