Matsepo and her grandchildren treasure their reading time every day and the three books they now own from the Bristol-Myers Squibb children's clinic.

Eleven-year-old Bohlokoa says his favorite book is “Linaka Feela,” the story of a monkey and a zebra who are excluded from a party by other animals because they don’t have horns.

The book has a happy ending and its anti-exclusion message appeals to the boy who often feels left out because he is HIV-positive.

Bohlokoa is one of the nearly 1,500 children who receive treatment at the Baylor-Bristol-Myers Squibb Children’s Clinical Center of Excellence in Lesotho, one of a network of clinics built by the company’s SECURE THE FUTURE initiative.

Thanks to a Reach Out and Read pilot program the clinic started in 2006, these children are getting free books along with the medical care they so desperately need. Now Bristol-Myers Squibb employees in the U.S. and Puerto Rico have an opportunity to expand these efforts by donating to the Reach Out and Read – Bristol-Myers Squibb Africa Project through the Employee Giving Program.

With employee support, the Reach Out and Read - Bristol-Myers Squibb Africa Project will continue to provide the center’s doctors with enough books to give to all their young patients. The Baylor-Bristol-Myers Squibb clinic in Swaziland is also adopting the program in 2008, giving potentially thousands more children the ability to experience the delight of having a book of their own.

Reach Out and Read has been a proven prescription for improved children's literacy in America and elsewhere for nearly 20 years. Recognizing that pediatricians have a unique opportunity to promote healthy habits, the program enables doctors to give books to children and advice to parents about the importance of reading aloud.

Some children visiting the Bristol-Myers Squibb clinic in Lesotho receive their very first book through the Reach Out and Read program.

“He often picks up newspapers or points out a notice or poster in the street and asks me to read it to him,” she said. “He is hungry for information and knowledge right now which, just a few months ago, he wasn’t.”

The books from the clinic are enjoyed by the entire household. Bohlokoa is one of five grandchildren that Ramabele, 69, is raising. The children lost their fathers to HIV/AIDS and their mothers are too ill to care for them, she said. They live in a small home made up of two bedrooms, a kitchen and a central living area. They have no electricity or running water, TVs or radios. Matsepo described the books as prized possessions that are read out loud time and again, and whose stories are acted out by the children for entertainment.

Matsepo was a nursery school teacher and had looked forward to retirement, but now works harder than ever as her grandchildren’s sole caregiver. She has no income and relies on her eldest grandson’s occasional jobs to buy food and pay the children’s school fees.

Despite these hardships, Matsepo is determined to improve the lives of her grandchildren. This includes making sure Bohlokoa goes to checkups and gets his medication. It also includes doing all she can to further the children’s education. Matsepo says the books brought into their lives by the Reach Out and Read initiative have been a blessing.

Matsepo said she and Bohlokoa read twice a day, once in the morning and before he goes to sleep. He treasures this reading time and asks many questions about the story and its characters, she adds. Once a quiet boy, he has gained confidence as he improves his reading and now shares stories with other children.

Matsepo believes this reading will improve her grandchildren’s English, the nation’s official language, in addition to their native Sesotho, and open up opportunities for them later in life. She also shared a belief that the positive messages and morals in stories like “Linaka Feela” will help teach the children right from wrong and give them hope.

What is Kids Care?

Two non-governmental organizations, Mpilonhle and Bambisanani Project, have built a network of daytime Kids Care Centers visited by some 900 orphaned children before and after school each day to receive a nutritious meal and the support of caring adults.

The Kids Care program seeks to provide the basics, such as food, clothing, blankets and school fees, to these children to take care of their needs today so that they can build a better future for themselves.

Another aspect of the Kids Care program will be to address the emotional needs of the orphans and vulnerable children. The Mapilelo project of Namibia has worked closely with SECURE THE FUTURE, and plans to provide training for its team of home care workers to provide emotional support to children after the loss of a parent to HIV/AIDS.

Donations will be matched dollar for dollar by the Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation.

What will employee donations provide?

