Life of an Au Pair.

You might think that landing a decent paying, nine to five job right after graduation is good luck, right? Call me ungrateful but I found it boring. Not only did I want more but I needed it.

Scrolling through Instagram as always, I came upon an Insta-ad advertising, what they claim to be, "a chance to become apart of an American family". now how could I pass that up? Now don't get me wrong, I wasn't new to the idea of becoming an Au Pair. A bunch of different Au Pair companies took their turns to visit my high school to give their perfectly practiced reasons as to why we should join the program. So this time it was my own voices in my head trying to convince me.

I signed up on the website and like a much needed watershed in my life, an agent from Cultural Care called to ask about creating a profile to share with potential "host families".

While on the phone with...well lets just call her "Megan", it felt like speaking to a friend who is simply trying to motivate me to take on any new adventures. But that is not what convinced me in the end. She laid out every detail that most companies would hide as to seem more enticing. She laid out every single hidden cost and at the end it did cost me quite a sum to complete my application, but at least I was warned beforehand.

One of the application terms were that I had to have my driver's license, which in my case was a problem. Sure I had my learner's license but that was easy to get on the first try. I had a set time frame in which I had to get my license in a country built on bribery. After what seemed to me like the millionth, I got my license on the third try the day before my application deadline. Lucky me, right?

This is the part where most people would say my journey started. Wrong. I got the call from Megan giving me instructions as to what's going to happen next. Needless to say that the list seemed endless. First it was a personality survey questioning every single bit of my moral being and resulting in one final conclusion about the type of person that I am.

After that it was setting up my public profile for the different host families to see. Think of it as one of those dating sites. Eye catching profile photo, name, age, nationality, favorite food, dog lover or cat lover? But making my profile public wasn't an option yet. Like I said, this journey is far from taking off.

Countless emails flooded my inbox. It was "before you go, you need to know" booklets, Au pair stories and advise boards. So much so that I was starting to think they were trying to convince me to quite while I'm ahead.

The big thing that I had to complete before I could be added to the matching pool was a very long online course which included some quizzes on childcare. You'd have to be a bibliomaniac or at least have a long enough attention span to read the pages and pages on childcare in America, child nutrition and the health of your host kids and of course including some courses on living in America.

After finishing all that, I was finally let into the matching pool and my journey started. This was going to be the moment that I change my life. Be it for better or worse is something I have yet to figure out but I do know one thing for sure...The life of an Au pair is not what you'd expect.

-Domenique Snyders

(South Africa; NY)