Background:
Liza van de Linde, a Dutch employee at a Christian owned day-care centre for disabled children in Maʿādī, discusses the living conditions of disabled children in Egypt. Van de Linde reports that there are around 2 million disabled people in Egypt, which includes the physically and mentally disabled. The public educational facilities in Egypt are, according to van de Linde, not of very high standards, accordingly educational institutions specialised for disabled children are practically non-existent. Another Dutch employee, Trinette, builds upon this statement and suggests certain measures that should be taken in order to improve such services.
Side A:
A disabled child named Mīlād was found straying around a Coptic church in Giza in early October 1995. The boy suffered from anaemia, malnutrition, multiple abscesses and on top of that was not able to speak. There have been countless of reported cases of children straying around the streets without supervision. These children are often taken by the police and put in orphanages. However, van de Linde argues that these children do not have the freedom they are used to in the streets and often run away from the orphanages. In the case of Mīlād, the kid had been deserted, neglected and forgotten. He had no family as far as van de Linde knew and it was very hard to deal with the boy due to his inability to speak and his absence of manners. The only details that were known about Mīlād were his name and visible information such as his health issues and a cross on his wrist, revealing his Christian faith. The woman, who found him, took him to the day-care centre in Maʿādī where Lisa and Trinette worked. He was later taken to a hospital in Maʿṣara, where he got his abcesses checked out. In Giza, where Mīlād was found, a place for disabled children was in the process of opening, and he would be able to go there but in the meantime he resided at the hospital in Maʿṣara.
Van de Linde argues that there are only a few shelters scattered around Egypt where disabled children can go, but the number of shelters is far too little to hold even a significant number of the 2 million reported disabled people. There are many disabled people who are allegedly trapped in their own homes because the families are ashamed of these children setting foot outside the homes. Others live on the streets and like Mīlād, are neglected and are considered outcasts and rejects of the society, according to van de Linde. Most shelters for disabled people are privately owned. There are few owned by the government but these are maintained by private institutions/organizations.
Trinette references another one of the disabled children who had been picked up by the day-care centre where she works. There was a boy from a family of four children and he was the only mentally disabled child. . He, unlike his siblings, was trapped in a room without food or attention to the extent that his diapers would not even get changed. The boy was simply not taken care of, and due to his mental disability and malnutrition, the child started to chew on his own hands. Trinette thinks that people mistreat these children because of certain principles of honor and shame, ashamed that as a parent, they have brought a child like this into life. Liza expands on this by saying that a lot of people also see a disabled child as a punishment of God, while others see it as a blessing, whereby the relation between mother and child is so strong that the child becomes totally isolated from society to the extreme. The number of disabled children is supposedly much larger than in more urbanized areas because there are still many families who consist of first cousins having babies together.
Side B:
Trinette believes there are a few schools owned by the government that accept some disabled children, but the problem is there are no special programmes for these children. The only difference between these school and other public schools is that the speed of learning is purposely a little slower. She believes the way to go about fixing the issue is by starting out small, and slowly expand the shelters into institutions that may offer special programmes for these children. Additionally, the population needs to be mobilised so that they can take care of their children, because it is important that there are solutions for two sides of the issue, which are domestic care as well as the institutional facilities.
