Letter to Host FamilyDear Host Family!
I'd like to thank you for your interest in my profile and I hope we can get to know each other a better and develop a good-friendship between us. Let me talk a little about myself: My name is Ana Maria, but my friends and family call me Ana. I'm twenty two years old, I´m almost turning twenty three (March 5th). I live in Brazil, a country with lot of diversity and beautiful places to visit. I was born in Maringá a city in the state of Paraná and I have lived there since I was born. It's a beautiful city, full of really green trees, good universities and many options of places to go out for dinner and have fun!
I still live with my parents, but this is very common for our culture. My dad is 60 and my mom is 53 years old, they both work with health care. My dad is a children's surgeon and my mom is a dentist. I also have a big sister, she's married and doesn't have any children yet. I would love to become an aunt, but I may have to wait a couple of more years. I worked until December for the Secretary of State because now I wanted to dedicate my time getting more experience with children. While I´m waiting for a family I will continue to work as a volunteer at a shelter of pregnant mothers and children. And I also will help friends as a babysitter.
I love children and my big passion to work with them was discovered in the beginning of last year, March 2012, when I started doing voluntary work at a NPO (a No Profit Organization) that I mentioned earlier. On Saturdays my responsibilities were to help children from 7 to 15 year old with their homework and to review topics about subjects like Portuguese, Math (I´m good with Math - I took Kumon´s classes for almost 3 years), History and Science. I helped to feed them and we played a lot of games. (Educational games). During this time I realized that I have, somehow, a special way to communicate with them. They sympathized with me easily and were very lovely so I felt in love to work with children and to interact with them. This explains why I want to do an interchange program as an au pair. I believe this program would be perfect for me. Since April 2012, I help a friend of mine with her kids - a girl of 3 years old called Eloisa and a boy 7 years old called Davi. I take care of them on the weekends and sometimes at night. I make their dinner, we play games, I help them take a bath and put them to sleep. Once in a while I helped on Saturdays mornings too. I helped with breakfast, entertain them and keep them safe. With different experiences and situation I was learned more and more about children and their needs.
In the second semester of 2012 I decided to work in a children's buffet, as a monitor. This job gave me the opportunity to be in touch with children from different ages: starting at about one year old to up to 12 years old children, I learned how to take care of many children at one time, and how to make friendship with them faster. My responsibilities were to watch the kids while playing with other kids.
My experience with children younger than 2 years old is not much, although I had opportunity in the NFO to work some days with children between 3 month and 6 years old like bathing, changing diaper, feeding them, and making them sleep.
People that are around me on daily activities say that I calm them easily. Children feel comfortable with me easily. My dad, he is pediatrics, has taught me some basic caring like secure them carefully, what to do in the event of colic and right way/ position to place them to sleep.
I'm very responsible, caring, honesty, loving, energetic, very creative, organized, studious, and funny. I´m a very, very happy person. I really like doing exercises and playing outdoors with children will always be fun for me. I love reading! Last year I took some children's books in English to read, I love to practice my English reading for children. And one thing that I love also is to cook! I´m a great cooker! You can see some of the dishes that I like to cook at my Photo Album. I´ve being cooking meals for my family since I was 13 years old! It will be a pleasure for me to cook for the kids and the whole family as well. I bet the kids will have a lot of fun helping me in the kitchen. But safety first!
Being an Au Pair will be a very important experience for me. I want to taste a new culture, live together with an American family, improve the language (I'm graduating in business administration college in Catholic University, and English will help me a lot in my future carrier), I don't speak English very well, but I work hard to understand and to be understood, I'm sure that living with your family will contribute to improve my language skills, and if it's possible, study something related to my degree and English. And of course I´m sure I will have a lot of fun with the kids I want to experience something new, that will make me a better person, and I hope that this experience will be good for you as it is for me. We can really create a friendship and affection for all life!
Regards…. Ana
