Au Pair: How I worked as a governess in France
Au Pair - an international program sending young people to work, in fact, as governess or nanny: participants travel to another country to help someone else’s family raise children and carry out small tasks around the house. In return, the family provides them with housing, pays for food, and allocates pocket money - au pair labor is usually not very well paid, but many participate to learn the language and live in another country. We talked to Elena Ershova, who worked as an au pair in France, and she told about naughty children, hospitable families and why life in Paris was not as rosy as she imagined.
Before moving to France, I organized cultural events in Russia: photo exhibitions, concerts, festivals, city festivals. I can’t say that I didn’t like my work - rather, I wanted to go international, work in a foreign company or project, or just live in another country.
A good moment turned up in the fall of 2015, when I completed all current projects and absolutely did not know what to do next. By that time, I had already learned French, but I could not move beyond a certain level - there was no one to regularly speak the language. And then I remembered that an acquaintance from Strasbourg told me about the au pair student program, with the help of which one can move to Europe and live in the family for a whole year, taking care of the children - that is, to be a governess. I had little experience working with children at events, and besides, I helped raise a little niece, so I decided to try. It seemed that this was a unique chance to get into the family, to see with my own eyes how both the culture and the language of a nation are formed.
How to get into a Parisian family
None of my entourage did not participate in such programs, so I was in absolute ignorance. I started with the simplest thing: I scored the name of the program in a search engine and began to study thematic forums and websites. As a result, I found a convenient portal that exists for many years and really works. You create a profile there and you can view the profiles of families who are looking for a governess for their children.
At first I considered only families from Paris, because I love megacities and active city life. But it soon became clear that in Paris such things were of little interest to anyone - so the geography of my searches expanded first to the suburbs of the capital, and then I began to argue that it would be nice to live on the Cote d'Azur and in Strasbourg, and Lyon is good city. The second point that I paid attention to when searching was the number of children and age. I set myself the condition that there should be no more than two of them and they should be older than three or four years so that I do not have to worry about diapers and difficult feeding.
But my own location played a cruel joke with me. The main obstacle was that I am from Russia. The Au Pair program has existed in Europe for almost fifty years, and Europeans, of course, do not need a visa: they simply enter into an agreement with their family and register upon arrival in France. I also needed a special visa and a whole package of documents, including from the family: an agreement signed by the two parties, letters of motivation, a medical certificate and much more. This is a complicated bureaucratic procedure that takes a long time - most families were simply not ready to do this. They told me that they liked me more than other applicants, but as soon as it came to the documents, they preferred nannies from Europe.
As a result, the process of finding a family and paperwork took me three whole months. When I received so many refusals because of the visa, I began to actively write to families who were looking for Russian-speaking girls. And here I was lucky. Eleonor, a mother of two children from Paris, answered one of my messages. We met with her and her husband Philip, when they arrived in Moscow, and liked each other. They took my documents along with the signed contract, endorsed them in France and sent me. Immediately after the New Year, I received a special student visa and flew to Paris.
Life in france
I got into a unique family, which was not only interested in Russia, but adored her, and not in the first generation anymore. The family had two children - a girl of three and a half years old and a boy of five years old - who attended preparatory classes for preschoolers and taught there three languages: French, English and Russian. One of the conditions of my stay was that I should speak with children only in Russian to help them learn it.
I remember very well that I flew to Paris on Saturday. I had only one free day that I spent with my family, and that was all - as early as Monday I had to get into work mode. Eleanor, the mother of the family, helped me collect and take the children to school in the morning - the whole second half of the day was on me. I had to take the children out of school, feed them, do their homework, spend time with them before bedtime - in short, start making friends and socialize. From the very beginning, the children did not allow me to relax: on the very first day they started playing catch-up at home, shouted and completely ignored my remarks. It was hard work, and it took me a long time to gain authority and learn to stop their disobedience.
The others accepted me incredibly warmly and cordially. Even during the first Skype interview, Eleonor warned me that they needed not just an employee, but a person who would become a member of the family and would like to spend free time with them: go to country houses, participate in general gatherings and walks on weekends. I did not feel like a stranger at all - we spent all my free time together: evenings in the kitchen with a glass of wine, trips out of town on weekends, dinners and dinners with family and their friends and acquaintances. Once the grandmother of the children - one of the most famous judges of France - took me to the Palace of Justice, where you can’t go for nothing. I also had the opportunity to attend a dinner to which ambassadors from different countries were invited, including from the Vatican. I really became part of the family, and even when I had friends in Paris, I often preferred family activities to going to a club or to a disco.
