I certainly got a lot of value out of 6 months in the Lopair Au Pair Programme and would certainly recommend it to any young person who excels but more importantly enjoys working with children.
As an 18 year old, coming to China has been my first adventure as a fully fledged adult and for that is has been perfect. You are still very much dependant for food and living and have to follow a strict schedule that may impact your social life but there is also a gain in responsibilities as you care for and mentor a child. I found living with my host family nothing like a work contract but instead I was very much integrated as one of them. Granted, living in a foreign country does involve certain obsticales but the family and my local coordinator were very caring in helping to overcome anything.
Before coming to Beijing, I was wondering how hard it would be to meet people. Turns out, five minutes after saying goodbye to my parents at the airport, I met another British boy headed for China with LoPair and since then we've become good friends despite the fact that we've been in different cities. I've made some friends for life while I've been in China and now it gives me an excuse to book a holiday and visit them some day.
To any person considering this opportunity, I believe the three most important characteristics you need to show in order to gain the most as an au pair is patience, open-mindedness and friendliness. In the end, your time spent here is a luck of the draw when you are matching with a host family so I can't emphasize enough to consider carefully when choosing. Some au pairs really hit it off with their families, some can be left a little in the rain. Luckily, I was one of the fortunate ones and got on very well with my host family. I look forward to keeping in touch as I go on to other adventures!
Response from LoPair Culture Exchange
Dear Virginie,
Thank you for your valuable comments regarding to LoPair Au Pair China Program.
We truly value your feedback for this program as it could help us to improve our program in the future and we are very sorry to hear that you had mixed feelings about your experience in China. We always try our best to deliver our high standard assistance to every aupair because helping every to have a good experience in this program means everything to us.
We are very happy to hear that you think you’ve improved yourself in many ways through this program, such as you’ve improved your Chinese language skills and made a lot of friends over the past few months.
As for your disappointment for the program, we assure you that we have addressed this issue with the team to find out what went wrong and take steps to ensure this is not repeated complained issue. Although we still need to make some clarification about some points such as your opinion about the pocket money being too less, we are sorry about that but the standard amount of pocket money of au pair China program is between 1500—2000 RMB as set forth by the national association to make sure it meets the legal requirement for cultural exchange programs in China.
If you still have more valuable opinions, we welcome you to contact us anytime for further discussion. My email address is iris.guo@lopair.com, or you can call me on (+86)18006718359. Please do believe that not just the host families are important to us, the aupairs are also the ones that we truly care about and we want you all have great experience here. Thank you once again for your feedback, and I look forward to hearing from you.
Best regards,
Iris Guo
Lopair Program Advisor