Mpilonhle and Bambisanani Project estimate that it costs approximately $360 per year, or $30 per month, for the Kids Care Centers to care for each child. Examples of costs include school fees, which run about $75 per year per child. A school uniform costs approximately $9 for a child. Food parcels for children to take back to their homes cost approximately $22 per month, per child.

Another aspect of the Kids Care program is providing for the emotional needs of orphans and vulnerable children. The Mapilelo project of Namibia has worked closely with SECURE THE FUTURE, providing home-based medical care and support to people with HIV/AIDS. When a parent dies, the role of these care workers changes to that of counselors for children left behind. Donations will be used to provide Mapilelo's home-based care workers with training in grief counseling so that they may comfort recently-orphaned children.

Why are the Kids Care Centers necessary?

Kids Care Centers emerged as a way to provide the basics: breakfast, so that these children don’t go to school with empty stomachs; clothing and school uniforms; lunch after school and food parcels to take back with them to wherever it is they spend the night, to name a few of the essentials.

Kids Care Centers are usually located near schools and open each school day. The children arrive at the centers in the morning for breakfast, and help with grooming and getting ready for school. They return in the afternoon for lunch, help with homework, lay counseling and some love and care from an adult. The centers close in the evening, when the children return to their homes.

Kids Care Center Volunteer Story >>

Who runs the centers?

In addition to cooking meals, these adults also provide care and support in any number of ways. They help the children with homework, supervise their play and activities, and also teach them some of the life skills they may need in order to survive, such as tending a garden, weaving and beadwork.

Finally, these adults also act as social workers and counselors, helping the children apply for government grants and aid to which they are entitled, and doing what they can to assist the children in coping with the trauma of losing their parents, sometimes through theater and dance activities.

Why train home-based care workers?

With the help of Bristol-Myers Squibb employees, Mapilelo plans to provide additional training to enable its home care workers to better meet the needs of these children. This will include training in bereavement counseling to help children cope with their loss. The training program will also inform care workers about other programs and resources available for orphaned children, so that they can refer the children for medical care, food and nutrition programs, government support programs and other aid.More about the organizations Kids Care will be helping.

Mapilelo

As part of this multi-faceted initiative, Mapilelo mobilized a corps of home-based care workers and trained them to work in coordination with the local health clinic to ensure people with HIV/AIDS adhered to their treatment regiment. The group also organized voluntary testing initiatives, counseling programs, prevention-of-mother-to-child transmission programs and other outreach efforts.

Mapilelo is credited with having a major impact in the lives of people with HIV/AIDS. The group's efforts were recognized in 2006 with a Red Ribbon Award at the International AIDS Conference in Toronto for outstanding community leadership and action.

Bambisanani Project

The group is based in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa and focuses its efforts in a region of lush grasslands and rolling hills on the border of Eastern Cape and neighboring Kwa-Zulu Natal Province that has emerged as the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa.

The Bambisanani Project was launched in 2000 as a partnership involving Bristol-Myers Squibb and a number of local organizations including the South Coast and Transkei Hospice and the Mineworkers Development Agency.

In addition to operating Kids Care Centers, the non-profit also recruits and trains local community members to provide home-based care for people with HIV/AIDS, and a provides a variety of other services for the terminally ill and any children left behind. These services include support groups and drop-in centers for people suffering from the disease, and training in farming and other income-generating activities with which families might support themselves.

To Learn more about Bambisanani, click here >>

Mpilonhle

Mpilonhle, which translates to holistic health, also works to assist orphans and vulnerable children and people living with HIV and AIDS in South Africa, focusing its efforts in the hard-hit Kwa-Zulu Natal Province.

Like The Bambisanani Project, Mpilonhle began as a partnership backed by SECURE THE FUTURE and local institutions including an area hospital. It also offers a variety of services by mobilizing communities and all available resources to respond to the epidemic.

Mpilonhle provides home-based care and care to orphans and vulnerable children through a large network of volunteers, establishes support groups, trains people in income-generating activities, and refers people to clinics for HIV/AIDS testing and care. In addition to its Kids Care Centers, Mpilonhle offers children orphaned by AIDS grief counseling and life-skills workshops.

