History

In 2005, Dr. Anne-Marie Zadjlik founded the Masai Centre for Local, Regional and Global Health, in response to the growing numbers of HIV/AIDS patients in the Guelph area.

Masai is the name of a beautiful baby boy born in 2003 at the Guelph General Hospital. He is the son of Ethiopian parents. His mother lived in Canada for several years with her parents who arranged a marriage for her with an Ethiopian man who immigrated to marry her and promptly gave her HIV. He was unaware of his status and so was she until she became pregnant. Her routine prenatal HIV test came back positive. Because of the medications and health care available to her, Masai was born HIV negative and his parents remain well on treatment.

Had he been born in Ethiopia he would have had a 40 percent chance of being born with HIV and would have joined the ranks of AIDS orphans and vulnerable children. Bringing this child into the world without the death sentence of HIV was a turning point for Anne-Marie. That beautiful, healthy newborn symbolized the contrast between rich nations and the third world, hope and despair, well being and daily misery, life and death.

As a result, in 2005, Anne-Marie launched the Masai for Africa Campaign with a goal of raising $1 million in Guelph for the Ontario Hospital Association's Tšepong Clinic in Lesotho. Lesotho is a small country in southern Africa with an HIV prevalence rate of 28.9 percent and very little of the infrastructure, medicines, doctors, nurses and health care workers that we enjoy here in Canada.

Claire Alexander and a group of enthusiastic students from the University of Guelph came up with the brilliant idea of hiring a cooperative of South African women to make 5,000 red and white beaded bracelets to sell on campus at $5 a piece to reach a goal of $100,000. The bracelets caught the attention of Alastair Summerlee, president of University of Guelph, along with the media and the citizens of Guelph. It was then that Bracelet of Hope was born. One African woman can make 50 bracelets in a day, earning 100 Rand in a part of South Africa where an average day’s wage is only 20 Rand.

Anne-Marie averages a speaking engagement every week, taking her passion and message to communities across Canada. The response was overwhelming—journalists, students, parents, churches, businesses and unions—got involved up to their elbows. Birthday parties, golf tournaments, garage sales, bake sales, walkathons, weddings, funerals, anniversaries took place with donations going to Bracelet of Hope.

The Bracelet of Hope Campaign reached the $1 million mark in October 2008—$500,000 of which helped sustain the Tšepong Clinic.

Now the Bracelet of Hope Campaign is going national across Canada—a bracelet on the wrist of every Canadian—with the ultimate goal of freeing the people of Lesotho from the death grip of HIV/AIDS.