Festival of children-invalids held in Dagestan capital

On the eve of the International Day of Invalids, marked on December 3, Makhachkala hosted a cultural-and-sports festival for children with disabilities. Now, Dagestan has about 27 thousand children-invalids.

The festival of children with disabilities is held in Makhachkala for the second year in a row under the auspice of the Makhachkala city administration and the Ministry of Physical Culture and Sports of Dagestan. Its overall objective is to popularize and propaganda physical training and sports among the children with disabilities.

About 200 children competed in chess, darts and arm-wrestling. "We need to spend more actions of this sort, where children could meet each other, go in for sports and exchange experiences. Unfortunately, now the state pays little attention to children-invalids, who become unsociable and themselves torn away from life," mother of one of the teenagers, a hearing invalid, said to the "Caucasian Knot" correspondent.

Last year, one of Makhachkala schools started an experiment of training children sick with infantile cerebral paralysis (ICP) in ordinary classes.

"When we only started discussing an opportunity of opening a class for ICP children in our school, some parents spoke against and promised to remove their healthy child to other schools," says Irina Pashuk, director of the Makhachkala Grammar Schools No. 4. "But when we put the newcomers in a line, and all the pupils and their parents saw all these kiddies, many could not constrain tears. None of them took their healthy children from the school under this motive."