To Learn more, visit the Mpilonhle website.

Lucia Nthunya and the children of the Philani Kids Care Center.

She volunteers at a Kids Care Center, a facility in South Africa where children orphaned by AIDS can come before and after school for hot meals, clean clothes and the support of caring adults.

Nthunya wakes up at 5 a.m. and, after making breakfast for her husband, walks to the Kids Care Center in her village in the province of Kwa-Zulu Natal. An hour later she is already hard at work preparing breakfast -- on one small stove -- for the approximately 50 children who will soon arrive.

They call her “Mama.”

Volunteer "mamas" at all the Kids Care Centers cook meals for the orphans to ensure they eat before and after school.

In the region where this Kids Care Center is located, the rate of HIV/AIDS has been placed at 40 percent. Many parents have died leaving thousands of children completely alone, or living with their siblings in orphan-headed households.

One child at a time, however, Kids Care Centers are making a difference. Mpilonhle reports a number of positive changes in the children they serve, including improved health, school attendance and academic performance.

That success is due largely to dedicated volunteer “mothers” like Nthunya. Most Kids Care Center volunteers are women with their own large families to care for, but they feel driven by a desire to help others who have less than themselves.

“I became a volunteer three years ago because I love children,” Nthunya says. “When I arrived in the community a few years ago, I noticed that there were so many children who needed taking care of because their parents were sick or had died.”

Nthunya and three other volunteers care for children ranging in age from two to 18 years old at the center, known as the Philani Kids Care Center. It is located outside the town of Ladysmith.

Hard work makes the days pass quickly. After Nthunya has fed the children and readied them for school, she washes the breakfast dishes, launders their school uniforms (by hand -- the center has no running water or electricity) and starts preparing lunch.

The volunteers at the Kids Care Centers teach the children life skills like gardening.

At 5 p.m. the children begin to gather their things and prepare to go home. Nthunya tidies up and then goes home herself, in time to prepare dinner for her own family.

While the centers are closed evenings and weekends, they are not times of rest for Nthunya. On weekends, she and the center's other volunteers can usually be found looking after others in their villages, assisting the elderly and the sick, and checking in on children in orphan-headed households.

“I see them as my own children,” Nthunya says. “I love them dearly and will do anything to help them.”

In a remote, rural village in South Africa, a young woman named Thandeka Hlomuka lives with her two younger sisters in the house where their mother died last year of AIDS.

Life had never been easy -- the family home was a single room with one bed to share, a small stove and no running water or electricity -- but it would get harder.

With no father or other family to help them, Hlomuka, 20, left school and her dream of being a social worker to care for her sisters: 12-year-old Busisiwe and 11-year-old Thabisile. They relied on the community for their basic needs and often went without food for days. What little money Hlomuka received from people in the village, she spent on school fees for her younger sisters so they wouldn’t have to leave school, too.

“I often feel hopeless and tired, but I need to be strong for my sisters, as there is nobody to take care of them,” Hlomuka says.

Today, however, a bit of hope is returning to the lives of Hlomuka and her sisters thanks to the nonprofit organization Mpilonhle, a partner of Bristol-Myers Squibb’s SECURE THE FUTURE project, and a beneficiary of the new Kids Care employee giving initiative, through a partnership with South Africa Partners.

Mpilonhle focuses its efforts in a region called Kwa-Zulu Natal. Even in AIDS-ravaged South Africa, Kwa-Zulu Natal stands out. This province on the nation’s southeast coast is often shown as having the nation’s highest incidence of HIV. A 2006 national study of the province’s pregnant women found 39 percent to be living with HIV, against 29 percent nationally.

Since learning of the family’s plight, Mpilonhle has provided Hlomuka with money for school, enabling her to return to her studies. The younger sisters, meanwhile, attend school as well at the local Kids Care Center.

The Kids Care Centers are lifelines for these children. In addition to providing breakfast and lunch, the centers give food parcels for them to take home evenings and weekends. Adults at the centers also help children apply for government social security grants and coordinate the volunteer efforts of other adults who try to keep an eye on the children at home in the villages.

