The language barrier is the biggest problem faced by some 300,000 foreign brides, the Eden Social Welfare Foundation said yesterday.
The foundation said that because foreign brides often encounter language problems and strained relations with their mothers-in-law, it will offer free Chinese-language classes to foreign brides and provide counselling to help them adjust to life in this country.
Foundation officials said that the language barrier is at the root of many problems for foreign brides.
It has not only affected relations between husbands and wives, but has also caused conflict between the brides and their mothers-in-law and adversely impacted their childrens' eduction, they added.
The foundation staged skits yesterday to show the different customs in Taiwan and Vietnam for taking care of new mothers.
Medical professionals were on hand to demonstrate how to take care of new mothers during the first month after giving birth.
The foundation also announ-ced a strategic partnership with another social group, the Around Taiwan Health Care Alliance.
The latter will be donating NT$200,000 (US$5,900) to the foundation for a fund that will assist to foreign spouses of Taiwanese.
Alliance officials said they currently have 13 member hospitals, including such prestigious hospitals as Keelung Chang Gung Memorial Hospital, Chiayi Christian Hospital, and Yuan's General Hospital in Kaohsiung.
In addition to meeting foreign brides' urgent need for medical care, the alliance will complement the activities of the foundation, making up for its deficiency in medical resources, the officials said.
Meanwhile, the government will appropriate NT$3 billion (US$88.2 million) over the next 10 years to finance assistance for foreign spouses of Taiwan residents, Premier Yu Shyi-kun announced yesterday.
Speaking on a visit to families of foreign brides in Fengshan, Kaohsiung County, Yu said that the number of foreign spouses of Taiwan residents has increased to 300,000, making them the fifth largest "ethnic group" in the country.
The government should pay more attention to the lives of these foreign spouses as well as the education of their children, who are a new generation of Taiwanese, Yu said.
The government is therefore prepared to set up a foundation which will spend NT$3 billion over the next 10 years to help foreign spouses of Taiwan residents and their children, he said.
Yu also suggested that foreign spouses form organizations inform authorities of any problems or difficulties they encounter.
GREAT POWER COMPETITION: Beijing views its military cooperation with Russia as a means to push back against the joint power of the US and its allies, an expert said A recent Sino-Russian joint air patrol conducted over the waters off Alaska was designed to counter the US military in the Pacific and demonstrated improved interoperability between Beijing’s and Moscow’s forces, a national security expert said. National Defense University associate professor Chen Yu-chen (陳育正) made the comment in an article published on Wednesday on the Web site of the Journal of the Chinese Communist Studies Institute. China and Russia sent four strategic bombers to patrol the waters of the northern Pacific and Bering Strait near Alaska in late June, one month after the two nations sent a combined flotilla of four warships
‘LEADERS’: The report highlighted C.C. Wei’s management at TSMC, Lisa Su’s decisionmaking at AMD and the ‘rock star’ status of Nvidia’s Huang Time magazine on Thursday announced its list of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence (AI), which included Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) chairman and chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家), Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) and AMD chair and CEO Lisa Su (蘇姿丰). The list is divided into four categories: Leaders, Innovators, Shapers and Thinkers. Wei and Huang were named in the Leaders category. Other notable figures in the Leaders category included Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Meta CEO and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Su was listed in the Innovators category. Time highlighted Wei’s
EVERYONE’S ISSUE: Kim said that during a visit to Taiwan, she asked what would happen if China attacked, and was told that the global economy would shut down Taiwan is critical to the global economy, and its defense is a “here and now” issue, US Representative Young Kim said during a roundtable talk on Taiwan-US relations on Friday. Kim, who serves on the US House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee, held a roundtable talk titled “Global Ties, Local Impact: Why Taiwan Matters for California,” at Santiago Canyon College in Orange County, California. “Despite its small size and long distance from us, Taiwan’s cultural and economic importance is felt across our communities,” Kim said during her opening remarks. Stanford University researcher and lecturer Lanhee Chen (陳仁宜), lawyer Lin Ching-chi
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) was wooing leaders from across Africa with a banquet on Wednesday night, King Mswati III of Eswatini was notably absent. That is because the kingdom — about the size of New Jersey and with just 1.2 million people — is one of Taiwan’s remaining dozen diplomatic allies. That means Eswatini does not participate in Xi’s Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, the centerpiece of China’s diplomatic outreach to Africa, which was held in Beijing this week. The landlocked nation, which sits between Mozambique and South Africa, is the last holdout in Beijing’s seven-plus decade mission to make Africa
RSS