Numbers don’t always tell the entire story.

For instance, today, December 1, is World AIDS Day.

If you look at the statistics, 30.8 million adults were living infected with HIV/AIDS worldwide the end of 2009. There were also 2.5 million children, most of them being perinatal (meaning, they received the infection from their mother in utero).

That isn’t taking into account the millions who die from AIDS every year.

As it stands, AIDS is a humanitarian endemic. Those numbers, especially in sub-Saharan Africa and South-East Asia are mind-blowing.

What happens to the children? I’m not only referring to the children who are infected with the disease, I’m referring to those who have lost a parent to AIDS. In some countries, over 70% of all orphans are because of AIDS.

They begin to suffer from depression and anger, studies show. They experience exploitation and abuse. Even while the parent is alive, quite often, they feel emotional and physical neglect.

They aren’t cared for, long before the parent dies. They have a social stigma after the parent dies, because of suspicion of their own status. Their remaining family, if it exists, cannot afford to take care of them.

Of course, some children in Swaziland simply raise themselves. But that is not a solution.

Just some points to think about when you read headlines with statistics.

Late last night, I was catching up with a renowned technology blogger and entrepreneur and I showed him what we are beginning to do on Twitter and on the blog. He asked me quite bluntly, “will anyone actually click a link about orphans?” To be honest, I hadn’t thought about that.

When you are fully immersed in any area, whether it is as business or passion, you tend to forget that you care more about that more than anyone else. To be honest, no one at your holiday party really cares about what you are working on, beyond polite chit chat.

In the 1980s, Sally Struthers worked with Christian Children’s Fund (now ChildFund International) to create the ubiquitous “dollar a day” campaign, and the campaign had orphans send letters to donors. People felt like they were adopting children across the world, and it helped create an emotional bond, at least for the donating party.

But the question remains, is there any gain for clicking on a link about orphans and reading an article that will not necessarily help you out in your day-to-day life?

Much ado has been made about our living in a 24 hour news cycle. We follow wars, natural disasters, financial downturns and political decisions with great gusto. The moment a juicier story enters the cycle, we all but forget about the war, flood, depression or vote.

Stories about children are really the stories about what happens next.

When 10,000 die, 40,000 orphans can be created in a day. When a civil war breaks out and we gloss over the number of civilians killed, we don’t think of the repercussions for the children they loved and cared for. The world is always ready to help during a disaster, but 3 months later, it has moved on to a different part of the world. Americans don’t need to look beyond our own Civil War to see a nation stripped of young fathers.

Admittedly, the numbers are staggering. Even if we were to think about it, our initial reaction would be that nothing we can do could possibly help. So we, thankfully, start focusing on something else.

But not everyone forgets. Some people, like Derreck Kayongo, don’t forget where they came from, and they don’t remember the problems that, literally, plague their hometowns. Other people, like Natalie Pinkham, don’t forget the volunteer work they did during their summer break over a decade ago.

There are couples, like Delphine and Guillaume Gauvain, who see an under-served market, recognize a method that worked elsewhere and attempt to synthesize the new market and the old method. All these individuals became entrepreneurs, in their own respective way, for social good.

None of them set out to change the world. Instead they set out to change the lives of a small number of children, who in turn, may change the world.

Of course, not every link is a writeup about a niche entrepreneur who cashed in his 401k to buy a machine to recycle soap so orphans in Africa could reduce the transmission of disease by over 40%.

Some links may elucidate problems that you are fortunate enough to know how to solve. Others may just inform you about the world we live in, the world that’s not necessarily covered on the news every day.

I began a conversation with a friend the other day and mentioned that I was reading up on orphanages. His face went pale for a second, and his visceral reaction was of disgust.“Orphanages are horrible places,” he remarked, “terrible things happen in them.” Treading very lightly, I carefully asked if he was a product of the system. He responded in the negative. “But I saw this horrible documentary on them.”

Two hours before, I was reading a book that said exactly the opposite. It spoke of a group of children that grew up in New York in the 1960s and still remained a surrogate family 30 years later.

Most people think of Charles Dickens when they hear the word “orphanage”. Many of them were horrible places, plagued by financial woes, lack of resources and overcrowding.

This is the problem with generalities. There may be good places and bad places. Good people and bad people. Good intentions and bad intentions.

UNICEF now suggests that everyone move into a home living situation. In the past, many orphanages were actually started because some foster parents were abusing the system. Jane Aronson, the CEO and Founder of Orphans Worldwide, thinks that orphanages should be downsized into more manageable sizes.

It isn’t the place of this blog to take a side. The GIOH, for instance, has evolved over the past 110 years into having girls living both on premises and in foster homes, but providing a framework to help them out.

Understanding why orphanages or other alternatives were founded is an integral part in understanding the role of the orphanage or other out-of-home child care today.

The change in orphan care today has to be a charge towards individuality. Each child is unique. There is no golden solution that is going to be for everyone.