The first kindergarten for handicapped children and orphans in China has opened in the northern municipality of Tianjin to provide them equal access to preschool education.

The kindergarten, in Jinghai County on the city's outskirts, uses internationally accepted teaching methods and is equipped with special toys and gym facilities to boost the intellectual and physical development of the handicapped children.

Even its desks and chairs are specially designed to make it much easier and more comfortable to move around and do simple exercises for children suffering from physical disabilities caused by brain damage.

Most of its teachers have received professional training on how to address the specific demands of blind, mute, and physically and mentally disabled children.

They would use new textbooks tailored to the children's needs, says Feng Liwei, head of the Tianjin Children's Welfare Institute, home to hundreds of orphans and handicapped children.

The kindergarten had also hired nurses and doctors to treat the children, added Feng.

The kindergarten had enrolled more than 30 children aged between two and a half and 10 years, most of who were abandoned shortly after birth.

China has approximately 1.4 million handicapped children under six years old, and the figure is rising by some 200,000 a year.

The country has set up 188 non-profit organizations to care for handicapped children and more than 1,600 schools to provide them with basic and vocational education. Chengdu, capital of the southwestern Sichuan Province, has promised a nine-year compulsory education for all handicapped children free of charge in the next five years.
 
(Xinhua News Agency January 13, 2004)