The Sunday Independent’s Xolani Mbanjwa wrote a piece late last year about a widower who has experienced incredible loss.

“It is often said that no parent should have to bury his or her own child, yet widower Thokozile Mahlinza has buried eight of her children and eight of her grandchildren, all of whom died from HIV/Aids-related illnesses.

… Since 1995 Mahlinza has seen the number of graves in her backyard multiply steadily, year after year. No fewer than four sons, two daughters and seven grandchildren are buried there. Two other daughters and a grandchild are buried close by, at her daughter-in-law's home. But 2005 has been a ‘kind’ year to her, because in it she has not lost anyone.”

It’s a heart-wrenching story that unfortunately does not sufficiently unpack the wider context of life in northern KwaZulu-Natal. It’s relatively easy to get the life experience of one person, but a much greater challenge to reflect a community, city or country’s social change.

The New York Times’ Michael Wines and Sharon LaFraniere show how a community’s story can be told in Hut by Hut, AIDS Steals Life in a Southern Africa Town, and the equally compelling multimedia interactive accompanying it.

AVUMISA, Swaziland - Victim by victim, AIDS is steadily boring through the heart of this small town.

It killed the mayor's daughter. It has killed a fifth of the 60 employees of the town's biggest businessman. It has claimed an estimated one in eight teachers, several health workers and 2 of 10 counselors who teach prostitutes about protected sex. One of the 13 municipal workers has died of AIDS. Another is about to. A third is H.I.V.-positive.

Wines also told a powerful story of graveyards filling up in South Africa in 2004. He introduces the story of a solitary grave digger on a hilltop in Umlazi, Durban, but quickly widens the scope.

“Five years ago, we used to have about 120 funerals a weekend, but this number has now jumped to 600,” Thembinkosi Ngcobo, who heads the municipal department of parks and cemeteries, said in an interview this week. “In order to cope with the current rate of mortality - we hope it is not going to increase - we will need to have 12.1 hectares every year of new gravesites.”

This is an example of how statistics can be used to enhance the story that is being told about the psychosocial context of grief and loss as a result of AIDS-related deaths in this country.

The Journ-AIDS statistics factsheet can be a starting point for contextualising AIDS mortality. The ASSA 2002 projections, Statistics South Africa’s mortality research and the UNAIDS/WHO Epidemic Update can be used to add reliable data to any story.

The numbers can also be reworked to provide fresh angles on statistics that are otherwise mind-numbingly large. The UNAIDS/WHO latest estimate of 2.4-million AIDS deaths in Sub Saharan Africa in 2005 for instance – a number that is usually unfathomable - can be described as 6575 deaths per day, 273 per hour or nearly 5 per minute.

Describing the statistics metaphorically can also help drive home the point. Perhaps if Africa’s leaders were aware that 20 Boeing 747 plane loads of people die in sub-Saharan Africa every day – mostly because of inaccessibility to life-saving drugs – it would spark them into action.

We need to also be sensitive to the profound loss that families and communities are experiencing across South Africa. But neither one-person narratives nor bare statistics will sufficiently tell this story. - Richard Frank