By Kim Rahn
Laughter, merriment and activity bustled in a class at a community center in Gangdong where 16 pregnant women were learning how to make bibs, stitching and sewing buttons last Tuesday.
“It is thought that a baby is born cleverer if the mother uses her hands a lot during pregnancy. Let’s think about your future baby while making the bib,” an instructor told them.
When they had difficulty sewing, they asked the instructor questions. But an interpreter was necessary to facilitate the questioning and explaining the answers — the pregnant students were all immigrant wives from Vietnam, China or Japan.
It was the last session of a four-course class organized by the district office for foreign wives who are expecting. The classes were designed to help them get information about childbirth and childcare, to ultimately relieve some of the fear and anxiety associated with delivery and transitioning into motherhood.
During previous classes, they learned how babies are born, the correct breathing skills and posture during delivery, exercises that facilitate childbirth, and how to bathe newborns — all necessary knowledge but all fresh information to the women.
“I didn’t have any information about childbirth and childcare. Books didn’t help, as I don’t read Korean, so I only looked at the pictures. Some of my Vietnamese friends here told me about their childbirth experience, but that was all,” Tran Ngoc Mai, a 28-year-old from Vietnam said.
Tran came to Korea in February to marry a Korean man and she is now eight months pregnant.
Difficulty in obtaining related information is mainly due to the language barrier, as most immigrant women get pregnant soon after marrying and are here in Korea without enough time to learn the Korean language, said the instructor, Park Sung-ae, the coordinator of the Mother and Infant Care Center at Kyung Hee University Hospital at Gangdong.
“They are generally young, and most of them get pregnant without planning it. So, they don’t have any knowledge about pregnancy, delivery and childcare,” Park said.
She said communicating with the women was challenging due to language and cultural differences. “When I ask them, ‘Do you understand what I’m saying?’ they neither say ‘yes,’ nor ‘no,’ but just remain silent. Most of them are Vietnamese, and I heard Vietnamese people usually don’t respond to such a question. I kept wondering whether they were following me.”
But Park didn’t need to worry, as the participants were satisfied with the lecture, with most of them attending all four classes.
Another participant, Wang Ying from China, said she learned a lot from the class.
“The exercise lesson was the most useful. I also learned what I should avoid during pregnancy to keep my baby health.” Ying is five months pregnant.
“I would like more lectures to be prepared, such as one about baby food,” she said, adding she will introduce the program to other Chinese immigrant women.
Gangdong District has a large population of immigrant wives with more than 1,700. Besides the lecture, the ward office led immigrant wives, their Korean husbands and in-laws on a tour of public health centers in the district in March.
Park said such lectures will be more effective if they are available not only to the foreign women but also their Korean family members who will play a part in childcare.
“Even Korean women have trouble with their mothers-in-law when a baby is born as the latter has old-fashioned childcare methods. When the immigrant women think their mother-in-law’s way is disagreeable, they won’t be able to say it’s wrong but will just follow, because of an inability to communicate and lack of courage to disobey. The whole family needs to receive education together,” she said.