Today is Saturday in Soweto and AIDS-ridden South Africa's biggest township is geared up for its foremost weekend activity: funerals.
Traffic police officers are dis-patched en masse to the major streets where the sheer number of funeral processions would render chaos if one had to rely on traffic lights alone.
"Nowadays young people are dying like flies," reflects 27-year-old Modise Selebogo as the family of a close friend throws soil on the grave at Avalon Cemetery, Soweto's biggest burial ground.
Music from another funeral not 3m away wafts over to intersperse with singing at this graveside, where a young male victim of the AIDS pandemic joins thousands of others below the soil.
Freshly covered mounds creep towards the edge of the cemetery where many heroes of South Africa's liberation struggle were buried and several freshly-dug graves wait for funerals later in the day.
South Africa, which recent UN data say has the world's worst rate of HIV sufferers, is experiencing soaring death rates -- mostly among young people -- resulting in overcrowded cemeteries and weekends spent attending funerals.
These funerals are good business for the hundreds of burial companies that advertise on walls lining the streets, with the graveside ceremony over in a matter of minutes as others wait in line.
"Nowadays the tents have to go somewhere else and the buses also. They have to be somewhere at another funeral. The hearse also," says Selebogo.
About 45km south of Johannesburg lies South Africa's biggest informal settlement, Orange Farm, where circumcision studies were first found to decrease risk of being infected with HIV.
Here Reverend Gijimane Radebe who has worked at the St Augustine parish for four years, can attest to the dreadful impact AIDS has had on the community, as well as himself.
"It's killing young people terribly. I have buried almost every week, young people between the ages of 18 and 40," he said.
"When you go around in churches you find priests talking about burying so many young people in the community."
He said he and other pastors were regularly debriefed by the diocese "because they know the stress we are working under. It affects you sometimes".
In African culture a funeral is a big occasion, necessitating the slaughter of a cow and the best coffin and after-burial banquet money can buy.
The cruel extent of the AIDS pandemic means that families may still be reeling from the death of one loved one when they have to bury another.
"I have encouraged our parishioners not to spend a lot on funerals. In the African way we have to slaughter a cow and prepare food -- you end up spending about 20,000 rand [US$3,000]," Radebe said.
"In other families people are dying in numbers and it's hard to bury them all," he said.
However while some could not be spared the embarrassment of a pauper's funeral, having to borrow money from other members of the congregation, most could not be dissuaded from sending their family members off in style.
"People, they will tell you: `What will my neighbors say?' People end up being in debt for something they could have avoided," he said.
South Africa has some 5.5 million people out of a population of 48 million living with HIV, and a recent report by the Institute of Race Relations showed how the pandemic has affected the country.
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