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The supposition suggests itself that having a retarded child is an experience of such intensity and universal qualities that it can transcend the existing societal behavior patterns.

Although the organizations of parents of mentally handicapped children have been a key factor in the recent increase of interest and of services, such developments have occurred also in countries where there is no such parent group. Kenya e.g. reports that the mentally retarded child presents "a very troublesome problem." (4) "In the villages there is a high incidence of subnormality, one cause of which are birth injuries due to prolonged labor and the absence of available medical treatment. There is also a high incidence of fever of various kinds and if a child contracts such an illness he may be left for days before medical help is sought or procured." (5)

(5) Hale, Judith A., Training Scheme for Teachers of Mentally Handicapped in Kenya. Teaching and Training, VI, 2, 1968.

Dr. R. J. Hayden, Senior Medical Officer, Nairobi City Council, presented the following statement at a WHO-UNICEF Seminar in Nairobi, February 1967:

"In some ways, handicapped children in urban surroundings fare better than their country cousins, and in some ways very much worse. Those who fare better have profited by development, improved planning and community service that urbanization can bring if it is prosperous and brings with it a scattering of wise philanthropic leaders. Those who fare worse, are the children who would have been absorbed and supported by their own long standing tribal and family units, in quiet rural surroundings where the hurly-burly of modern-city life would not have highlighted what the child could NOT do, but where the community would have been very content with what the child could do...."

"The mentally subnormal children in the city, of which there are a large number, have a bad time. In some ways, they have not received much attention here in Kenya -- there is no Society for Mental Health or for the Mentally Disabled as yet. However in other ways, prevention as a result of good antenatal and maternal care is very possible in urban surroundings and is certainly improving here. Children are found earlier by Medical Officers and Health Visitors and are often taught to walk and use their limbs. The Health Visitor also can play a large part in encouraging the best out of a mentally subnormal child at home, particularly by encouraging the parents to play their part. Here in Nairobi are two privately run schools for mentally subnormal children... These two schools hope to amalgamate towards the end of this year and it is hoped that then the united school may expand and also run more economically...."

"In an urban area these children fare badly.. They have no space in which to wander, their living conditions are confined and so they are a source of irritation to families in contact with them. If they wander, they are a source of danger to themselves and others as a result of road accidents and other urban dangers.... Causes of the high number of mentally handicapped children are varied. There are mongol children though not in large numbers, there is familial mental subnormality, there are cases of injury to the brain by anoxia in the prenatal period and at the time of birth, there is birth injury, and there are the results of encephalitis and meningitis in quite large numbers. In fact, the number of mentally subnormal children has been badly underestimated, mainly because so far so little can be done to help. I have on my Nairobi register twice as many mentally handicapped as deaf children and I have not yet started really to look for them, though I shall be doing so in the coming year."

In Indonesia educational facilities for the mentally retarded are being developed in various urban areas throughout the country, under both public and private auspices, including some privately sponsored day schools for the moderately and severely retarded. Although in general the physical and vocational rehabilitation field has in most countries been slow to respond to the needs of the mentally retarded, Indonesia has been an exception and the Indonesian Journal of Rehabilitation has over the past several years included a section on mental retardation.

The following report from "Sumber Asih," a school for moderately and severely retarded children started eleven years ago in Djakarta by two mothers and now serving one hundred children, conveys the thinking of a local parent group:

Care for the Mentally Subnormal in Indonesia

"In Indonesia nowadays the process of 'acculturation' is in full swing. With the country folk or social lower class in big cities the educable child is not marked. In this community one lives according to traditional rules; personal decisions are not demanded. And there is work as much or as less as for the normals..."