I also had quite a lot of free time. I spent about two hours with the children in the morning when I woke them, fed them, dressed them and took them to school. From half past eight to four o'clock in the afternoon I was absolutely free. The first time was to go to the obligatory courses on the French language, but when they ended I spent most of the day on my own. In the afternoon - from four to nine - I was with the children again: we did our homework, we walked, they often played with each other, and I could go about my business. After nine in the evening I was free and could spend time with my family or friends.
About once a month I tried to leave Paris for other cities in France. As the cost of living, food, travel around the city and insurance was taken by the family, my salary at four hundred euros was enough for everyday life with museums, coffee and croissants, and for traveling around the country. This, by the way, is a very important moment for everyone who is going to go to Europe under the Au Pair program: talk carefully with your family all financial issues - not only the monthly fixed payment, but also additional expenses, otherwise you may be faced with unforeseen expenses. For example, I paid for compulsory French courses myself, although I later learned that the family had to do this.
The ability to negotiate and make compromises are very important qualities for such work. You need to understand that when you come to someone else's family, you can expect surprises: the rules of family life, and their behavior, and character. Even my beautiful family had clear, long-established rules of life, to which I had to adapt. For example, due to the fact that electricity, gas and water in France are several times more expensive than in Russia, it was impossible for a family to wash their clothes separately in a washing machine. I was told that one of the previous nannies was doing it all the time and throwing just a few things into the washing machine, as we used to do in Russia - at the end of the month the family received a bill for electricity twice as much as usual. Heating in France is also very expensive. In fact, low-income families sometimes do not include it at all for the winter, although it is cold in apartments. But even if you are allowed to regulate the temperature and turn the heating tap, unfortunately, you can turn it not to the maximum value, but only half - you will be more or less comfortable, but you will not spend the entire family budget.
What was unusual for me was the fact that people walk around at home in what they came from outside. I did not understand how to walk on the carpet, to the kitchen, to the bathroom in shoes or in a jacket. My French family laughed and told me that I was not the first Russian nanny who was trying to teach children to take off their shoes in the hallway instead of running straight to the kitchen in their shoes and climbing onto the sofa with their legs. But I still persistently forced the children to change their shoes. Parents laughed, but they were absolutely calm about this.
Its among strangers
I did not have an adaptation period, I immediately felt myself in my city, in my house, among my people, and enjoyed this feeling from the first day. The crisis moment happened in about five months, when I began to learn more about the social and economic life of the country, about the problems of migration. It turned out that in France there are issues that have not yet been resolved and for finding out which takes a lot of time and effort.
For example, it was hard for me to accept the attitude of people towards the cleanliness of the city - Paris seemed to me very dirty; In this regard, Moscow can be considered an example of cleanliness and order. There are a lot of homeless people on the streets, and in the subway they can stick to you and start to obsessively demand money or food. I was surprised that many things in France are not as modern organized as in Russia. For example, the banking system is very bureaucratic, slow and inhospitable towards the client. Changing the card from which the monthly fee for a mobile phone is charged is a whole story.
All this annoyed me and caused disappointment - I could not accept these realities of French life and decided that I didn’t want to stay here longer than the year it was supposed: it seemed that Russia was not so bad, and all our problems were at least native and understandable. But, as often happens, time passed, and I realized that I love both the country, and the city, and people, and I am ready to live and merge with this culture. Despite all the prejudices and stories that the French have a bad attitude to representatives of other nationalities and cultures, this is not entirely true. If you are a person of another nation, but you adore French culture, language, you want to become your own and demonstrate it, this is very much appreciated. Although, for example, in a cafe, if you do not speak French well, you can be arrogantly interrupted and switch to English. This also occurs.
Future plans
According to the rules of the program, you can only participate in it twice, that is, you can work as a nanny in the country for two years. When my first year came to an end, the family invited me to stay, but I refused. First, I want professional development and career achievements. I understood that I couldn’t afford the second year of such a life - it’s time to use what I had accumulated and gained. And secondly, I was too tired of the children with whom I was engaged, so that at the end of the contract I returned to Russia.
For several months now I have been living at home, but this has not changed my decision to go live and work abroad, to gain international experience, to actively use French, which has become my native language. Recently, I applied for a competition program to study in France, according to which it will be possible to work more. In the middle of summer I will get an answer. If everything works out, then I will leave, as planned, if not - I will continue to look for new opportunities.
Photo: Alxy - stock.adobe.com, Photocreo Bednarek - stock.adobe.com
