Courage or Luck?

by Ana Ballio (Brazil)

A leap into the unknown Netherlands

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I always had a great desire to travel and meet other countries, cultures and people around the world and for me this dream was distant due to financial, social and professional unpreparedness. In 2017, at the age 22, I looked at my life and saw that it was the right time to live an adventure outside my comfort zone, and then I started looking for information on how to be an au pair in Europe. I did not speak English, I had never traveled outside the state of São Paulo and barely knew exactly which country to apply for the au apir visa, but a great force inside me told me '' it will work ''. I found on google a website called aupairworld.com and started to register to find families, the whole process of registration and application took about 2 months and in the beginning of May 2017 I found a Dutch family who was looking for an aupair for the beginning of august, we made a simple video call on skype (although I couldn't speak English) we got along really well and they liked me a lot and me too, right after this conversation with the family i thought to myself '' it's impossible to get this job, I'm unemployed here in Brazil now, how will I pay for this trip? '', however, the family liked me so much that they offered to pay for all the expenses of the trip. We started to initiate the visa process and in 3 months I embarked to the Netherlands. When I arrived in Amsterdam and saw that the trip was real and that I had really managed to go. This family presented me so many trips, I met Lepe-Spain with a Spanish friend who allowed me to be inserted in a very typical local context of that place, Brussels-Belgium on Christmas so famous in Brussels, villages in Germany that are close to Holland and I got to know a lot of Dutch culture that I am passionate about and respect a lot. The au pair job is to live a constant challenge with a lot of responsibility and for me the routine within this exchange was always ready to meet a new family need that involves the local culture. That family welcomed me as a daughter and for a year I lived intense, happy, cold days, homesickness, the desire to stay and the desire to live a new adventure elsewhere. I discovered that traveling is experiencing a lot of emotions at the same time, good and bad, but more than that, it is necessary to actually experience everything that television, social media and exchange agencies do not tell you about living in another country. I returned to Brazil at the end of April 2019, and my feeling after all this experience in Europe is that the risk of embarking on a trip without knowing who were the people with whom I would live a year and not barely speaking a single sentence in English has never been worth so much and all this madness has changed my life forever.