For the five-year-old Sona two days a week are the favorite ones - the days she and her mother visit Vanadzor’s Health and Medical-Social Rehabilitation Center of the ‘Arabkir’ Medical Complex for Children.

The center, which has been run in Vanadzor for five years, is attended by children with physical and mental problems. As a result of the medical and psychological treatment they undergo, the children’s physical and mental skills start developing. Sona is one of the 50 children who attend the center.

Sona was born with lack of thyroid gland hormones, and consequently she stopped growing – both physically and mentally. She feels better after the treatment. And the Center helped her to get rid of the isolation, and to stop keeping silence. She gradually started speaking, and also communicating with foreigners.

“She gets bored during weekends, she asks all the time when Monday or Friday will come,” tells Sona’s mother – 38-year-old Evelina Pirumyan. The mother remembers that before attending the center, when her child was four years old, she couldn’t even speak, she was reserved, whereas children of her age were singing and reciting poetry.

Pirumyan says that now daughter speaks, knows the colors, and tries to communicate with foreigners.

Isolation, absence of desire to communicate, non-speaking are the symptoms describing the disease of development delay or the so-called mentally retarded.

Artsvi Harutyunyan, psychologist at the Center, believes that the reasons of this disease are of different nature: delays in physical, psychological, social development. The development delay is either an inborn defect or a disease obtained during the first years of life. It is expressed in insufficient development of psychic, but mainly – in intellect. The reasons are various.

Twenty children out of 50 attending the Center have this problem. They are not only from Vanadzor, but also other towns and villages of the Lori province.

“They have problems connected with behavior, they do not speak. If you try to look into their eyes and make them speak they react very emotionally and may become even more reserved. It is important to make them communicate step by step, because if there is no communication, there cannot be development,” says psychologist Harutyunyan.

Another child, six-year-old Gor, who has autism (a complicated disorder that influences the normal functioning of the brain) after three years of attending the center not only speaks, but, as his mother says, has also expanded his limits of communication.

“Gor was not taking off his clothes for three-four months, he wasn’t talking, he did not look at us, he was in a hard situation, he had aggressive behaviour,” says the psychologist and adds that currently Gor attends school, and he gets high marks.

“He has musical skills, I think about taking him to a music school, too,” says the excited mother – Liana Jamharyan, 36.

Now another 50 children are waiting for their turn to attend the center. The specialists of the sphere are few; this is the reason why the number of children simultaneously attending the Center is small, and many have to wait for their turn to attend the Center.