Thanks to SECURE THE FUTURE and Mpilonhle, Hlomuka and her sisters no longer have to worry about where their next meal will come from. They can focus on their education and the prospect of brighter days ahead.

Program Overview

The Baylor-Bristol-Myers Squibb Children's Clinical Centers of Excellence are treating HIV-positive children and their families in Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland. Providing books to these clinics will go beyond the medical care children are receiving and nurture their imaginations through the gift of reading. Founded on a belief that growing up with books and a love of reading is an essential part of growing up healthy, Reach Out and Read has long been providing advice to parents about the important of reading aloud to their young children and supplying doctors and nurses in the United States with books to give at-risk children at checkups. The Reach Out and Read - Bristol-Myers Squibb Africa Project will give children infected with HIV the opportunity to learn and to grow through the world of books.

Reach Out and Read - Bristol-Myers Squibb Africa Project seeks to provide books to children who may not otherwise have the opportunity to own books. In the areas of Africa where the Bristol-Myers Squibb clinics are located, poverty is high and resources are limited. Some families own no books at all. The first books the vast majority of children will encounter are school textbooks, and many children are delayed in attending school because of their illness.

But like children anywhere, they are curious, ready to learn and eager to read -- if given the chance.

Which clinics will receive books through the program?

The Lesotho clinic provides care for more than 1,500 children, each visiting up to 10 times a year. The clinic director, Dr. Edith Mohapi, would like to have enough books to provide at least three to each child per year.

If resources allow, two other Baylor-Bristol-Myers Squibb clinics, in Botswana and Swaziland, hope to adopt the program, giving many more children the ability to experience the delight of having a book of one's own.

Where will the books come from?

Tell me more about Reach Out and Read.

Reach Out and Read is a registered non-profit affiliated with the Boston University School of Medicine and the Boston Medical Center Department of Pediatrics.

Established in 1989 with one clinical site at Boston City Hospital (now Boston Medical Center), the organization now has more than 3,000 programs serving 2.8 million children in all 50 states, Puerto Rico, and in countries ranging from the Philippines to Italy and now Africa.

Founded on a belief that growing up with books and a love of reading is an essential part of growing up healthy, Reach Out and Read has long been supplying doctors and nurses in the United States with books to give at-risk and underprivileged children at checkups.

Reach Out and Read has been widely recognized for its literacy promotion efforts including the UNESCO Confucius Literacy Prize in 2007, recognition at the White House Conference on Global Literacy in 2006, and a four star rating from Charity Navigator, an independent charity evaluator, for the past three years.

Tell me more about the Children's HIV/AIDS Clinical Centers of Excellence.

Bristol-Myers Squibb, through its $150 million SECURE THE FUTURE® program, is funding the construction of six medical centers in sub-Saharan Africa focused on caring for children, to be operated by Baylor College of Medicine and the local governments. The first opened in 2003 in Botswana, followed in 2005 with the opening of the Lesotho clinic. A clinic in Swaziland opened in 2006 and additional clinics are under construction in Uganda, Burkina Faso and Kenya.

These clinics are funded through $18 million in grants from SECURE THE FUTURE and provide comprehensive, multidisciplinary care for children and their families, as well as education and training for medical professionals. The centers feature large outpatient clinics, procedure rooms, pharmacies, laboratories and start-of-the-art training facilities.

Tell me more about the Pediatric AIDS Corps.

Bristol-Myers Squibb and Baylor College of Medicine have created a program to send 50 pediatricians and family practitioners to Africa per year, over five years, with a goal of treating 100,000 children and also training local health care professionals.

Doctors of the Pediatric AIDS Corps commit to spending one to two years in Africa working from the network of children's HIV/AIDS Clinics, as well as in remote locations in Botswana, Burkina Faso, Lesotho, Malawi, Swaziland, Tanzania and Uganda. The first wave of doctors arrived in Africa in August 2006, the second group deployed in August 2007.

Dr. Mark Kline, president of the Baylor International Pediatric AIDS Initiative, has stated that “one pediatrician can prevent approximately 1,300 AIDS deaths in children per year."