Au pairs bring the world to you

Each year, thousands of young foreigners seize the chance to see America by working as live-in baby sitters for busy professionals who want flexible, reliable child care.

Foreign au pairs expose children to new cultures and new languages, and along the way become the big brother or sister their charges wouldn’t otherwise have.

At 24, Rodrigo Coelho wasn’t ready to settle into his life’s work. Andrea Haller, 19, wasn’t either.

They decided to take an adventure in baby-sitting instead.

Coelho is Brazilian; Haller is Swiss. Both now live in Louisville, Ky., as au pairs to the children of three doctors.

“It’s the best thing I did in all my life,” Coelho, now 26, says.

Drs. David and Shannon Antekeier are pediatric orthopedic surgeons. They might have to get up extra early or come home dreadfully late. Sometimes they have to dash out the door in the middle of the night, when their children – Madeline, 7, and Aidan, 6 – are fast asleep.

Day-care facilities, baby sitters and 9-to-5 nannies can’t accommodate such unpredictable schedules. Au pairs can. But their ability to provide dependable supervision is only part of their appeal.

“They really do become a part of the family,” says Shannon Antekeier, who calls Haller her favorite of three au pairs she and her husband have welcomed into their home.

“They are not just here to see the country. They are here to take care of my kids. They don’t quit without notice, and they don’t call in sick to go shopping with their girlfriends.”

But they aren’t indentured servants, either.

“Au pair” is French for “on par.” In other words, the young adult bunked down in the spare bedroom isn’t just an employee but a guest who is entitled to be “treated as a member of the family.”

So says the U.S. State Department, which administers the Au Pair Exchange Program that facilitated the U.S. adventures for Haller and Coelho. The program stipulates au pairs are entitled to a private bedroom, minimum-wage pay and a $500 educational allowance.

They also get two weeks paid vacation and are forbidden to work more than 45 hours in a week or 10 hours in a day.

“It’s a cultural exchange situation and I treat it as such,” says Dr. Gary Loyd, an anesthesiologist who has entrusted his 8-year-old son, Jonathan, to Coelho for the past 18 months. “Rodrigo eats with us, shops with us, takes vacations with us and goes to family functions with us.”

“Rodrigo is fun,” Jonathan says. “We play soccer, we play GameCube. He’s not very good at video games, though. I always beat him.”

Two years ago, Coelho was finishing his third year as an economics major at the Federal University of Bahia, located in Coelho’s hometown of Salvador, Brazil. He worked part time at city hall, helping do cost analyses of civil construction projects.

One day he decided to stop ignoring his wanderlust. He started researching ways to make an extended stay in the United States. Being an au pair provided a 12-month visa that Coelho has since renewed for another 12 months.

“I decided that I was young, so I have to go while I have the opportunity to travel,” says Coelho, now. “I wanted to breathe the new air.”

In his free time, Coelho skis, attends stage plays and meets other Brazilians at local hotspots.

Haller and other au pairs occasionally join him. But they don’t always understand him. In the company of his countrymen, Coelho speaks his native Portuguese, which for all intents and purposes was the only tongue he knew when he arrived in America.

“My English was horrible,” he says. “I had taken classes, but in Brazil, we only read and write English. In class, we never speak it, so we don’t know the sounds.”

Early on, communications between Coelho and the Loyds were almost comical.

“There was a lot of drawing, a lot of finger-pointing, a lot of speaking things over and over and over,” Loyd said. “But Rodrigo is an extremely fast learner. Within three or four weeks, we had good communication.”

There was no communication gap when Haller joined the Antekeiers last July. Her English was pretty good, and her host family’s German was too.

The Antekeiers’ previous au pairs were from Germany, so they had little trouble understanding the Swiss German dialect that is spoken in Haller’s tiny hometown of Gontenschwil, Switzerland.

The Antekeier children are sufficiently fluent in their au pairs’ native tongue to sass their parents in two languages.

Haller was 19 when she decided to be an au pair. She was training to be a professional florist, but the three-year program had the unintended effect of convincing her to do something else with her life. Being an au pair bought her a ticket to America and some time to think about her future.

Now 21, Haller will return to Switzerland in August and study to be an elementary school teacher. Helping the Antekeier kids with their homework has provided a bit of hands-on experience.

But perhaps the most important thing Haller has learned here is that many Europeans, her parents among them, are wrong about America. She has found that the sex and violence that some say permeates our pop culture – and the perceived warmongering of our government – don’t accurately reflect the affable nature of American society.

“Americans are very open and friendly,” Haller says. “It is very easy to meet new people. Everyone asks how you are and wants to talk to you. I like it. It’s something we miss in Europe.”