As a preteen in New York, Whitney Johnson volunteered at soup kitchens and delivered clothes to the homeless. While at college, she started an English-language tutoring program for immigrant children. No one was surprised, then, when she chose to volunteer in an orphanage in Khayelitsha, one of South Africa's poorest areas, during her junior year abroad.     At the orphanage, Johnson discovered most of the children infected with HIV at birth, many abandoned by parents too sick to care for them, or neglected by surviving  s. Few were receiving the care needed to stay healthy. Many died. When she left, all she wanted to do was go back and change what she had seen.     After graduation, Johnson began a fund-raising effort that eventually collected enough money to found UBA, a nonprofit organization intended to provide services for HIV-positive   kids aged 4 to 18 in Khayelitsha. Now UBA is housed in a church big enough for offices and the children. The staff includes counselors  , a social worker, a nurse, a cook, and a handful of volunteers, ensuring that each child has access to proper care, a free healthy meal, and emotional support. Once a week, she makes sure the children receive age-appropriate lessons about AIDS. The social worker sees to it that the kids are enrolled   in school and have safe living conditions-especially those without parents.      Johnson plans to soon relocate UBA to an even larger location with more medical staff and a field"so the kids can run around and just feel like kids." She's also working with the South African Department of Health so that the new center can distribute drugs and give blood tests.      "Many people think that HIV means death, but it doesn't," Johnson says. "There's so much that can be done." In the five years since the center opened, not one of the 200 kids in the program has died. "It's so emotional to see the strong, independent people they become." One teenage girl who had received help at UBA even announced that she wanted to become a nurse. After graduating from college, Whitney Johnson   _  .
volunteered at soup kitchens in New York went to study abroad for a year started an English-language tutoring program began collecting money to found UBA