Photo by Nihal Karkala on Unsplash

Archway Community Services in Abbotsford run a pregnancy outreach program that reaches out to Punjabi-speaking immigrant families in the Abbotsford and Mission area.

We spoke with Monica Grover, Facilitator for South Asian Families at Archway Community Services, who runs the Punjabi-language pregnancy outreach program in Abbotsford and Mission. The pre- and post-natal program offers support in Punjabi to recent immigrant families from India. Many of the participants are have been in Canada for less than three years, and some have only just arrived.

The program offers help and support, including support for those are in Canada as visitors or on work permits who do not qualify for coverage under the BC MSP for doctor’s visits and obstetric delivery. B.C. Women’s Hospital in Vancouver has a free program to support women in this situation, but they are required to come to Vancouver for delivery and to be present in Vancouver 15 days ahead of their due date. Accommodation costs for this pre-delivery period are sometimes, but not consistently, covered through the B.C. Women’s program. These are familiar issues for women living in many rural areas of B.C. without local obstetrics services, as we have reviewed in previous Keeping in Touch articles. Issues such as childcare for other children in the family if the mother has to be away for several weeks, are particularly difficult for recent arrivals who have not yet had time to build up personal support systems within the community and/or who do not have family nearby.

For women who have only recently arrived in Canada, and are still adjusting to language and cultural differences, this can be daunting. Having come from different cultural expectations around cooking, especially for vegetarian food preparation, cooking routines are often very different than Canadian norms, often time-consuming and geared around daily preparation (not easily made ahead for several days), and eating out or ordering in of culturally-familiar foods is expensive and not readily available.

For women in the late stages of pregnancy, trying to adapt to new shopping, food-preparation techniques, and unfamiliar foods can be exhausting, hard on digestion, and stressful both for them and their families. Abbotsford has a large enough Punjabi community to have specialty grocery stores which sell familiar ingredients, which is a great help, and some of the bigger grocery stores have partnered with Mexican and Californian growers to supply familiar Indian vegetables. The program participates in the BC Farmer’s Market coupon program. Families are given coupons to use at their local Farmer’s Market and are encouraged to try a new vegetable every week and share their experiences with others in the group. The sense of taste is closely tied to feelings of security, and this is an important step in getting to feel ‘at home’ in Canada.

In addition to the normal pre- and post-natal support program, Monica’s program addresses the following issues for pregnant women newly arrived in the community:

·      How to access supports in a new country, where systems are unfamiliar

·      How to deal with language barriers

·      Hold to develop confidence in breast-feeding, especially in an unfamiliar culture

·      How to make “family-substitute” connections

·      How to connect with others who share commonalities of language/culture/food, etc.

Motivated by her own experiences of having to source information and supports when she first arrived in Canada, Monica persuaded Archway Community Services to establish the pre- and post-natal support program, which has now been running since 2004. It had been noticed that new immigrant women were not getting emotionally satisfied, as they had difficulty expressing their experiences and understanding information in the English-language programs, so it was hard for them to open up. Even after the program first rolled out, it took time to get potential participants to trust, as many had perceptions of community services as catering specifically to people who use substances, unhoused people, and single-parent families. Monica and her team focused on giving customized service to those who came, in order to change perceptions and build community confidence. Their mandate was to make each person feel comfortable by remembering participants’ names, children’s names and any information shared. Even today, the program gets more referrals by word of mouth than through agency referrals.

Monica stressed that a very special group of staff and volunteers have worked in the program over the years. The program has provided mentoring and development opportunities in assisting good volunteers to build a resume and move on to full-time work, especially for those who are previous participants in the program. Many women in this community are well-educated, but it can be difficult for women with young families to build a Canadian resume and acquire the local credentials they need to move beyond low-paying service-industry jobs as they settle into their new Canadian home.