I arrived in Spain in January 2018, ready to start work with the family that I had found from my searches in America. They looked nice and had three little girls, and I was excited to start work with them. I had worked with both the agency in America and Au Pair In Spain to find what was hopefully the perfect fit. Unfortunately, skipping forward through the first two weeks of work, I discovered little by little that things wouldn’t be nearly as easy as I had hoped. The family wasn’t the right choice for me. They knew it and I knew it. We had different ideas about the run of the house, my responsibilities, the way that the children should spend the day, and millions of other small things that mean the world in a small space and an intense contract. The family and I had a talk, and it was agreed that I should find another placement. On the surface, it seemed like an easy and relatively common situation. No problem, right? Plenty of people end up changing families or situations, and the contract stipulated that I would get two weeks to live there before having to move out.
The problems showed up the next day, when I found out that, despite the contract, the family expected me to leave almost immediately, without any time to find a new placement or a new place to live. Within 36 hours, I was suddenly faced with being homeless in a new country or choosing a new family in a hurry simply to have a place to live, without having any time to decide if they would be a good family for me or not. Thankfully, there are people in the world like Aida Tosar. Being new in the country, not knowing Aida, and knowing that she had worked with the family before, I was worried that she would take the family’s side against me. I was worried that she wouldn’t be able to help. But after a call from me and one from the mother of the family, Aida sent me an email. Suddenly, I didn’t have to worry about paying for a hotel or bringing all of my things to a hostel. Knowing how important and urgent the situation was, she picked me and my suitcases up that day and offered me a room in her own home.